User:Pleun/grad/Proposal3rdversion

~~Project Proposal

“If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly [...] this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacrum [...] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.”

(Baudrillard, Simulacra and simulation)

Abstract

'Tank' by the artist Janice McNab

"REST" will be an audiovisual experience which will explore the alternative therapy of the 'Sensory Deprivation Tank'[1] or 'Flotation Tank.' Not only as a Technology of the Self[2], but as a window overlooking a bigger ill in society, which I will call by the name the October 2016 documentary by Adam Curtis gave the phenomenon: 'Hypernormalisation[3].' The tendency of our modern western society of trying to escape from instead of dealing with the complexities of this world, while keeping up appearances of a fully functioning society.

“[...] however the past 40 years, politicians, financiers and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated. Instead they constructed a simpler version of the world, in order to hang onto power.”

(Hypernormalisation, Documentary, BBC, October 2016)

Before viewing this documentary I saw tendencies that express this phenomenon popping up everywhere in my daily consumption of media without the means to connect them with the right phrasing. After the documentary I again saw the urgency of talking about this subject. A few of these tendencies I will pull into the project to serve different parts of the experience I want to create. One I mentioned before is the Sensory Deprivation Tank, which was developed by the neuropsychiatrist John C. Lilly in the fifties and later used with LSD research in the sixties, before becoming available for commercial use. The Tank is a Technology of the Self, which expresses literally hiding from society in a very 'action-based' way. The second one is the subculture of Vaporwave[4], which is a musical and visual culture ironically exploring the void of capitalism. Below I will give definitions, my positioning and role within the project.

Sensory Deprivation Tank

Pods in the 1979 film Alien

Presentator:“I wonder if sensory deprivation could work towards deconditioning or mitigating the damage caused by all this technology?”

Frequent user: “Not just the technology. I think it can mitigate the damage of living in our society in general”

(Sensory Deprivation Tanks, Documentary, VICE, April 2013)

A Sensory Deprivation Tank "(or Isolation Tank, Float Tank, Flotation Tank or Sensory Attenuation Tank) is a lightless, soundproof tank with high epsom salt (magnesium sulphate) content filled with salt water at skin temperature, in which individuals float." (Isolation Tank, Wikipedia) It is used for flotation R.E.S.T.; Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy.

The act of going into a Sensory Deprivation Tank is for me one of the most extreme expressions of this behaviour, where we literally hide ourselves from all stimulation by voluntarily laying inside a small and closed off space for a while. The shape represents both the beginning of life with its womb-like connotations as well as the coffin-shaped end of it. Its white, shiny and rounded exterior reminds me of how architects and designers of the nineties would describe the furniture of the future.

The strange form of commodified relaxation of floating is seen as a healing therapy, all the while similar sensory deprivation techniques are used as a system of torture within the walls of monstrosities like the prison base at Guantanamo Bay.

“When you are in the tank you are cleansing the doors of perception. When you come out you are like a baby coming out of the womb and seeing things with fresh eyes [...]”

(Sensory Deprivation Tanks, Documentary, VICE, April 2013)

The pod is reflected in a range of films like The Matrix and Alien and appears to always be used to reach a certain non-state. A coma-state where the mind and body are separated to create a lapse in time, promote a healing process or transition, keep the body from harm and/or to use the body as a source of energy.

Role and positioning: physical and mental, musical

Spatial design
Atmosphere
Performative elements

Potentially:

Brain waves
Ambient music

v a p o r w a v e

Vaporwave a e s t h e t i c

Another example is the relatively new, but already completely evolved online subculture, visual language and musical genre of Vaporwave. Born in 2010, Vaporwave began as an “ironic critique of global capitalism in the form of sample based informercials and home shopping networks” (Urban Dictionary) that used the empty promises of capitalism as a critique by heavily overusing brand A E S T H E T I C in combination with glitch, fluor, Greek and Roman architecture and sculpture and early nineties web nostalgia. The subculture later completely transformed into the subject of its own critique and was declared dead when MTV and Tumblr started to incorporate it in 2015. At the end of 2016 it is definitely not dead, it is actually more popular than ever, but it's intentions are unclear. The most interesting thing about Vaporwave is that its constantly contradicting itself. You could say doublethink (a term coined by Orwell in his 1984 novel) is based at the core of the movement. The subculture is nostalgic but futuristic, criticising but adoring capitalism, idealising zoning-out with its endless GIF-loops, but clashing that with heavy aesthetic.

Vaporwave creates it's own hyperreality where you enter a world of pastel perfect plastic, LED lit statues and cyan-blue waterfalls all on an old Windows '95 monitor in the Japanese city Kyoto. You can only see the criticism in second glance – beyond the flashy images and the elevator-music.

Role and positioning: visual and musical

What role do I want Vaporwave to play in my project?

A hyperreality created by Post-Truth

Role and positioning: language

What role do I want populist politics to play in my project?

