User:Amy Suo Wu/17th oct

A general summary of what I did last year and how I may further explore what I see as potential trajectories.

Desire as a productive means.(reality as a by-product of desire)
In the first trimester of the last school year, my research focused around the idea that desire produces realities and new subjectivities, but specifically how that productiveness is manifested/invested in technology. Technology thus becomes an embodiment of impossible desires (Kluitenberg, 2005).

Imagination materialising realities.
In the second and third trimester I explored how imagination constructs and informs the material world. I first used imagination as a tool to help me construct an allegorical world to understand reality. For example, as the outcome of the trimester's theme 'online privacy', a fictitious multinational entity called Benji (the world leading DNA search engine) was written into existence. This project then took on more life as it travelled to a recognised event where I presented a short history of the man and company while assuming the role of a close associate of Benji.

For the third trimester I was interested in the interplay between fiction and reality, how they are blurred and hybridised. (Collective) Memories, hallucinations, conspiracy theories (particularity space exploration), myths, lucid dreams, altered levels of consciousness, paranoid delusions, and schizophrenia were questioned. Are imagined and dreamed realms as of equal validity to the apparently shared world? and how are they mediated? For example, I became fascinated with the phenomenon of the Influencing Machine, a condition where one believes that their minds are controlled by an imaginary invention of which is an external object. The famous case of the 1810 Air Loom (the influencing machine of James Tilly Matthews) was first manifested through illustrations and then spatially materialised (albeit an artistic artefact) around 200 years later by artist, Rod Dickinson in 2002.

Graduation possibilities:
Following this line of work, I would like to push further into the muddy space of the mind's imaginary (omni)potency as both a materialising and mediating agency of various levels of realities. In Florian Cramer's text, Words Made Flesh (2005), he reconstructs the cultural and imaginative history of executable code - how code instructs the execution of reality. Using this as one starting point, I intent to study imagination and its causal affects.

Speculation as an imagination inducer: complexity grows where there is darkness, gaps, the unknown etc.
From a social constructivist view of the discourse producing the object (and subject). Foucault's idea that if you have enough to prove a case, then you can create the conditions in which it can become possible. Further readings: Bruno Latours' Laboratory Life, Didi-Hubermans' Invention of Hysteria.
How does imagination perform reality. How does the real validate the imaginary e.g. The Australian Aboriginal 'Dreamtime' (an animist mythology of their creation story where both imagined and shared worlds are of equal validity), The Museum of Jurassic Technology (an established institution founded by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson in LA based on both fiction and fact).
Self-fulling prophecies as a phenomenon. “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
Manifestation of the techno-imagination and vice versa. The abundance and popularity of sci-fi is one such example. Solaris (1972 Russian sci-fi film where the scientists' onboard the space station orbiting the fictional planet of Solaris, experience the materialisation of their hallucinations - an example of a self-referential subject matter).

Questions

How to narrow it down? ( need more anchorage through various case studies so that I may elucidate more complex ideas)
Literature/films/artworks etc. that deals with or relates to the above?
How to narrow it down?
How do I to stop myself from getting inundated?