top of page

Updated: Nov 12, 2020


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.202017 | Issue 5 | October 2020

Dr. Richard A Carter (richard.carter@roehampton.ac.uk)

University of Roehampton

Abstract


The film Waveform is an output from a project of the same name that has been ongoing since 2017, and which centres on the use of drones as tools for generating poetry. Initially, a drone captures aerial images of incoming ocean waves. These images are then analysed by a machine vision system that traces the boundary between wave and shore. This boundary provides a stream of variables for another algorithm that generates short, poem-like texts, which meditate on questions of environmental sensing and sense-making.


Waveform is presented as a speculative apparatus—a fragment of a world in which sensory technologies are employed for creative, notional ends, rather than a source of purely specular representations. The project considers how these devices might be used to re-articulate the world not as a static formation, with an embedded array of attributes awaiting detection and visualisation, but as one that is emerging and transforming continually—with sensory devices contributing also to this emergence. Here, quantitative outputs in the form of numerical graphs and charts give way to poetic texts that hint not only at the scene being imaged, but also convey aspects of the sociotechnical contexts in which these acts of sensing and interpretation occur, and which often go unacknowledged. The point of this gesture is consider how these contexts are both integral to the ways in which sensory acts are framed, and to consider how they might be reframed in-turn so as to enable new modalities of sensory unfolding and becoming. Such openness to alternative potentials for sensing and knowing will be critical in negotiating the forces of severe ecological disruption and degradation which characterise our present moment.


Research Statement


Waveform is a 10-minute film that was first shown in July 2019 at the Glucksman Gallery, Cork, as part of its ‘Peripheries’ exhibition (see Clarke and O’Sullivan 2019). It represents the latest creative output from a practice-led research project of the same name, and which has been ongoing in recent years (see Carter 2017). This project is premised on the use of airborne drones and machine vision algorithms as experimental tools for generating poetry—curating an unconventional matrix of technologies and scholarship in order to investigate the role of sensory systems in mapping and characterising the state of the wider environment at a time of profound ecological stress. All the creative work emerging from this project depicts the processes by which the aerial imagery is transformed into poetic outputs, offering catalysts for critical reflection on the steps involved.


At first, a camera drone is flown above a coastal shoreline, capturing top-down images of the incoming waves. These images are then analysed by a machine vision algorithm that traces a line demarcating the mutual boundary between surf and shoreline. The detection markers connecting this boundary then provide a stream of variables for the poetry algorithm itself. This employs the principle of a Markov-chain, in which a textual corpus is tabulated into a set of probabilities between its constituent words—that is, for every given word identifying those most likely to follow. Using this data, the marker values can be used to assemble a chain of word selections from the corpus, weighted sufficiently as to echo its grammatical and stylistic nuances, while still yielding intriguing juxtapositions (see Carter 2018 for a detailed technical account).


It is evident from the above description that this assemblage is enacting an elaborate form of cut-up poetry, and, from a purely technical standpoint, there is only a narrow connection between the source image and the outputted text. This connection is, however, enriched substantially by the subject locations of the drone footage itself and the corpus fed into the poetry algorithm. In the case of the Waveform film, this involves overhead shots of a remote Cornish beach known as ‘The Strangles’, and the use of text from R. M. Ballantyne The Ocean and Its Wonders (1874). While neither of these aspects are referenced expressly in the film, they are, nonetheless, a useful vector for considering its potential for meaning.

At the film’s beginning the viewer sees a fixed overhead shot of rolling waves, in high-contrast black and white (see Fig. 1), accompanied by an ambient coastal soundscape—mixed by the artist’s collaborator Dr Mariana López. After a few minutes, this soundscape gives way to the rush of cooling fans and humming electronics, while the image itself freezes and transitions into a heavily pixelated rendering of the same scene.


Fig. 1. The initial shot Fig. 2. The boundary line


This rendering then fades into another image depicting a bright line tracing the edges of the shoreline (see Fig. 2), before transitioning to reveal a short poem (see Fig. 3). After a few moments have passed, the poem fades, movement returns to the background scene, and the coastal soundscape prevails once again. This sequence is repeated several times throughout the 10-minute running time, all while maintaining the fixed overhead perspective on the beach scene—and so, effectively, breaking up an otherwise continuous fixed shot.

