What do I want people to walk away with?
- I want people who experience my exhibit to acknowledge the state of data that we're in.
- I want people to re-consider their relationship with their own data and push people to think about the qualitative and quantitive evaluations of personal data and representative data like social media profiles, game avatars etc.
What are my thoughts on the existing data infrastructures?
- I think it's pretty fucked at the moment, our reliance on data/ability to create data/digital remnants grown rapidly surpassing the amount of discourse we've had about it / create legislation about. That being said I don't think going backwards is an answer, moving forward as we leave more and more data behind I think we'll have to do more to think about how we go about doing that and regulating that.
General Thoughts:
The ideation behind this project began with my friend Matthew who tragically passed away in a biking accident a few years ago. We belonged to a few group chats on facebook of close college friends. When he passed away one thing that struck me was how eerie the group chat felt, none of us wanted to msg in the chat. The remaining members of our group chat all talked to each other in private messages and mourned together to some degree yet none of us wanted to say anything in the chat. I never asked them about it but at least for me, I distinctly remember feeling uncomfortable that if I sent a message in the chat maybe Matthew's phone or computer, pieces of technology that don't know that their owner is dead might ping and receive a notification. That if we continued using the chat every single thing we said would be sent to a deceased person as well. Even opening the group chat and seeing Matthew's profile picture in there made me feel uncomfortable, couldn't quite verbalize it but it just didn't feel right.
I came to realize that what I was experiencing was Matthew's aura, I'm not referring to this from a spiritual perspective but from a quantifiable sociological perspective. Psychologist Bruce Hood attributes auras to human 'Supersense', the ability for people's intuition to conflict with reasoning and rationale. Bruce used an example of from when he used to teach and lecture and would bring a cardigan around and ask people if they'd wear it. Students generally were open to the idea until he mentions that it belonged to serial killer Fred West. Suddenly no one was willing to wear it, the cardigan didn't change and objectively had nothing to do with the actual crimes, the ownership by Fred West was enough to make people uncomfortable. Hood contributes this behavior to the speed at which our intuition reacts, our gut reaction and ability to pattern recognize etc. I would take this a step farther, and push this towards more a sociological thing rather than a purely psychological phenomena. I believe that our intuition has been trained see the world from an inter-relational point of view. Our relationship with an object can imbue it with our 'auras', or rather, mental emotional connections can be drawn between items that we often use or correlate with in the eyes of observers. In the twenty-first century this goes beyond just physical objects but metaversal ones as well. This isn't all that new, many of us could name a song that reminds us of an ex, of course then a person's social media profile can remind of said person. These social media profiles and avatars traverse through the web on our behest, touching things, interacting with things, taking up space in the metaverse all while leaving traces of us behind. Traces that become ever more important when our physical beings no longer exist.
to be finished...
