Hyperessary Role of Viewer: Objectual Conciousness

In the following thought experiments, we would presume with the idea of objectual consciousness and its performative aspects while contemplating upon the role of viewer. Notice that as an experiment, a contrived role would subject to change but nonetheless far from arbitrary.

Firstly, we think about the characters involved.

The Artist

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1972

As a ghost in the machine, the artist would perform textually a stream-of-consciousness. What does it meant to be still? The manifestation of its speech would be dependent of the states that the artist is in:

1. Present

2. Absent

3. Passive

4. Active

The Viewer

Locational environment where to work would be installed.

Audience would be considered as a the public that was geographically located in a college with largely populated with Singaporeans. In that regards, consider the cultural behaviour that may dictate the action-reaction.

1. People related to the artist prior to the experiment

2. Intentional participants with no relations to the artist

3. Non-intentional public without knowledge of the artist and the artwork

The Relationship
Now discuss the probability of what is going to happen.

Activities

1. The object constantly replays its consciousness.

Present
When the artist is (tele)present, seduction would run its course in in text writing from stream-of-consciousness.

Absent
When the artist is not, seduction is generative and automatic. The object speaks in machine language.

2. The audience’s engagement with an object

Passive
Where the artist is passive in its identity, the machine listens and attempts to conduct a session encouraging transference.

Active
Where the viewer is active in its engagement, the identity of the artist in its object becomes active.

Form and Format
The materialisation of the objectual consciousness of the ghost in the machine would be established in Project Hyperessay Technical Realization.

Hyperessay Concept: Phantom of the Machine

Phantom of the Machine: The Ghost in the Machine

Concept

Phantom of the Machine is an exploration of human’s reception to intelligence of a machine. It is contrived in experimental spirit to study the interactivity between non-human being and object. This is done through playful public intervention, inspiring experiences with an emotional machine. Where the intelligence is of human, there is, however, negation of noticeable physical presence. This installation aims to disrupt he audience everyday interaction involving computers.

Prior Art

Since the culmination of Project Virtual Awkwardness last left of in OSS, the investigation of spaces was running along the discourse of the third space. Whereas the humans who are governed by the fear of God ties in with physical death, the being whose fear of social media challenges the existential notion of intellectual engagement in space-time continuum ranging from the real, virtual to the third space.

The artist’s fear of social media would render the physicality of a human body irrelevant and would live as close as to minimally on consciousness. This implies that the object would have to live on collaborative interaction between itself and its environment. For the artist, that stream-of-consciousness would be the only way to indicate her presence. Was silence then relevant How could silence be perceived? The mind and its data visualised in textual form and silence as glitch?

In Internet Art & Culture, we have dealt with concepts such as the collective artwork, data visualisation, glitch aesthetics and more. At the end of this experiment, more would be elaborated as we look into our findings.

Objectual Consciousness

In 1965, Amerian artist associated with Minimalism, Donald Judd, wrote one of the most significant texts of the movement known as “Specific Objects”. Judd emphasises the physical, phenomenological experience of objects rather than representing any metaphysical or metaphoric.

Objectual consciousness, as a term would help unravel Phantom of the Machine’s idea of a concrete with its consciousness emancipating in a stream. Additionally, a layer of performance filmed the box and to complicate matter, interactivity is involved in the experience.

Judd believed that art should not represent anything, that it should unequivocally stand on its own and simply exist. Contextually speaking, it was ousting painting’s representation of space and abandoning plinth of a sculpture. Strict rules are set against illusion and falsity.

In Phantom of the Machine, an objectual consciouness is alchemised with a machine installed in plexiglas. The evaluation of its consciousness in performance and interactivity would be ensued in the Project Hyperessay Role of Viewer, we determine the role of artist and its viewer, how the interaction would be, and the rituals involved.

GL1TCH.US: JESUS DIED FOR OUR GLITCH

Jon Cates, GL1TCH.US (ongoing)

… the dirtiness implies there is a human quality in new media, that it is not perfect, it’s not sterile, it’s the dirtiness implies there is a human quality in new media, that it is not perfect, it’s not sterile, it’s not removed from real life, but it contains its imperfections, it’s impurities, in a way, it’s organic qualities, that get closer to our “wet” lives, rather than our binary ones. not removed from real life, but it contains its imperfections, it’s impurities, in a way, it’s organic qualities, that get closer to our “wet” lives, rather than our binary ones.