Method

To me the topics I mentioned are heavily linked in the way that they all numb the mind and are forms of hiding and escaping. The Sensory Deprivation Tank does quite literally that, the subculture of Vaporwave idealises (and criticises) this numb state and with its music and imagery tries to induce it from a computerscreen.

Vaporwave as a Minor Literature

Minor Literature is a term from a book by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: "Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature" published in 1986, which is about how minorities use language:

"Minor literature is not the literature of a minor language but the literature a minority makes in a major language."

(What Is a Minor Literature?, University of Southern Mississippi, 2009)

The Minor Literature Deleuze and Guattari wrote about is mainly about minorities within the political left. I am curious how nowadays the ideas of Minor Literature are of effect within the Alt-Right movement.

"The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation."

(Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 1986)

Populist Politics as Domestic Perception Management

Post truth within the populist politics of the Alt Right movement as domestic (?) Perception Management.]

Perception Management is a term from the US military which is explained by the US Department of Defence with this definition:

"Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviours and official actions favourable to the originator's objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations."

(Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, 2010)

Different Modes of information

overload,
false,
filtered,
noise,
no information,
post-truth,

Practical Execution

The project will take the form of an installation, which explores these topics I am presenting in a way they form their own meta-hyperreality.

First Version 1.0 and 1.1

Assessment 12/12/16 Version consists of:

one room
total darkness
live sound consisting of different influences (sensory deprivation tanks, vaporwave, populist politics)

The first trial was an experiment in how a public, in this case teachers, would react to being put in total darkness and listening to the story of the project.

Re-assessment 16/01/17

one room
total darkness
extended soundscape
ending with image

Version 1.1 will be an extension of version 1 where the aspects are more thought-out.

Spin-off

Love Imams at The New State, WORM Rotterdam, NYE 31/12/2016

collaboration w/ theatermaker Kolijn Jagersma
a space we build ourselves w/ white crates
influences from The New State, the new identity of WORM for the coming two years

Project: We created a performance for WORM where we invited three people at a time to enter our self-made space, where we brought them into The New State of 2017.

Second Version 2.0

Museumnacht 04/03/17, UBIK, WORM Rotterdam

collaboration w/ theatermaker Kolijn Jagersma
Multiple rooms
Build-up in experience
Combination of visual media, sound, performance and spatial design

Third Version 3.0

Graduation, July 2017, Piet Zwart Institute, Location unknown

Timeline

January

Further crystallising the concept, while starting to experimentation with: sound, image, space and vibe.
Collecting material and reflecting.

Building a test-space for me to use.
Talking to peers about what they feel could work to express my ideas.

16th of January: Re-assessment. Use this assessment as a test-moment for Version 1.1.

February

Preparation for Version 2 at Museumnacht.
Get into PureData to create sound instead of Max MSP
Get more into visualisation
Building spaces
Performance elements
Write "script"

March

Preparation for Museumnacht
4th of March: Version 2 at UBIK Museumnacht.
Reflection and plan third version

April - May

Preparation for Graduation

Further Context

A few out of many:

Concepts of Hyperreality and Post-Truth,
Alt-Right–A lecture by Florian Cramer,
Hypernormalisation–Documentary Curtis,
Museum of Analogue Reality– theatre performance by collective Macabre,
Internet of Things and Prometheus Unbound, two theater plays by URLAND,
Wait but why's blog about AI: Singularity,

Another trend is escaping into the technological utopia of for example Elon Musk, who is hoping to colonize Mars within the next 30 years, or Raymond Kurzweil who is a public advocate for the belief in and workings towards the singularity. Within the futuristic prospects of a technological utopia as a realistic future as well as in science fiction, I am interested in the way it exaggerates the now to predict the future.

Relation to previous practice

This subject is a direct continuation of the project I proposed last year, which was about sensory deprivation and Technology of the Self, but linked to a society of control.

Wordlist

Escapism
Numb
Floating
Kyoto
Sadboys
A E S T H E T I C

A growing collection of material

Sensory Deprivation Tank

Vaporwave

books:

Babbling Corpse, Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts - Grafton Tanner
Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past - Simon Reynolds

Vaporwave Fashion

Music:

Macintosh Plus (one of the most influentialalbums)
Yung Lean
Blank Banshee
death's dynamic shroud.wmv
Saint Pepsi
マクロスMACROSS 82-99
Internet Club
Oneohtrix Point Never
James Ferraro

Endnotes

Technology of the Self

One of four "technologies" as described by Michael Foucault is the Technologie of the Self:

"[...] which permit individuals to effect by their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform I themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdowm, perfection, or immortality."

Hypernormalisation

“The term "hypernormalisation" is taken from Alexei Yurchak's 2006 book Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, about the paradoxes of life in the Soviet Unionduring the 20 years before it collapsed. A professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, he argues that everyone knew the system was failing, but as no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens were resigned to maintaining a pretence of a functioning society. Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the "fakeness" was accepted by everyone as real, an effect which Yurchak termed "hypernormalisation".”

(Hypernormalisation, Etymology, Wikipedia)