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.

The Big Kiss: Sensuality Beyond Physicality

Annie Abrahams, The Big Kiss, (2008)

Machine mediated kissing in a performance = drawing with your tongue = taking pleasure, while constructing an image = a way to be superaware of the other = never totally abandoning yourself = ???????? = not at all like real kissing, it’s better! This might be a female view point.

– Annie Abrahams

Check out 5 minute documentary:

Annie Abrahams creates situations where people reveal things of themselves they normally don’t show, being real and acting out of what is normally accepted, referring to it as an “intimate moment”. The idea is that in such a situation, people invest their thoughts and emotions while conferencing in the third space. In retrospection, it pricks to pick on their performance, in The Kiss, both performers self-consciously gestured a kiss. A kiss and its various cultural connotations deconstructed in the third space. Read more…

From Annie Abrahams’ “not at all like real kissing, it’s better!”, it suggests fear of bodily intimacy such that a mediated situation creates a simulation that human are perhaps more comfortable with from machine’s interface.

On the opportunistic point of view, it is an empowerment of the machine as an extension of our mere body. The sensuality of kissing has transcended beyond the physicality of which.

Fear is an emotion evoked by our instinctual senses that we may react in fight or flight. Women associate oral activities as emotional engagement, that prompts vulnerability. From being “superaware” of the dynamics behind the screen and bearing an overview of oneself with another through super-flat, perhaps then, an inspiration of safety be it physical or emotional propagates thrill and immersive voyeurism.

Virtual sex, no matter how realistic, was really nothing but glorified, computer-assisted masturbation.
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

When observed alone in physical space, an observer might decide to feel awkward for the participant, when in fact such engagement is so intimate to those involved. To kiss as a gesture is differentiated in implications. Where in The Big Kiss with the hint of intimacy in machine learning, intimacy pushes beyond physical and emotional, but to cognitive and experiential.

In men’s ideation of sexual fantasies and desires, physical fixation is where the difference lies in as compared to women. Annie Abrahams is might be right after all that it might be of preference to females in virtual act of intimacy.

Touch is the space of the gap, not the connection. (Source)

Datamatics: The Relationship Between Data and Knowledge

Ryoji Ikeda, Datamatics, (2006)

Using pure data as a source for sound and visuals, datamatics combines abstract and mimetic presentations of matter, time and space in a powerful and breathtakingly accomplished work. datamatics is the second audiovisual concert in Ryoji Ikeda’s datamatics series, an art project that explores the potential to perceive the invisible multi-substance of data that permeates our world. Projecting dynamic, computer-generated imagery – in pared down black and white with striking colour accents, Ikeda’s intense yet minimal graphic renderings of data progress through multiple dimensions. From 2D sequences of patterns derived from hard drive errors and studies of software code, the imagery transforms into dramatic, rotating views of the universe in 3D, whilst the final scenes add a further dimension as four-dimensional mathematical processing opens up spectacular and seemingly infinite vistas. A powerful and hypnotic soundtrack reflects the imagery through a meticulous layering of sonic components to produce immense and apparently boundless acoustic spaces. datamatics, alongside the recently released and critically acclaimed dataplex album, marks a significant and exciting progression in Ikeda’s work.

Check out the immersion documented:

Albeit augmented as an experience of Ryoji Ikeda’s works, the common trend of black and white, extreme polarities, seen and then unseen. Mathematical, computational, and a generative demographics of sensorial transfinite space and time is newly defined.

I propose data visualisation as the sublime experience in ecstatic truth, with reference to Datamatics by Ryoji Ikeda. Much unlike Lev Manovic’s stance on data visualisation as a new form of abstraction and anti-sublime, in Ikeda’s alchemy. In its representation we find a deliberate lost translation; an atmospheric inclusion of one being into one entity in space-time continuum.

When Werner Herzog coined “ecstatic truth”, it was to describe state of sublimity from which “a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual”. In Datamatics, the human body finds itself immersed audio-visually in real data. Revered sublime beauty lies not only in information aesthetics, but also ecstatic truth relatable to general human system.

According to Mario Costa, the new technologies are creating conditions for a new kind of sublime: the “technological sublime”. Data visualization in new media art transcribes raw data into a form of experience. It is driven by data, and its form follows from the optimisation of efficiency in inputting data into a human brain. It is pragmatic, rational and logical. On the other hand, it evokes emotions through its aesthetics, communicates, distills complex ideas into simplicity. In its consumption, it is sometimes involuntary, however a pleasant disruption and controlled chaos that breed new form of harmony.

Especially in Datamatics, it encompasses the human body and its relation to environment. The experience is designed for interaction to be quiet and observation in subtlety. On the other side of coin, an assault of the technology —the question of what “real” reality is poses itself constantly.

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.