NEIN: 9 rejected submissions/proposals

8/11/2019 NEIN: 9 rejected submissions/proposals

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NEIN(9 rejected submissions / proposals)

By alex cruse



So much unseen labor goes into trying to get small groups of people to careabout your thoughts and/or give you money, so that you may produce…evenmore work.

These are failed attempts at that.



Name:alex cruse

Prefered Dates:12/15/2014-12/30/14

Project Description:I am proposing an experimental video-essay, which combines a reading of an (in-progress) text andabstracted representation of the built environment (please see the attached document.)

Thus far, I have filmed portions of Los Angeles' underground tunnel system, financial buildings, andreligious sites, in order to show 1) how representations of the body have been embedded into civicstructures, and 2) how architecture and evolving ideas of technicity increasingly govern our interpersonaland/or sexual relationships. I use both speculative and historical works through which to explore thesetheories; however, it is not a "didactic" or documentarian effort, per se—much of the film is intended to beinterpretative, and activated by the viewer. The film's title, "The Pliant Matrix," alludes to this flexible andsubjective view of, perhaps, somewhat more rigid or "fixed" concepts (economic systems, architecture,etc.)





"Motor Babble and Resilient Machines: Phenomenology of theBiocomputer"

From a neurological perspective, we are unaware of the medium through which wereceive information. During this process, our brains' respective data structures areactivated so quickly, that these systems cannot recognize themselves as such. A

decreased temporal resolution of meta-representational functions implies that thereexists no attentional availability within earlier processing stages. Therefore, we operateas cognitive systems that are unable to experience their own subsymbolic self-model as

a model .

Extending the work of cognition theorist Thomas Metzinger and digital poetics scholarBrian Kim Stefans, I will investigate how a 'transparent phenomenal self-model' (thatbeing, the aforementioned integrated, internal representation of the organic entity as awhole) complements/complicates Digital Poetics and other computer-generated textualmethodologies as literary praxes—and how each of these cant a phenomenological axisinto the domain of neurobiological computation.

Following this, I will also engage Max Weber's concept of Innerlichkeit ("a preoccupationwith the mind as both object and subject of experience") [1] and its implications forWhole Brain Emulation (WBE), or, the hypothetical "uploading" of humanconsciousness to computational devices: as “schizophrenic” machines—which literallyand figuratively embody the act of transmitting the thoughts of an Other —have alreadybeen willfully designed [2], how might human artifacts of language, culture, andexperience be embedded into a bio-computational self-model? Moreover, how mightthese machines navigate this inscribed 'neural' topology and evolve an internalrepresentation?

1. The Conceptual Self in Context. Ulric Neisser, ed.2. at the University of Texas in 2011



I n Media Res[istance]: Performing Augmented Reali ty

For this symposium, my collaborator Julia Litman-Cleper and I wish to recognize the inherent difficulty

in parsing visuals which “actively” construct a new, more politically-progressive reality, from those all-

pervasive sign systems which assist the repressive themes of the current capitalistic order. Even nascent

visual tropes in technologically-based art have been co-opted and recuperated, invoked by corporations to

assert their brand‟s credibility within „net art‟ subcultures. Even this symposium‟s call for “Visual

Activism” implies an image-oriented process, through which institutions and corporations seek to

construct their public identity. We were provoked to try to find „de-visible‟ means of activism: resistance

though non-visualization. With regard to the Internet — the de-centralized pinnacle of image trade —

radical visions become collapsed within a fixed system and are neutralized by their proximity to banal

and/or commercial images. As Paul Virilio writes in his essay “Eye Lust,” “[m]achines […] by

mediatizing ordinary everyday representations end up destroying their credibility.”

This limitation of imagery‟s political capacity has deleterious implications for globalized consciousness

and political action. Rather than recognize the value of site-specificity or meaning as a product of

localized knowledge, media-imagery now paradoxically colonizes as it de-territorializes and dislocates.

This precipitated the general thesis of our project: how can activists alter or augment a spatial reality of

his/her own design, while still taking into account the inescapable ocularcentrism of our times? Can we

create new spaces that combine real space + image-making, in order to both empower local interactions,

as well as remove the prescribed authority of city wide sign-systems?

Currently, the urban city-scape standardizes our collective vision. While its dominant mode, historically,



alluded to abstract activities outside itself, today it functions within a closed, entropic system of

conspicuous consumption. Representations of the consumer-impulse (“visual passivity”) have become

embedded within social media — while the dissemination of visuals may be intrinsically-motivated, the

visuals themselves are still a product of hegemonic forces and distributed within a massive, unintelligible

semiocracy. We turn to using spatial visualizations — in an attempt to incorporate collectivization and a

sense of situated locality into the image-making process — thusly emphasizing individual engagement.

