Week 68_Clusterduck
THE POLITICS OF VISION
- Lo màs oscuro de la noche es antes el amanecer -
by Arianna Magrini
Last night, time-traveling, I ended up for error right at the end of Piacenzian (1)(1.1).
I was welcomed by a warm breeze and the smell of passionflower (2), which made for a quite pleasant arrival, but confirmed my doubts about the accuracy of the algorithm that brought me there.
I quickly checked my info-sphere watch, trying to point it to the ground of what was looking like a very dry savannah, trying not to enlighten the acacias that stood right at my back, as well as trying not get too close to the ground while looking at it and avoiding any possible contact with the insects and other species that I knew where quite common before the Exodus from Time.
It confirmed that my portal would show up in two hours, in the exact position where I was left, where I stood now. I cussed, and quickly decided to wait in the darkness.
I switched off all of my devices except the old mechanic watch I always carry with mesince my grandpa showed me its tiny hands turned backwards during our first time travel, and of course my portal-checker in standby mode. Only then, I noticed the complete darkness I was surrounded by. My first reaction was to switch on the invisible mode on all my cyborg parts.
With my arms and my head turned to a filigree of ultra-red rays holding an invisibility cloak (3) that made their internal part completely obscure, my eyes covered with infrared glasses integrated with a movement sensor, my torso completely wrapped in terahertz waves fabric (4) that made it transparent, and my legs replaced by wheels in order to travel smaller and faster, I must have been a curious vision to see, if I was visible (5) .
Unable to censor my curiosity, I began a molecular scan of the quantum interaction of the ground surrounding me, trying to assume, by inserting those data into my geological analysis software, in which geological era I was. The result was, as it always is, astoundingly beautiful (6). I got captured by and spent one of the two hours I had left, by being completely absorbed by the vivacity and prosperity of interaction because it reminded me of a one-month time-travel training I had many years ago during the age of Anthropocene (7).
It was really intense for me to living in that period without making detectable changes on the Flux, just playing the part that the Algorithm designed for me, in order not not produce any life losses in the possible futures and not altering anything in the timeline. Every night, I came back home overwhelmed by the fatigue that it involved. The level of dependency to social mechanisms was absolute, and diffused in proportional relation to the wealth all over the world, producing a wide-scale constant interaction. The detection I made, through my software of face tracking and analysis (8), of the human’s emotions, feedbacked me with a panorama of deep solitude, interconnected only to the very superficial facade of social networking platforms (9), giving me a resemblance to a morphogenetic image I once saw exposed at Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts (10).
Although I was basically only watching stuff happening, interacting as little as possible with the local humanity, the info-scraper chip I had in my brain was making a strange interaction with the electric waves of my brain producing weird epileptic crises (11) that have never been produced neither before or after that time. One of those crises took place during one of my most loved Glitch Art shows (12), giving me a vision of the future, feeling at home, a thing that made me think about how much the vision itself was an essential key to understanding the parameters under which we acknowledge ourselves (13).
Going to shows and exhibitions, that presumed silence and few interaction but involved large audiences, was indeed one of the main activities that the algorithm prepared for me.
I remember one of those exhibition (14), held at the at NOME gallery in Berlin, messed up my chips, by representing faces I was urged to signal back to the Central Server as members of the first experiments of mass control during that time, all wrapped up in one single exhibition. While I was streaming through this memories, a strange thing occurred: my glasses glitched, and a shiny, candy-coloured, flickering vortex appeared at the centre of my vision (15).
I heard an alarm, as glitching images of subversive art of the early Anthropocene alternated on my visor. I shook up from these thoughts, suddenly realising, thanks to my portal-checker’s alarm, that the time to leave was near. I felt my heart cease it’s regulated, assisted beating, as I figured out that a three-headed creature was just in front of me (17), blended in the prehistoric darkness just like me. It was possible for me to be see thanks to the glasses I was wearing, I gulped as I gained 5 meters from her by wheeling down the small dusty hill we were on. She was speaking to me through a network my sensor couldn’t detect, telling me to calm down with an human, warm and feminine voice that could only be heard in that prehistoric savannah caressed by ancient winds. As I asked for her network’s ID. in order to communicate it to the Central Server, her voice raised and became a mechanical roar of furious engines.
