Ryan/draft project proposal

What do you want to make?

I am interested in creating a chaotic system that exists in the threshold between the human and the non-human. What is it that defines our consciousness and physical body that can be permeated into the virtual to dissolve these boundaries. An intermodal (multi-sensory) experience that breaks into the source code of the perception systems and re-writes them. Taking inspiration from the works of Stan Douglas, The Otolith Group, Chris Salter and Italo Calvino — I would like to create a non-linear narrative that offers a variety of stories that address travelling through the conceptual space of the posthuman. I would like to create a system of places, humans, non-humans, and stories that can interchange reflexively, in effect creating a system that can create a narrative that could never end, or be different everytime it is generated. In this sense the system will become an oracle, where the viewer can take a prognosis of being where future and past collapse into each other. These stories will consist of lore of speculative fiction that talks to the coming time of our existence. Also I am interested in exploring perspectives of narratives from non-human agents. Also, I am interested in a sort of hypothetical documentary/fiction, where “thoughts and things, exterior and interior, are captured in the same texture, in which the sensible and intelligible remain undistinguished – a transformation of the opposition between real and representation, between original and second-order copy”. Within this odd narrative there could be a sort-of hero journey, where an intelligence is seeking out the meaning behind its existence. Similar scenes could play out over and over with subtle changes that reflect getting closer or further away to the “goal” of the journey — or multiple varied descriptions are told eventually summing to be descriptions of the same place. Additionally, I would like to explore sensorial thresholds that form the perception of the body and its relationship to space — for the purpose of elaborating on the permeability of the boundaries of perception of the human body, akin to the ideas above regarding the dislocation of consciousness. “To encourage sensorial transience in the visitors, they also shake the stable self, remove the ability to hold onto something in the world, obscure easily defined borders between subject and object, visible and felt, perceived and imagined. Whereas the confusion of utter darkness plunges one visitor into “ absolute nothingness, ”another seems almost liberated in experiencing a transitory burst of ephemerality”

How do you plan to make it?

I will read tonnes of things, watch films, see exhibitions, etc... to generate the script sources, as well as write towards these themes. After this I will determine a way to best represent these ideas, probably in animation with characters. I am also super interested in researching thresholds of sensation, so I would like to experiment with this. To see how variations in all the senses can affect an experience, and then how these scenarios can possibly fit into my idea. Finally these aspects will all be assembled into a game engine that will serve as the system to present the narratives.

What is your timetable?

Read, write, model, code, create game system. The module story pieces can be developed independently of one another, so I will begin small with these touching on basic notions of the general idea.

Why do you want to make it?

I feel that the time in which we live is offering up thousands of answers without any questions being asked that could aid in understanding the developments that are taking place. Instead of technology offering something for our spiritual (non-religious, more hippie) development within our society, it serves as yet another platform for competition and financial hegemony. I hope my project will be a counterforce to this, and confuse, delight, confound, or bore the people who see it, and at the very least they get something out of it through the mere experience of it.

Who can help you and how?

THE INTERNETS! And people around me, talking about this idea.

Relation to previous practice

In consistency with my work of last year (and in the spirit of Guattari’s idea thief) I will appropriate texts, concepts and works of others and build new ideas and connections within them. Last year my work generally was about a consciousness trying to find its humanity, this year it will be about humans losing theirs and being confronted by this new reality.

Relation to a larger context

“In the face of a politics that prefers to work in the speculative tense, what is called for is something like a creative sabotage of the future; a pragmatics of pre-emptive resistance capable of actualising the future outside of the policeable boundaries of property right. This is an abstract formula for resistance that applies to such diverse questions as the capitalisation of health and old age insurance, biological patents of all kinds, and the commercialisation of the elements, from privatised water to traceable pollution rights and environmental catastrophe bonds”. To sabotage this future that totalises the image as nothing more than representation, and submits to the oppressive reign of the informational present, how can my work fight against this? Finding a way to relate subjective experience to the political, to propose questions not as assertions or affirmations, but as ideas.