We propose an alternative zone of augmented-reality (specifically, projections of a theoretical urban plan

using 3D modelling and a combination of different software) to empower the individual with the types of

visuals that s/he chooses to see: removing advertisement images and including the viewer in the process

of image augmentation. Through the creation of an installed space and the implementation of an ocular,

wearable device that effectively deletes unwanted or unnecessary visuals from the wearer‟s f ield-of-

vision, we endeavor to increase the user‟s visual-autonomy and ability to reclaim extant, industrialized

landscapes.



(above images by Julia Litman-Cleper)





TRANSDUCE/MUTATE: THE BUILT EPHEMERAL

Museums and galleries are hierarchical institutions, in service only to projects which advance

and protect capital. In response to this idea, I have conceived of a quasi-biomorphic exhibition

space without curators or organizational praxis; the contents therein are completely randomized,

ephemeral, viewer (user)-generated, and in-flux.

Through the projection of live footage of the patrons through Club Rothko Builder — their

likenesses a medium; WebGL a canvas — unique digital sculptures may be created, by distorting

a 3D base mesh and adjusting the given parameters. Any Twitter hash-tags generated by

users/viewers about the space can be processed and using TwitIE (an open-source information

extraction pipeline for “microblog” text, which uses Named Entity Recognition algorithms), and

could then be recombined the textual data with the aforementioned visuals in experimental,

unexpected ways. Audio is likewise generated by the voices therein, and played back usingvector-based amplitude panning for 3D sound spatialization.

The politics embedded in the space itself (problematic issues of labor which surround both the

physical environment and the technology within) unfortunately undermine the authenticity of a

truly trans-material and decentralized artistic environment. However, the recursive and

ephemeral qualities of the “exhibitions” would ideally remain resistant to the formalizing logic

of art establishments, while simultaneously engaging themes of sur/sousveillance; Socially

Distributed Cognition; the transparency and capture of telecommunications; and how bodies are

(literally, symbolically) represented within architectural confines.









My work is inspired by authors, film-makers, and theorists who encourage experimentalism as anembodied praxis of everyday life, and has been directly informed by theoretical architecture and thecultural trope of "city as text." I am interested in creating conceptual blueprints for future landscapes, toemphasize human agency in physical space as our interactions become more condensed within invisible,ephemeral zones.

The project I am proposing for this residency would surpass —in both technicity and scope—any of myprevious aesthetic undertakings. However, it would extend the aforementioned philosophy at the core ofmy art-practice, and would hopefully contribute to ongoing discourses around urban surveillance.

Using an intuitive, perambulatory method, I would record approximately seven hours of audio (one hourper day), from each of the five "circular zones" of Paris's public transportation system. I would thentranslate and compress the raw data visualizations into a single "sonic identity" for each zone.Subsequently, using the appropriate software, I would translate these wave-forms from their two-dimensional state and prepare them to be printed as 3D objects.

The process by which these pieces would be created—the computation of the images' properties—woulditself mirror that auditory grouping process carried out by the brain when it experiences sound. Theresultant abstract knowledge structures produced by the brain as this process occurs would, as such, berepresented as aestheticized, abstract data.

Through the physicalization of data, the individual is paradoxically represented and displaced. Thesesculptures would embody the schematic spatial relationship between the city's transients and their auralenvironments. To this end, I would like to reintroduce the sculptures back to their source: ideally, havingthem temporarily displayed in the zones where the corresponding sounds were acquired.

Additionally, this project would be a demonstration of how current data models often obscure, rather thanilluminate, meaning within our external world. The density of these wave-forms would symbolize a

reticular web of a thousand consciousnesses—the localized, 3D objects would collapse the distancebetween ambient sound; the white noise of industry; phatic and didactic speech. To quote Michel deCerteau in "Walking in the City": "the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint andnothing more," to be "a totalizing eye."I intend to exploit this tension between information (what is recorded and processed) and knowledge (theinformation's symbolic content), and how technology delimits each. Ideally, this series would transmutethe banality of the everyday—encoded in our linguistic and commercial systems—and render it as a new,abstract, and visually-compelling form of urban poetics.

Thank you very much for your consideration and time.

Documents

NEIN: 9 rejected submissions/proposals