“How do you dare?” she asked “Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch”(15) she continued, switching to several languages, and quoting different authors that, even with my super-fast search engine implant, I was unable to understand due to the speed with which she talked. I jumped, and I was blinded for a few seconds as she ripped off the visor from my face. Then, slowly fading in, I saw something that was quite recurrent during my epileptic crises: reality as a far away nucleus of pure vision, wrapped on on a spherical, pulsating surface (16). There were various co-existing balls all around me (17), and I could see myself in front of the three-headed woman inside one of them. As I closed up into it, to snatch the conversation, I could recognize my body deprived of its invisible bends, shiny as the mercury it was covered with (18).
Only at that point, noticing the beauty of the lights reflected on my body’s surface, I turned my vision on the breaking sunrise (19) as the portal was opening, revealing a whole new bunch of realities colliding.
About Aria.
I was born in Europe in 1987, the year of Chernobyl.
I studied and graduated at Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera and Scuole Civiche di Cinema L.Visconti, in Milan, where I was taught by Antonio Caronia, Franco Berardi “Bifo”, Paolo Rosa, Pier Luigi Capucci and Giuseppe Baresi, among many others.
I’ve been involved in social struggles, political activism and online/offline cooperation since the early
2000’s.
1) The PRISM4 (mid-Piacenzian) paleoenvironmental reconstruction - http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/101344/
1.1) Donna Haraway - Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene - Eflux -
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/
2) Arts: Botanical Drawings for the Digital Age - Wired - https://www.wired.com/2010/02/pl_arts_flowers/
3) Scientists interpret physics behind invisibility cloaks - Physics -
https://phys.org/news/2007-08-scientists-physics-invisibility-cloaks.html
4) Researchers design material that more effectively slows light - Physics -
https://phys.org/news/2015-10-material-effectively.html
5) Aitana Basquiat, une esthétique aussi légère que puissante - The Chemistry Magazine -
http://the-chemistry.net/aitana-basquiat-une-esthetique-aussi-legere-que-puissante/
6) You Don’t Need to Be a Rocket Scientist: Artistic Impressions Of Science - Arts Electronic -
https://artselectronic.wordpress.com/2017/03/22/you-dont-need-to-be-a-rocket-scientist/
7)Embracing the Horror of the Anthropocene - Daniel Rourke -
http://www.machinemachine.net/portfolio/embracing-the-horror-of-the-anthropocene/
8) The Emotional Face of Machine Learning - MIT Initiative for Digital Economy -
http://ide.mit.edu/news-blog/blog/emotional-face-machine-learning
9) Meet Sheidlina, the Russian Instagrammer Whose Art is Challenging Society’s Stereotypes - The Outsiders -
http://www.theoutsiderz.com/meet-sheidlina-russian-instagrammer-whose-art-challenging-societys-stereotypes/
10) Andy Lomas Lets Digital Systems Bloom In "Morphogenetic Creations" Exhibit - Vice -
https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/andy-lomas-lets-digital-systems-bloom-in-morphogenetic-creations-exhi
bit
11) La Cura - Salvatore Iaconesi e Oriana Persico - http://la-cura.it/BodyQuake/
12) Having Cryptic Conversations About Encrypted Graphics at Rosa Menkman’s New Show - Vice -
https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/cryptic-conversations-about-encrypted-graphics-at-rosa-menkmans-newshow
13) Barricades - Il linguaggio audiovisuale e la sua importanza nei processi cognitivi -
https://traumadotorg.wordpress.com/
14) Critical text for Overexposed series - Bruce Sterling -
https://paolocirio.net/press/texts/text_overexposed-sterling.php
15) Friedrich Hölderlin - Patmos, Dem Landgrafen von Homburg -
http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/friedrich-h-262/132
16) Graphica http://www.graphica.com/defined/
17) Strange behavior of quantum particles may indicate the existence of other parallel universes - Physics
https://phys.org/news/2015-06-strange-behavior-quantum-particles-parallel.html
18)
19) Post-Human Particles Explode from a Data Glitch Matrix -
https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/the-dataists-new-video
