Ryan/draft project proposal

What do you want to make?

Following the schematic set out in my thesis proposal, I will create a cycle of works that investigates dislocation from the body, how symbolic systems interlace with biological systems, and how the human nervous system is co-extensive with information systems. These will take the form of video, installation, and VR. They will be narrative based aspects of the notions in the thesis, while being inspired by them they will angle towards symbolic analogues of the ideas, spoken through dialog and metaphorical imagery. The following texts represent the first forays into this project. [S: a few lines on: how is this narrative structured. It seems to me that the essential structure is a saga or quest which is then abstracted to different degrees]

Text 1 - Spiritual Cyborg/Alchemical Fire
Text 2 - Metabolic Rift
Text 3 - Networked Self

How do you plan to make it?

I am attempting now to define exactly what is my method of artistic research. Generally, I will read, watch, and view a wide variety of materials. From here I will derive a narrative, then fill it out with characters and scenarios. Modelling, animation, sound, etc.. can occur then, and building up the presentation system in a game engine will occur after that.

What is your timetable?

November - Finalise narrative

December - Build characters and world

January/February - Production (for eye, present a prototype?)

March - Engine Build

April - Finalise

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 technological 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 get something out of it through the mere experience of it.

Who can help you and how?

I imagine I will do technical dev mainly through internet research, as well as ask my peers for advice and opinions. I think it could be beneficial to solicit feedback from a few of the xpub tutors, as their work seems to overlap with my interests.[S: I agree!]

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. [S:I think there is also a strong ecological theme, which you go into in depth below, in the proposed work that could be mentioned in this para]

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. [S: How to make this a positive - ask: where in the work does this happen already, and how? and, indeed, suggest how this may be done- corporeality and biography could be agents in achieving this]

References

Matthew Barney - Cremaster Cycle
Cecil B Evans - What does the Heart Want
Camile Henrot - Dogs are Days
Sascha Pohflepp - Various works
Monira al Qadiri - Various Works
Chris Salter - Haptic Field

WORDSSS TO BE USED MAYBE LATERZZZ At any moment in time, an individual can be spread across multiple locations, both real and virtual. Information exchanges transplant a portion of the mind to another place, apart from the physical body. My project will investigate this phenomenon and explore the potential limits of sensory experience. I would like to create narrative spaces that tangibly manifest dislocation in a hallucinatory and dreamlike environment. Architectural forms, light and sound that folds into one another as the viewer’s sense of sight changes perspectives, ultimately questioning our perception of reality. The human psyche is constantly being threatened by a denial of service attack from the systems of information control, with the intent of creating the spectre of individual freedom. Individual’s consciousness are being spread across a vast virtual domain, this material forms a sort of de facto primordial soup for the ascent of artificial intelligences. Coupled with this, the physical spaces that contain our corporal being are irreversibly changing. Plastics and radioactive debris are becoming imbued into aspects of the planet that give us life. This has both a mutagenic and endocrinal disruptive effect on the body. These factors sum to the notion of what I would like to address within the concept of becoming posthuman.

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 from non-human agents 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." A place where the confusion of utter darkness plunges one visitor into absolute nothingness, another seems almost liberated in experiencing a transitory burst of ephemerality. A long time between suns - the otolith group

Suspiria - Stan Douglas

Alien Agency, Experimental Encounters with the art of making - Chris Salter

Sans Soleil - Chris Marker