(horizontal optokinetic nystagmus.)
Department of Biological Flow
RGB (Retinal Ganzfeld Bitcast)
2011
(re)mixed media sculpture
installation view and detail
at “Brazil”
May 24, 2012
Electricity is Magic Gallery
Department of Biological Flow
Pinkeye
2012
sculpture and closed-circuit video installation
- - -
Electricity is Magic presents:
“Brazil”
Lee Blalock
Lauren Hall
Sean Smith / Department of Biological Flow
Opening Reception:
24 May 2012, 7-11pm
EiM Gallery
715 Richmond St. W.
Gallery Hours:
Sun/Mon/Tues 12-5pm
Department of Biological Flow
Mecha Butterfly Soundsystem
2011 (shown in process)
mixed media and performance
- - -
October 5, 2011 at 12:32pm near Surfside, FL
walking to school i saw a monarch butterfly appear out of nowhere. awkward flight — surfacevolumesurfacevolume — it began to venture out over a major four-lane artery. halfway over the turbulence was too much and it flew crazily all over the place before pulling a 180, executing a neat glide back to my side of the road, and landing on flower, orange on purple. nice ride, dude.
- - -
articulations
most insects have tiny hairs on their antennae that help serve to empirically understand their external environments. to the eye, these appear as a sort of fuzziness.
although each of these hairs has a specific coordinate in space and time relative to one another, each detecting perturbations in a particular type of stimulus, they function as a sensory whole. the skin itself has multiplied, increased its surface area by orders of magnitude. and yet each hair retains a singularity within this plurality. what one comes to know, empirically, another has already forgotten.
call this fuzziness a strategy: an attempt towards weak localization (political) or suggestive site-specificity (aesthetic). if i told you this status update comes from fanshawe park road, london and/or surfside, florida, would this be considered an example of the latter?
how do we make the tiny hairs on the back of our necks bristle?
if you had a small enough camera, these tiny insect hairs might appear to the lens as a moiré pattern … … …
Simone Decker
White Noise
1999
isolation tape
- - -
also see tomas saraceno’s ‘galaxies forming along filaments, like droplets along the strands of a spider’s web’ from the venice biennale in 2009.
Department of Biological Flow
RGB (Retinal Ganzfeld Bitcast)
reworked sisal and steel wire
in process
- - -
“The Ganzfeld effect (from German for ‘complete field’) is a phenomenon of visual perception caused by staring at an undifferentiated and uniform field of color. The effect is described as the loss of vision as the brain cuts off the unchanging signal from the eyes. The result is ‘seeing black’ - apparent blindness. … The Ganzfeld effect is the result of the brain amplifying neural noise in order to look for the missing visual signals. The noise is interpreted in the higher visual cortex, and gives rise to hallucinations. This is similar to dream production because of the brain’s state of sensory deprivation during sleep.”
Jacqueline Mok
Not on my watch
2011
two-part video installation
-
“Toward a Kinoderm Aesthetics” final studio project
The Facebook Polis
- - -
8. No matter how many categories are added to the personal identity options in the Facebook Polis (ie. for gender, sexual orientation, relationship status, location, etc.) these remain categories. As such they operate on the basis of exclusion, a formulation of “social networking” violent to the individuation that emerges within every relational encounter. The architecture of the “relational” database demands this gridded positioning and our every performed expression of “self-ness” thereafter may serve its reinforcement.
-
9. One’s skin is predominantly white in colour as one moves through the Facebook Polis. This is not the same as the “whiteness” of a corporeal skin in lived, material reality (which was never really white anyway), nor is it to deny a racial politics and privilege of whiteness that may exist in this expressive space. Rather, it is to suggest that the basis of whiteness lies in the optics of luminescence, our skins reduced to optimum measures of colour contrast on the interface display. It is here, in the absolute presence and absence of the visible spectrum (albino-derma and pitch-typeface) that we make our shift to the speed of light. And it is in this sense that we bear a greater resemblance to newspapers than reality TV shows.
-
10. Though it is the absolute presence and absence of the visual spectrum that make/up the primary composition of our skins in the Facebook Polis, it is the precision of #3b5998 within a variable geometry that signifies its imprimatur — both visual appeal and mark of the brand.
-
11. While the whole surface of black and white and blue in fact expresses the Facebook skin, we tend to reduce this dermal signification strictly to the profile picture. Here is where colour and personality are introduced; here is where we find style! But the whole tapestry remains important. The profile picture photo album, then, makes explicit what Michel Serres might describe as the ocellations of some boxy, gridded peacock: from the layers and layers of deadening, templated plumage, one is drawn to the tiny rectangular eyes looking back in presentation.
_____
posted in no particular order, these aphorisms are the beginnings of a microbook-in-progress for Delere Press, a boutique e-book publishing venture by Jeremy Fernando and Yanyun Chen
#facebookpolis
