Intentions > Transfer and Disappearance II, or Who Owns Our Emotions , 2020
Participatory performance, Face recognition software, Max MS custom patch, projections, webcam, text, performers
Photo by ©Andrew Demirjian, Performer Marissa Delano
“Designers of technology love to propagate the myth of a just world, in which people always get what they deserve. In erasing the messier and unsolvable elements of social experience that shape subjecthood, technology attempts to frame us as clean and uncomplicated. We become reducible, mapped by a programmable sets of traits with defined, singular meanings. Our digital choices and consumption patterns give a portrait of who we are. We are easily represented by our avatars.” — Nora Khan
Video by EdgeCut at NEW INC, poster photo by Andrew Demirjian . Performer Marissa Delano , 2020. Participatory performance, Face recognition software, Max MS custom patch, projections, webcam, text, performers
We are enraptured, extracted, excluded or erased. Our bodies and actions are transferred and subsequently disappeared, not by some evil AI, but by the fabric itself of our public space and the political structures that put above everything shareholders’ profit, (and do so using the public resources,) to extract ever-growing power. What is helping immensely to this transfer and disappearance is the “outstanding” work of simulation, and averaging of human emotions.
Intentions > Transfer and Disappearance II addresses the hijacking of our emotions, and the potentials of glitch and failure to subvert the underlying purposes of an “emotional” technology. It explores the failure in identity representation as possible means of protest, and the profoundly false public-ness of public space. Neither “cold” nor “objective”, data becomes Public Space in a way of vertical penetration, where our mental spaces are seized, exploited, enraptured, or excluded.
Who Owns Our Emotions is a participatory performance based on the interactive installation Intentions > Transfer and Disappearance II. It was presented by EdgeCut at NEW INC in January 2020