project proposal

working title

The real world isn’t real at all

aims

Networks are the primary source for my practice based research. I’m interested in creating narratives, objects and platforms, working on the boundaries of the false dichotomy between virtual and physical.
I would like to evolve my research through collaborative platforms, online and offline, and investigate new forms of social relations.

objectives

• steal, copy, paste, combine network related elements in order to experiment the ‘infinite versioning’ effort on entropy
• support internet communities active on knowledge and tools sharing, and network based researches and arts
• experience new online identities bots/fake identities and escape the ‘profiling’ process
• keep it spooky and do it for the lulz

context

The following text is a rough edited ‘cut and paste’ of various quotes from books, magazines, song lyrics, anime and film scripts, Wikipedia pages, previous posts from this blog and a panel discussion’s transcript.
I used these elements with a ‘versioning’ approach, as sources to build a statement in flux.

Let’s start from the beginning. Out of six million sperm cells, I came in first and won a warm moving body. We all are the ones that won the bodies. There are countless ingredients that make up the human body and mind. Sure I have a face and voice to distinguish myself from others, but my thoughts and memories are unique only to me, and I carry a sense of my own destiny. Each of those things are just a small part of it. Apart from the external perimeter of your body, when you grow up in a digital environment the screen becomes something like to the retina of your mind’s eye.
I collect information to use in my own way. All of that blends to create a mixture that forms me and gives rise to my conscience. I thought the network wasn’t real, but your mind makes it real. If you’re killed in there, you die here? The body cannot live without the mind. And the network is an additional body for your mind, not a mere copy of your physical one. Have you ever actually seen your brain?
From Phone Phreaks’ phone calls to BBS, IRC chats, P2P hubs and image boards, physical and virtual are not opposed; rather, the virtual complicates the physical, and vice versa. The user is embodied both in physical and virtual entities sharing the same mind. I am me, and I am the only me there is. Or not?
Sometimes you can feel confined, only free to expand yourself within boundaries, without the opportunity to dissolve in the collective unconscious; through experiments with network identities you can get close to be formless.

Life online in web 2.0 tends to be a real time cloud storage of your life, a digital mirror of your everyday experience. Social media corporations owns your profile data in order to reshape the users’ path, and keep yourself connected with your IRL identity in the best way.
Facebook’s naming policy requires you to use your legal name, asserting that you should only send friend requests to people you have a real-life connection to, like your friends, family, coworkers or classmates; beside online-based communities, the real-world communities conquer the online world, restoring a more traditional communication model under straightforward policies. Escape from profiling has become more and more complicated.
What is profiling? A silhouette is a bounded shape that sharply delineates an inside from an outside: the information it carries lies entirely in partitioning a field. The verb “to profile” denotes the imposition of such a finite shape onto a set of perceived statistical regularities, as when scientists plot a straight line through an irregular array of data points, disciplining and abstracting inchoate (or sometimes merely imagined) patterns. Profiling is adopted by Google’s PageRank, and most of social network’s statistics, reflecting your data on search results, ads, dashboards, and so on.
Roger liked to watch her with a telescope and follow her around with a tape recorder; he put the information in the firm’s computer. Comparative analysis, he thought he knew her.
Your browsing history defines what you’ll find next. Similarly, profiling is related to latest improvement in face recognition, or new smart phone camera technologies capable of matching faces and shapes from your previous social media pictures, to clean images from noise.

So, what happens to the world outside the internet? IRL world is trapped under its multiple representations, images of all sorts, relayed by satellites and caught by the aerials that bristle on the roofs of our remotest hamlets. The ‘local city’ is now only a district, one borough among others of the invisible world meta-city whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere. The virtual hypercentre, of which real cities are only ever the periphery. And every of these physical places separately are composed and organized as a recap of the entire world.
In this particular environment, ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ collapses into each other and the entropic force of recombining its elements and removing its own footnotes, is an indispensable condition to create new narratives, blending sources and new materials, without covering up a cultural product in a tribute of fandom or a sterile representation of the world.

methodology

My practice-based research is being carried out using a selection of internet sources and tools, images, texts, 3D modeling, sound and digital compositing. Context is directly part of my practice and vice versa. For the forthcoming development of some of those features I’m currently trying to implement more code in my screen-based series (using Java and Processing), and get it involved in a mixture of different elements such as printed objects (flags, blankets), sculptures/hardware devices (Arduino).

outcomes

Further development for ‘Water Portraits’ series:

• video-statements (talking 3d sculptures, web based Java scripts)
• objects (flags, printed blankets and clothes)
• silicone masks / inflatable sculptures (Arduino)

Further development for online identities bots/fake identities:

• website restyling + new content
• social media identity experiments

workplan

I’m going to work mainly on Water Portraits until the new year, improving my coding skills (Javascripts, Processing) for the web based part of the series, and will start to set up my sculpture series straight after the first term ending.
I think will start working again on the fake identity website around December or so.

bibliography

L. Manovich, The Language of New Media, Leonardo, London 2002
P. Virilio, The Information Bomb, Verso Books, London 2005
M. Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, Verso Books, London 2009
J. Aranda, B. Kuan Wood, A. Vidokle, What Is Contemporary Art?, Sternberg Press, New York 2010
J. Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, Reaktion Books, London 2010
D. Quaranta, Collect the WWWorld, Link Editions, Brescia 2011
D. Joselit, After Art, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2013

http://rhizome.org/
http://www.e-flux.com/
http://dismagazine.com/
http://www.theguardian.com/uk