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"the interactive artist holds up the mirror to the spectator"

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"the interactive artist holds up the mirror to the spectator"

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I had the idea to have a zoom conversation with an actual other being. Through four different devices (iphones and apple computers), I held a zoom meeting with the pig next door. It so happens that I caught her on her last days. She was just about to be taken to the abattoir and I managed to be with her for her last few minutes before being taken into a van. Suddenly, the weight of this work took a whole other dimension. As I watched her watch me, watch herself, and hear herself, I had a discussion with the pig who also had a discussion with herself. Here is the endless echo of the mirror. Zoom served as my mirror both visually and orally. The feedback of sound created very high pitched frequencies, and everytime they were emitted and echoed through each device, the pig stopped, listened, and couldn't figure out what that noise was. In some ways, I felt like I was trying to tell her that this electric and unnatural noise was the noise of what was to come. Almost a kind of alarming sound, like the foreshadowing of her own death.

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“How can we rearticulate our relationship with the world if we are unable to see the actual impact of our actions in the concrete world? What can be the role of media art in the reinforcement of such process? What fundamental shifts need to occur in the sphere of art in order to reveal the connections between actions and consequences, especially when those actions are mediated by technology? I believe it is crucial to set the environment as a main political agent within the networked society art discourse and to create mechanisms that might stimulate and re-appropriate subjectivity“

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Non-aestheticized works that materialize what is otherwise a dematerialized reality.

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Masquerade (2015-16)

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"It is this fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection. And the examination is the technique by which power, instead of emitting the signs of its potency, instead of imposing its mark on its subjects, holds them in a mechanism of objectification. In this space of domination, disciplinary power manifests its potency, essentially by arranging objects. The examination is, as it were, the ceremony of this objectification.”

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Rematerialise what has been dematerialised through self-awareness

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Rematerialise what has been dematerialised through self-awareness

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Because my reaction to the DD theme had so much to do with my reaction to the way it was articulated on zoom, I decided to reinterpret the space that zoom offers when discussing serious issues. Through intervening in zoom, I decided to invert what was outside from what was inside as a metaphor of switching the dialogue from being closed-circuited to open circuited. Below is an image of me having a zoom call with security cameras around the world. These cameras include regular surveillance cameras, but also two Google Earth images.

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The purpose of putting Google Earth images next to surveillance footage was to parallel them. Are they not the same? The only difference is that the google earth footage is taken by regular citizens, and the surveillance footage is taken by authoritative institutions. But in the world we live in, are we not becoming our own surveillors?
Sitting in the same spot where I sat during the DD talks, I changed the surrounding screens with video footage of what is outside my house, or space of confinement. I find the confinement very symbolic. It is the material and physical expression of what existed within those zoom talks, where we are confined to our art & design community to address responsibility through the confined idea that we have of it. Before I start trying to teach the world a lesson about the evils of commercial graphic design, may I not rather first question where I am sitting? From what environment am I formulating these opinions? By becoming self-aware, I couldn't help but hear the echo of the farmer next door, who takes his goats out every day and who has never been to an art gallery, has never cared for gender rights, and who thinks art & design are leftist intellectual masturbations that exist in the big cities. In these videos, there is the single local supermarket in the whole area. There is the ping pong table where people go to socialise. There are the hills and the river and the trees. All of these places deserted or populated in highly regular ways. And I am confined, both physically and culturally.

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What if I started to have a zoom call with everything around me? This is to highlight an absurd world where in order to discuss with my environment I need to go through the medium of a technology rather than just myself. This parallels the issues with addressing responsibility in an art school whereby, to have a discussion about it I have to adopt certain ideological standpoints and a certain kind of literacy rather than trust my own feelings and all their contradictions. I have to mechanise myself in order to communicate.
Below are stills from a zoom conversation with the sun rising and the shepherd taking his goats to the hills, from four different devices. This is to highlight that our existence is reduced to and materialized by electrical devices.

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When placing devices next to each other they end up communicated with each other through sound feedback. When one device hears and emits a noise, another device hears it and echoes it in a delay. And so on. On zoom, this echo is visually expressed through the looping of green rectangles that signify which device is 'speaking'. This also served as a tool to portray the closed-circuited nature of the topic of responsibility, for the very platform it uses to create the discussion is stuck inside a feedback loop of its own self.
As David Rokeby, interaction designer, speaks of the story of Narcissus, he says : “this extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the

servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image . The nymph Echo tried to win

his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to

his extension of himself and had become a closed system ”.

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I am addressing responsibility from the standpoint that self-awareness is essential to responsible thinking. Responsibility regarding bigger world issues from an individual level is a step that I feel cannot be explored unless self-awareness is first addressed.
By self-awareness I am referring to a state of consciousness in which we recognise that our beliefs, our morals, our opinions, are situational.
In the process of being self-aware, I recognise that my online lifestyle is structured in such a way that my reality is closed-circuited. It paints a self-referential portrait of reality, whereby I, as an online citizen, am reduced to seeing and hearing (and sensing) things that agree with me and my idea of myself through the positive accumulation of thumbs ups. This trickles down to everyday life and affects everyday culture. Ordered, organised, and specialised into groups, we are perpetually divided through our differently curated ideas of the world.
With this in mind, when the School of Design community at the GSA is having a zoom call about responsibility, I am aware of many things. Generally, I am aware that the art world is a closed-circuit. To be in an art community one has to be literate in art, and therefore not anyone can experience art. To claim that art or design 'changes' the world through its 'thought provoking' realisations is the epitome of being irresponsible in thought. It is to forget that the audience is limited and agrees with itself, politically, aesthetically, etc. By virtue of being both academic and creative, it takes for granted that it may 'understand' culture, when in fact it is perfecting the act of being morally sound, of knowing good from bad, by alienating that which is 'bad' from that which is 'good'. Furthermore, it is a competitive environment due to the nature of its place in a capitalist world. Therefore, it engenders a culture of winners and losers, of the visibly recognized and the invisibly unrecognized. To romanticise art as a pure, neutral, and powerful tool, and therefore representative of  reality and people, is to assign to it a universal power that ignores the situational boundaries of its perpetuation. There is an impotence to art and design which needs to be acknowledged before it is assumed that it is capable of addressing issues of responsibility. It may dangerously delegitimise the seriousness of the issues at hand, and give a false image of what  left leaning ideas tend to aspire towards.
I decided to propose to make a work which is interventionist, rather than solutionist. By that i mean that it is looking to intervene inside of already existing hardware or software in order to materialize what is otherwise designed to be dematerialized. In the same way that I felt that the Design Domain discussion was dematerializing the concrete nature of contemporary issues by intellectualizing and fitting them within a certain ideology, without actually encouraging students to look at what is immediately in front of them, and why. I am avoiding to approach this from a solutionist standpoint because I do not want to make a piece of work that can only be read by like-minded people. I want to shamelessly express rather than conceptually address my own responsibility.

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- Zoom
- Different devices with webcam and mic input

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I wish to recreate an open zoom call with a fixed webcam where anyone can pass by and participate. For now I only have video footage of what I have done to myself as a spectator, in which I inverted to position of audience/artist. For example, is the pig spectating or am I spectating the pig? Am I actually talking about responsibility or am I watching myself talk about responsibility?
As a final piece I would like to create a space where there is a live interaction. Placing a source device in one place, with a live zoom call, and other devices around the same area, so people can watch themselves watch themselves, watch themselves be their surveillors and their own victims of surveillance, be the spectator and the actor.