I am studying interactive art and emerging media at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. I aim to create art that engages with the phenomenological and social experience of living in today’s hyper-connected, hyper-digitized, and increasingly unsustainable and unstable reality. I am conceptually inspired by Timothy Morton’s notion of the hyperobject, as well as the broader theory of object-oriented ontology; by metamodernism; and by the Situationist theory of the Spectacle.
I wish to engage with questions like…
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How do we grapple with planet-scale systems (climate change, the Internet, global capitalism) so staggeringly complex and massive that they do not simply dwarf us individually, but undermine the neat and tidy processes of scientific rationalism that brought us modernity in the first place? How, as individuals or societies, ought we to engage with them? What does it mean to live our lives already inexorably trapped within them?
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Emerging artistic media - for instance, digital installation, computational art, or virtual reality - by their nature often require a great deal of engineering, which begets a top-down, linear work process. To what extent can the element of spontaneity and flow present in more traditional artistic processes be brought into these new forms? How can the opposing aspects of the artificial/mechanical/engineered and the human/organic be placed in constructive tension, rather than set in conflict?
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Where do the binaries of artificial-natural, machine-human, mechanical-organic, etc. break down? In a world where the former seems to threaten the latter, where our lives and even our attention are transformed into automated input to Capital, how can we gain from deconstructing these binaries?