stream of consciousness

Ah articulates a simple paradox of reading animated digital literature, which is that the eye, and by extension the mind, often has no sense of the future of a sentence or line of text and, more importantly, is not given the chance to retread an already witnessed word or phrase. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industry's Dakota is a perfect illustration of this principle. In Ah, the central object of rumination is Einstein, but just as the physicist pondered the numberless variations between the presence of a "1" and "0," this Flash animation brings us back and forth between clever articulations and the ambiguous expressivity of single letters and syllables.

Streamfishing is an installation in an open public space, where people will pass through. It is presented on a large billboard. The billboard shows a live-stream of what is going on in the world. The stream of ideas will alter the stream of people.

Streamfishing depicts a real-life pattern by pulling together individual fragments of reality into a virtual image. The fragments of reality are thoughts merged into a constant stream of thoughts where they are enabled to interact. This way the virtual image or world is revealed as an interactive reality of human beings and machine and can be used for further communication and exchange of ideas.

Streamfishing is an installation in an open public space, where people will pass through. It is presented on a large billboard. The billboard shows a live-stream of what is going on in the world. The stream of ideas will alter the stream of people.

Streamfishing depicts a real-life pattern by pulling together individual fragments of reality into a virtual image. The fragments of reality are thoughts merged into a constant stream of thoughts where they are enabled to interact. This way the virtual image or world is revealed as an interactive reality of human beings and machine and can be used for further communication and exchange of ideas.

For the user

You are fishing in a constant stream of thoughts. Catch someone else's thought and put it in your bucket or throw your own idea into the stream and see what happens. The constant stream is supplied by means of a search-engine. Any input in this particular search-engine will show up in the stream. Try to communicate via search-engine.

The installation

Streamfishing is presented on a large billboard in an open public space where lots of people pass by. The billboard shows a live-stream of what is going on in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. From two or three computers on pedestals visitors are able to fish for their preferred queries and thoughts. And they are able to contribute to the constant stream of ideas.

(Source: http://archive.aec.at/prix/#7728)

Ah articulates a simple paradox of reading animated digital literature, which is that the eye, and by extension the mind, often has no sense of the future of a sentence or line of text and, more importantly, is not given the chance to retread an already witnessed word or phrase. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industry's Dakota is a perfect illustration of this principle. In Ah, the central object of rumination is Einstein, but just as the physicist pondered the numberless variations between the presence of a "1" and "0," this Flash animation brings us back and forth between clever articulations and the ambiguous expressivity of single letters and syllables.

“The Office Diva” is an audio-visual installation; a large scale projection of a computer-controlled character living in a claustrophobic virtual space and compulsively talking. Conceptually, the project is a reproduction and examination of a consciousness ruled by manic-depression. But she is also a machine, and the work plays with the ways in which mad and machinic behavior can manifest in similar ways. Phoebe Sengers argues that the modular design of some intelligent agents makes them hard to understand, they appear to be a schizoid assemblage of random, unmotivated behaviors. Contariwise the computational limitations of other agents have been masked by their insane personalities. Repetitions, lack of affect, inappropriate responses, and non-sequiturs are signs of disturbed people as well as machines. In this project, we deliberately chose a bland machine voice, that speaks the stream-of-consciousness text which is generated, re-ordered and reassembled by a machinic algorithm. But, just as deliberately, we massage the relationship between text and code so that our ”mad” consciousness is not so badly fragmented and fractured as to be indecipherable to a human audience. Over time the bland voice reveals a mad, sad story: a pedestrian story of a receptionist; a perfectionist who works too hard in her small therapy center; a critical observer who sees too much going wrong and strives to fix it; an office Don Quixote tilting at the windmalls of petty inefficiency and corruption; a woman slowing exploding. The voice comes from the psychic emanation of the Office Diva: a larger than life projection of her ego. The graphics represent another synthesis between machine and human; procedural animation creates the flaming or dripping archetype that forms into a dimly human form, that is then reanimated with motion capture. The Diva’s anima swirls chaotically in response to the internal narratives she retells so intently. She drifts in the dimly seen and utterly mundane office environment that has taken on so much overdetermined significance.

(The ELO 2102 Media Art Show.)