ON SOUND/IN SOUND
2-20/08/2023.
Video animation.
loop, 1920x1080, stereo.
6-9/07/2023: Video Art Miden festival, Kalamata, Greece (reference at p.4)
2-20/08/2023: International Exhibition Circle 2023 (reference at p.2) at Cong Institute of Contemporary Art (CICA Museum), Seoul, South Korea.
10-24/07/2024: Fonland Festival Coibra, Portugal.
In this brief 3D animation video, the central theme is the formation of new subjectivities in industry 4.0. The use of automata generates machine approximation to human life through non-human resemblance technologies, following the materialisation of a technological territory that simulates human lived time, simulacra.
The video’s opening takes us on a wander through this technological territory, the microchip world. As it zooms out, we encounter multiple microchip worlds that spread across each side of seemingly identical cubes. Signs and their references to the real world break down through an alienating process that breeds a chaotic sign exchange in a network that cannot be represented further. Still, it is a system of continuous simulation. The intention is to interpret this simulation system by creating an environment that reflects this visceral computational reality.
The towering trunk, which appears halfway through the piece, is the only element that resembles organic life. It has flesh that seems to absorb the microchip worlds, which are spread on the cubes. The organic body of the trunk becomes a multi-projected and omnipresent organism; the body-flesh resembles a fold that can transcend its own presence; there is the possibility of existing in the absence of the original being and the presence of an avatar.
The era of transhumanism offers the technological and reflective tools to consider the extension, dissolution, and unfolding of the body-flesh within the body-I. The cubes, which are gradually absorbed through the trunk’s foundations and onto its body, signify the spread of technologies that disappear into our everyday operations to the point of becoming universal, casual, as well as unseen. As the lens zooms out giving us the full perspective of this assimilating process, a cube appears in close distance directing us into its microchip world, implying another wander in an identical territory which was just experienced.
This pattern might bring to mind an Escher painting, a paradox of infinite production and reproduction. It could be argued that in this sterile environment, the cubes that breed other cubes, hence Hypercube, symbolize networks that form an ever-growing perception that is raised in tandem with everyday life, a symbiotic condition. In other words, Hypercube functions as a metaphor, revealing a system that suggests the transitory process from human to transhuman and from real to hyperreal.
3D & animation: Michalis Kotaidis & Lefteris Delimpasis
Initial concept and design: Manousos Manousakis
Sound: Dimitris Batsis
Sound design and production for audio visual installation with BKDM (Michalis Kotaidis, Lefteris Delimpasis, Manousos Manousakis).