User:Ryan/Proposal/thesis-outline
THESIS OUTLINE
The thesis territory I am interested in researching can be viewed on a coordinate plane, with the real and the virtual forming one axis, and the human and non-human (or post human?) forming the other. Within this system, I am interested in investigating the interactions of these polarities within human consciousness. The constructed physical world influences the perception of the body. The virtual world(s?) reflect the conscious desires of a space broken free of these tangible boundaries. In between is the unconsciousness and noise, and at the boundaries of these spaces are the transitory zones where the mind/body constructions dissolve into thought. In the physical world, I think this is where the constructions of modernity that are falling apart have this effect on the human psyche. Mass pollution, poverty, unending asymmetrical war, etc... are phenomena that break down the assumptions that formulate the psyche, i.e. "the kids are not alright". Glaring discrepancies exist within the promises of technology and capital. This creates a cognitive dissonance where the unreal seems just as plausible as alleged reality.
I am interested in researching the thresholds between the real and the virtual, with respect to the perception of the human body and physical spaces, and then consequently the virtual spaces that are being defined today, and their effect on our consciousness. There exists multiple relationships between these spaces, but they are centrally connected through performativity of the human, and its interaction with the non-human. These spaces have blurry boundaries and definitions, and become solid generally when they are commodified. 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 thesis work will investigate this phenomenon and explore the potential limits of sensory experience. I would like to investigate narrative spaces that tangibly manifest dislocation in a hallucinatory and dreamlike environment. Can architectural forms, light and sound ultimately question 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.
(Some general related quotes)
“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. "
“I am writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way, the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what history is to the other. An impossibility. Legends are born out the need to decipher the indecipherable. Memories must make due with their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector. Madness protects, as fever does. To play with the signs of memory. To pin them down and decorate them like insects that would have flown beyond time where you can contemplate them from a point outside of time — the only eternity left. I look at these machines, I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend…. Here is a story of one who has lost the ability to forget, who, through some peculiarity of his nature, instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning humankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the world they come from, to call forth a vision, to be moved and tremble at a portrait or the sound of music can only be signs of a long and painful prehistory. ”
Texts:
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
Hyperobjects - Timothy Morton