User:Sara/ Project outline

Project Outline First Draft

In my previous presentation on my work, I spoke mainly of the context from which my subjects of interest were formulated rather than actually showing work material. As I look at the texts that I have written so far, it seems to me that “my work” is precisely that; telling stories and describing the methods by which those stories come to existence.

As I come from a film background, my interest in storytelling may not come as a surprise, but what I intend to do is to re-explore what storytelling is in the first place. How are narratives created and how facts or truths are formulated through their own mediation.

In the past year, I have tried to reflect on some of stories that affect me most: How can one speak of disaster? How do texts function within a context of surpassing violence?

What I showed earlier in my presentation was an experiment on hacking images that mediate that surpassing violence; that being identified not only by the scale of destruction and loss it creates, but rather by the way comprehension of basic language becomes impossible.

The reason why I speak of images when in fact I want to talk about literary texts is perhaps the fact that in today’s digital era, the nature of images and texts as individual and separate media has shifted into a basic stream of digital numbers and codes. The nature of mediation as well as the nature of what is being mediated has shifted in essence into what seems to me an illusive, ambiguous, and perverse relation between the language/image/voice/code of the oppressor and the language/image/voice/code of the oppressed.

As I am now stepping in to what, to me, is the previously obscure world of code, just the fact that I am peeking beyond my usual position as an end-user/consumer becomes an object of desire and fascination.

My plan for the coming weeks is to experiment with this new tool and try to explore, technically, how all media can be translated to one another, modulated, synchronized, transformed; how they can lose their materiality and melt into mere mediations, transitions, vectors.