Randall Packer’s response to Jon Cates idea of “dirty new media” (via A Glitch Expectations: Conversation with Jon Cates)

Glitch fundamentally disrupt the otherwise peace and order. But to have technology is to have glitch. God created men to sin; otherwise jesus died for nothing. the celebration of glitch as an art form symbolises an awakening — a new beginning for digital natives in B.G. (Before Glitch). Now with wifi as the most basic need in Maslow’s hierarchy, it is an implied need for it does not have direct nutritions to a man’s existence. It is the broadening of a man’s consciousness, the internet as an extension to men’s brain in prosthetic knowledge.

Glitch as the underdog that subverts UX/UI design

The unnerving experience in Jon Cates’ aesthetics challenges the functionality of which but above all, one’s patience for navigation. Glitch art unsettles the audience. Much reflective of the anxiety from mismatched expectations and trolling computers. It is theatrical and overloads sensory perception, inducing a hypnotic trance; a mental state of new singularity. The transgression across content curation in glitch proves to be nostalgia-inducing. To speak of instinctual reflex from the glitch aesthetics suggests a journey in associative thoughts as connected points in the cloud of hippocampus.

Is glitched porn still porn?

In Dirty New Media, pornographic materials did not get any less sensual. Pornography by its heritage would very much prefer clarity and resolution boost in its media translation. If sheer is sexy, so is glitch. For sheer clothing evokes that sense of wonder and curious lust, glitch in its distortion inspires fantasy of a spotless mind. One perverse lucidly and iterates above satisfactory sexual scenes. Sex does not live purely on bits but engages a perfect union between virtuality and the viewer. It offers tantra from the digital realm.

Catharsis in glitch

In a non-intentional experimental spirit, I have experienced glitch first hand by crashing my iPhone 5c. Some might see brokenness as an opportunity for growth i.e. get an iPhone 6/6 plus. Some quizzed my blatant apathy to my now obsolete hardware. Others simply trolled and maybe give thanks to god for the new aesthetic.

To be broken is to be free. To acknowledge that security is elusive. And this takes time as much as the scalping of wound. Where certain glitches were not meant to be fixed, restoration comes from the faith of human’s mind detached from worldly extensions. Certain glitches are looked back in anger and disgust, whereas certain glitches merge into aesthetically pleasing forms. We decide which is burden or opportunistic growth.

The Pirate Cinema: The Free Cinema

Nicholas Maigret, The Pirate Cinema, (2012)

In the context of omnipresent telecommunications surveillance, “The Pirate Cinema” reveals the hidden activity and geography of Peer-to-Peer file sharing. The project is presented as a monitoring room, which shows Peer-to-Peer transfers happening in real time on networks using the BitTorrent protocol. The installation produces an arbitrary cut-up of the files currently being exchanged. User IP addresses and countries are displayed on each cut, depicting the global topology of content consumption and dissemination.

Nicholas Maigret’s presentation to show the world through technology and language of our time, as he explained to has existed through historical avant-gardes, aligns with Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye manifesto (1923):

I, a machine, am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see. […]

I free myself for today and forever from human immobility.

This is I , the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements,

recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations.

Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be.

My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world.

Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.

The erection of TPC (The Pirate Cinema), could be explained at large with Lisa Jevbratt’s opening to Coding the Infome: Writing Abstract Reality where she is quoted “to write code is to create reality.” In TPC, physicality of generative visual material in its dimensionality establishes non-linear space-time continuum; “it is similar to the act of making a sculpture or designing and sewing clothes – to start with a material and feel how it folds and falls and cut out two dimensional surfaces that turn into three dimensional shapes by sawing them together in specific way.” Truly, a “global village” of internet’s age of independence is beautifully woven.

At first glance, the clashes of visual imageries identifiably of pop icons and colossal NSFW feeds the viewer overwhelms yet ironically satisfy the short attention span of modern digital natives. Albeit arbitrary in the orchestration of audio-visual channels, the transitory aesthetics of failure in glitch harmonise the bytes of familiarity, evolving into resonance of our interwoven identity our Internet contemporaries.

The curation of top 100 downloads could perhaps be most illustrative of popular choices then polling and voting systems helmed by any human host and the authenticity of an open source network most genuinely conveys human-to-human connection makes this work of art brilliant in demonstration. To recall and speak of the present cinema, is to speak of The Pirate Cinema. The cinematic language has to progress and it is of every concern of today’s cinematographers in frames from the traditionally calculated aspect ratio to explosive immersion of dome. In TPC’s live performance, demographical interests is further data mined and visualised in total honesty. Medium at large, TPC ironically brings audiences back into the cinematic experience a black cube. The extraction of focus without mobility of an Iphone screen reminds for the piracy of content, sacrificed was the past infrastructure, though not necessarily abhorred against. The new, is however, going back to the old for the newer, the endless cycle provides “the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes”, says McLhuan. We are certainly anxious.

For more information, check out it’s home site and array of visage at TPC’s photo stream.