User:Emily/Self-Evaluation

Alibi agency (working title)

Possible Project Proposal

Intro The devices or machines which help to enhance/ expand the functionality of human organs(structural unit to serve a common function) have been developed largely. we get unsatisfied to watch within limited range of vision, and we have instant desire to shift from one place to another. When the physical body can’t satisfy those desires, we turn to some certain media, devices, or machines. As Marshall McLuhan puts, the technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. What if the scale, the pace or even the pattern that is hard for physical body to cope with? Will the physical body turn out to be obstacles.

Recent observation Drone camera has been popular in recent two years. Firstly like aircraft models that carry cameras, then user can get live view from the drone(there is a tablet mounted on the controller), now it flies itself and follows users automatically. (For users there would be only three steps need to do: "ready, throw, go") Here below is commercial image from lily.camera. It shows like as if we went through technological ape to human, or maybe next step to superhuman. The experience we can get have already broken the limitation of physical organs, the technical function units seem get further and further away from our body. It brings off-body experience which is much expanded, away from where we stand, up in the air, down to the water.

More absence of human body has happened in generalised automatisation. The next step is to design awareness/intelligence, like robotic arms, self-driving cars, like the drone flying itself and follow the user. Algorithmic automatisation, the internet of things have increasingly led to the decline of on spot interaction. And human beings is only small part of the interaction chain.

"Possible outcome" Being interested in this phenomenon, one possible outcome of my research could be a kinetic installation together with video projection. It consists of two similar(same) mechanical parts. They are facing each other, one standing on the ground the other hanging on top (the ceiling). Two cameras are mounted at the heads of two parts, video taping each other from their own changing position. At times, they move towards each other slowly, at other times, they quickly pass by each other.

For me, the piece works like ironic joke when people rely on technology heavily. There are of course numerous advantages to replace people with machine in some works, for safety, for efficiency. But there are also lots of concerns on ethical transformation. pic:

Related to previous research/works The form of this possible outcome relays on my previous research and works. In the last academic year, I researched mainly on the methods of recombination/permutation/cut-up. Firstly being used in literature then in video works. André Breton, Tristan Tzara, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, are main figures I looked at.T he works were/can be rewritten or reassembled by themselves, they are self-contained, self-recreated but also self-restrained. The (changed)relationship between each component become tempting.

Time and space are two main important dimensions of the moving image that I am concerning most in my works. Even the cut-up techniques used in create literature works involve spacial imagination. Like for example fold-in technique, taking two sheets of linear text (with the same linespacing), folding each sheet in half vertically and combining with the other, then reading across the resulting page. And Gysin created digital poetry I am that I am. In his 1960 essay entitled Cut-Ups Self-Explained, he put forwards "The permutated poems set the words spinning off on their own; echoing out as the words of a potent phrase are permutated into an expanding ripple of meanings which they did not seem to be capable of when they were struck into that phrase. The poets are supposed to liberate the words – not to chain them in phrases. Who told poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing." What I want to create with the two mechanical parts is to free the movement within a cylindrical space, from rhythmic repetitions to mutual interaction. The dual-screen moving images from two cameras will directly show next to the installation.

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