Exposition

Setting up in the yard. Test Space / Duncan Cameron

‘The two of us wrote this article together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. We have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have been aided, inspired multiplied.’ (Berry and Pawlik, 2005)

We assume that distributing, and gathering, knowledge provides a potential route to better understanding the world we live in. Social platforms such as Twitter or Facebook provide a space to share information, yet they are capable of exposing a sense of over information and over communication (Berry). Does this abundance of information lead to unknowing, rather than knowing? Can error act as a tool to resist knowing and digital logic? Can a cynicism towards ‘the notion of the computer as the universal machine’ (Cramer, 2013) be challenged through an entangling of analogue and digital? Can we confront apprehensions about technology through debates on errant use of social media, privacy, reliance, or disbelief and fake news?

During the symposium, I will test a project that lends materiality to the immateriality of virtual media, reflecting on the dehumanisation of the digital age. With this in mind, I will create a dialogue that interrogates materialist thoughts about physical forces and matter (Barad, Bennett, Hayles). In accordance with the condition of the post-digital (Cascone), the project will challenge our relationship with the digital world, and raise questions about our interconnection with technology– and how agency is distributed between humans, things and objects. I suggest that human and nonhuman matter, such as misadventurous thoughts (Deleuze) or misbehaving technologies (Cramer) possess vitality. Borrowing from theorist Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), things or in the case of this research errors have the ability to exhibit ‘lively powers of material information’ and the ability to act as mediators with their own paths and tendencies. The (mis)Feed experiment will set up different orientations, though a dialogue amongst multiple voices, human-nonhuman, nonhuman-human, to explore and blur the boundary between knowing-unknowing, and where error acts as a tool to resist digital logic and rationality.

Testing our adherence to anachronistic modes of archiving and display in relation to the experiential nature of the recorded moment and the making of memory in a digitally enhanced environment.

We persist with anachronistic models of collection, mark-making and the archiving of personal and societal materials as we record experiences of time and place. What is it that the physical and sensory interaction with the ordering of materials gives us that digital alternatives are yet unable to provide? Digital tools are reaching to bridge this experiential gap and I am interested in how this faltering interface has yet to provide us with effective contemporary models for digital archiving and the capturing of embodied experience. Drawing, organisational pattern-making, the collection of physical things, journaling and listing retain an experiential quality that digital alternatives fail to deliver as we engage with history and memory. (Bergson). Our extant archives of historical artefacts and specimens are progressively perceived as out of kilter with digital potentialities yet although anachronistic these modes of display persist and provide many familiar structures employed in an artistic research landscape exploiting these methodologies (Dion et al).

Evidence collection more broadly, as applied in disciplines from the forensic and biological sciences to archaeology, (Weinburger), underscore a requirement for material proof of experience past and current. In my artistic research practice I am working to uncover what it is that this says about our need for mnemonic objects, the experience of recording marks and materials and the value of order and arrangement in our securing of thinking and memory.