Data Holds Your Truths. The Avatar Complex: I trust your gargoyle id more than I trust you.
(2024)
author(s): Megan Annette Irusta Cornet
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
BA Photography
Within this piece of writing, different styles of writing have been approached as a performance strategy, a guise we humans willingly and unwillingly commit to every day, online and offline. The overarching themes this text seeks to tackle are alienation and escapism; what I think are the prominent can of worms which ooze from the Internet. Double-edged swords; beautiful and horrifyingly ugly. Alienation to oneself as well as alienating others through the digital sphere. With serious regard to the importance of avatar customisation as a form of expression, yet also acknowledging the destruction within it, it is also the very thing which is actively dislocating us from the IRL (in-real-life). The core to understanding who you are online, how you present yourself online, compared to who you are behind the screen. The text’s leading objective is to hypothesise a world where humans are given the option (highly recommended) to extract our online data to make more of a truthful analysis of who we really are. The prevalence of how capitalistic structures only feed alienation more. If the future consists of post-human and/or transhuman existence, by transmitting our data to gargoyle avatars, creatures which will take the form of one’s avatar, gargoyles are said to protect what they serve. A new gargoyle is designed by your data alone. Data anthropomorphism, the Avatar Complex.
Embodied Bits
(2023)
author(s): Pedro Latas
published in: KC Research Portal
The Master research “Embodied Bits” concerns how trans-human, post-digital and post-internet ideas relate to my Queer experience. It is, in a nutshell, an ongoing research on how the technological world has spilled over into the biological world and how Queer folks are front and centre when it comes to taking advantage of technological developments in order to realise their identities.
The research question is “How do we perform ourselves in the digital realm?”. Though it started as a research on the practicalities and aesthetics of internet/networked-based performances it quickly opened a Pandora’s Box of social inquiry and analysis. Performing ourselves means performing ethnicity, gender, sexuality, cultural identity... There is an inevitability in drawing a direct connection between these topics and how do we, as singular and, paradoxically, plural human beings within ourselves engage with modern day technology. Through technology we are able to build ourselves, to draft new identities, to build again if they no longer suit our needs.
As an artistic research, “Embodied Bits” looks into how digital media has influenced human experience and focuses on the experiences of non-normative bodies and identities, in which I include my own. These topics are interlaced with my own compositional and performative work, always informed and inspired by the previously mentioned ideas and historical context.
,__ ^_. ||:_DOWN_DEEPCUTS_'LOCK[ANIMÉ.INVENTION] :||,•__\-‘ - - ÉTUDES FOR THE BEGINNING OF AN ONLINE PRACTICE
(2021)
author(s): Josh Spear
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The Covid-19 pandemic of early 2020 has had a huge and wide-reaching effect. My group made up of four composer-performers called Bastard Assignments was not exempt. We were pulled to continue to make work, the difference now is that we are online at our individual homes and meeting each other on Zoom. Zoom is a company that has been around since 2011 and a lot of us have recently become familiar with it to celebrate birthdays at a distance, catch up with friends, or conduct our business. It was set up by a Chinese computer scientist who only after the ninth attempt at the application secured his visa to live in the USA. Since the beginning of 2020, the worldwide usage of Zoom has risen 67%, its use diversifying from corporate communications to domestic and arts activities. My compositional and performance work with Bastard Assignments is rooted in collaboration, devising, and group creation. It favours memorisation over the use of musical scores, emotional presence over reproducibility. As we take our work together into a purely online workspace, important questions arise. Through a new way of working online, does our adaptability bring about a new form? How will we understand this online work when and if normalcy returns? Skills that we learn as composer-performers are dropped, remade, and tested during this period, how will our practice have changed?
Playing against the camera
(2020)
author(s): Erik Friis Reitan
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In this essay I describe two projects within the field of visual art. Both works are examples of how the workflow techniques of digital photography can be modified in order to produce artworks that take on a distinct physicality and objecthood, and, as such, may form a spatial and/or haptic relation with the viewer. I discuss how such an approach relates to the ability of photography to point beyond the physical situation of viewing due to the particular virtuality of the photograph. By relating my work to the ideas of Vilém Flusser and Roland Barthes, recent theory on photography and photographic indexicality, as well as contemporary artistic work, I speculate here on how my own work illuminates perceptions of the photograph and understandings of the role of photography in today’s media culture and economy.
Transmedia Performance on Media Bias
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Tomy Herseta
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
An on-going artistic research of my study in Master Scenography program at HKU Utrecht.
This research is trying to investigate the bias behaviour in media, particularly in social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram then translating it into a transmedia storytelling through multi-cross platform.
The objectives of the research are to engage the audience and raise their awareness as well as providing a space for their reflections in how to deal with all of the overflowing information in this internet era.
In this essay I describe two projects within the field of visual art. Both works are examples of how the workflow techniques of digital photography can be modified in order to produce artworks that take on a distinct physicality and objecthood, and, as such, may form a spatial and/or haptic relation with the viewer. I discuss how such an approach relates to the ability of photography to point beyond the physical situation of viewing due to the particular virtuality of the photograph. By relating my work to the ideas of Vilém Flusser and Roland Barthes, recent theory on photography and photographic indexicality, as well as contemporary artistic work, I speculate here on how my own work illuminates perceptions of the photograph and understandings of the role of photography in today’s media culture and economy.open exposition comments (0)
An on-going artistic research of my study in Master Scenography program at HKU Utrecht. This research is trying to investigate the bias behaviour in media, particularly in social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram then translating it into a transmedia storytelling through multi-cross platform. The objectives of the research are to engage the audience and raise their awareness as well as providing a space for their reflections in how to deal with all of the overflowing information in this internet era.open exposition comments (0)