‘Reading week’ came at a good time, and whilst I’m not 100% confident that I’ve got everything I need for Monday’s crit/review, I’m planning on doing a lot of scribbling over the next couple of days to hopefully flesh things out. The biggest weaknesses I feel that I have here are two-fold: my mapping is rather anemic at the moment, especially with respect to justifying the particular direction of the project, and I feel like the project lacks a solid premise or premises (socio-technologically) and so the argument is weak. Below are the completed slides for Monday’s presentation.
Where do I see this going right now? I think the project has evolved partly from my obsession with Cyberpunk & TRON; along with my (currently dormant) political activist streak. What does that particular mix seek to achieve? Formation of a type of safe haven; am I at one level creating a hacktavist collective? I don’t believe so, as it currently is far too formal. It is about hunkering down, laying groundwork and evolving stratagems in a view to then alter the landscape via deployment of said stratagems, inevitably through an asymmetric approach. The architecture that I seek to achieve is itself a stratagem. Then there are the backers, or instigators of this clandestine (or is it clandestine? They are in plain view after all, their work and approach able to be monitored in real-time) operation. What happens if you hold a mirror up to society? Does it become incessantly narcissistic, or revolted by it’s own reflection? Or does it make light of the entire situation and turn even more vile and virulent? I do not wish to create the spectacle that was ‘Big Brother’, nor do wish to continue the fiction that the other began as either… do I? What does this simultaneously virtual/actual inhabitation with corresponding action truly accomplish? Where did this all begin?
Evolution and creation of a seed, an idea, a series of stratagems, leveraging the virtual not just for telepresence but to allow for hiding in plain sight, active camoflague if you will; and storing of vast amounts of data for analysis and leveraging; along with the allowing of formulation of tests, or the testing of systems prior to application. A virtual/physical laboratory.
The single, largest problem to all of this? The problem is Binary - Humans are not logical, the Virtual is.