User:Amy Suo Wu/updated project proposal

WHAT

I would like to construct an alternative prediction system which will metaphorically allude to how discourse regimes and personal perception narrativises reality. The set up will be in the form of an installation that spatially maps and physicalises the abstract structures of discourse regimes to reveal and deconstruct:
1) institutional mechanisms of power – how knowledge/power is produced through institutional apparatus and technologies (techniques) i.e. scientific statements, charts, architectural arrangements etc. and
2) personal mechanisms of belief – how meaning is produced through an active and complicated process of filtering perceptual data, or more precisely how pareidolia/apophrenia as a psychology phenomenon narrativises the construction of meaning and animate perception as 'constructed belief '.

My hope is that by interacting with this system, the relationship between these two strands of meaning-making and the interplay between human agency and external agency may be explored and meditated on.

HOW

In this space, the institutional apparatus is there to create believability and enforce power through all the appropriate support structures such as the architectural typology, scientific facilities, charts and diagrams with measurements and classifications (e.g. periodic table of elements, acupuncture, astrological charts .etc), and interviews of professionals who speak of prediction. The space will be donned with scientific and folklore signifiers, to at the same time juxtapose and equalise the opposing rationalities/belief systems. However, at the heart of this installation system lies a technology (technique) that I will construct. Technically, it will be a combination of programming software and analogue strategies applied to a dataset (provided by the participants) to prediction a final outcome.

Example scenario: Visitor is subjected to a kind of Rorschach test in which they will project meaning onto a random pattern → this will then be piped through to further interpretation, e.g. via my cloud system → piped again through statistical interpretation → more filters until I (the role of the final 'medium') gives a reading to the visitor → this prediction can then be the basis for the next visitor to interpret and begin the chain again etc. Final performance could be that I run all the visitors results through the 'averaging program' I used during the TLANSATLANTIC OLACLE MUM performance.

Perhaps through more 'filters', the convolution could expose the gaps and potentially lead visitors to insert their own meaning.

WHY

By showing how information is transformed through the filters of interpretations by various discursive practices, the intention is to expose the pipeline in a way that uncovers on one hand a simple and sober mechanism of how meaning is produced on a personal and institutional level, and yet on the other hand an ever-astonishing complexity which so much of our world is built upon. It also comes from a desire to probe the logic of irrationality as an everyday psychological meaning-making process. The edge between random and meaning, order and disorder, chaos and patterns is where I would like to the project to walk.