The final poetic output
Fig. 3. The final poetic output

Geographically, the narrow, rocky strip that constitutes ‘The Strangles’ is relatively typical of the Cornish coastline. Nonetheless, as a site located at the very periphery of the United Kingdom, facing into the ocean, it also resides near the terminus of major transatlantic submarine cables, which come ashore in the vicinity. These global infrastructures are the critical foundation of the internet, but are almost always hidden from view by the ocean itself and the shoreline sands—as well as shielded by the considerable secrecy around their precise location (see Starosielski 2015).


The Strangles is a complex site in the context of Waveform, and not simply because of the presence of these cables, but also because its relative isolation allows it preserve a record of its exposure to the impacts of contemporary environmental damage and disruption, which more developed coastal sites would seek to mitigate. The Strangles is marked therefore by growing cliffside erosion, large piles of shale gouged by violent storms, and an increasing burden of plastic waste and assorted detritus. The socio-economic patterns driving these effects are fully entangled with, and often enabled through, the online world, which generates its own specific impacts (see e.g. Belkhir, and Elmeligi 2018) while facilitating also the sensory infrastructures through which we have been able to measure and map a deteriorating global environment (see Gabrys 2016). In this context, the drone orbiting high above the beach scene below, and unseen in the film itself, evokes the remote sensing nodes that appear empirically far removed from that which they observe, but are nonetheless embedded within, and perpetuating of, the effects measured.


This juxtaposition between empirical distance and material embeddedness is further marked by how the Strangles remains unnamed in the film itself: an area with a rich local context becomes another grid location to be imaged, one that is demarcated not through its geology or sociocultural ties, but through the rectilinear aperture of the drone’s onboard camera, which reduces the scene to a computable surface of defined brightness values along an exacting grid. This is depicted within the film by arresting the intricate, ephemeral patterns of the rolling surf within the gaze of the machine, converting these into a pixelated rendering of fixed colour values before fading into a single dividing line—designating the signal being sought by the apparatus. This act of freezing and defining a boundary amidst a churning body of water encapsulates the digital ‘flattening’ of emergent worldly processes into discrete, atemporal states for the purposes of measurement and modelling. While functionally necessary and often analytically powerful, such operations invite reflection on what escapes these processes of digital sensing and sense-making—of the myriad phenomena and behaviours that fail to reach the spatial and temporal thresholds of a data-driven episteme (see Carter 2018 and Forthcoming for additional reflections on this point). Included in these hidden effects are the escalating affective impacts on thinking and being that such a rapidly changing world engenders, and how we might respond and adapt subsequently.


It is in this sense that the act of parsing visual data into poetry, using the archaic vocabulary of The Ocean and its Wonders, offers a deliberately unconventional response to such sensory aporia. Taken as a whole, Waveform is presented as a speculative apparatus—a fragment of a world in which sensory technologies are employed for creative, notional ends, rather than a source of specular representations that presume to account for the fullness of what they observe. Heavily remixed by the system, the source vocabulary manifests as a set of enigmatic statements concerning the maritime environment, ranging from the relatively prosaic to the outright fantastical (see Fig. 4 for examples).


At one level, we might read such odd, unsettling imagery as expressing the startling degradation of an imperilled ecology—of the otherwise surreal distortions generated by an extractive, exploitative politics and economics, which take little account of the more-than-human world beyond its potential resource value. Nevertheless, these strange outputs speak also to their novel origins, and we might therefore assess both the poems themselves, and the generative process as a whole, as enacting the potential for new modes of experimental practice, in sensing, writing, and computing, that will only grow in necessity as we seek to comprehend and adapt towards the hazards and disruptions ahead. This is a key point advocated by Gabrys (2018) in her own account of the possible futures of digital sensing, emphasising the value of the speculative as a way of perceiving and realising new potentialities of reading and acting within a damaged ecology. Waveform itself represents a conscious effort to bring this theoretical insight into the domain of concrete practice, to examine what might be learnt in the process, and so joins a number of other such experimental sensory endeavours in recent years (see Carter 2018).

Fig. 4. Some examples of the poetry seen throughout the film.

These efforts at realising new modes of perception are carried into the choice of source vocabulary behind the final poetic outputs of Waveform. Ballantyne’s The Ocean and its Wonders was published during a period when the distinction between literary and scientific endeavours was less recognised and reinforced than at present. Although it emerged at the dawn of contemporary investigations into the dynamics of ocean and climate, its free mixing of the lyrical and scientific also presages an approach seen in more contemporary modes of nature writing, as pioneered by authors such as Rachel Carson, which, in the words of Boscacci (2019: 193) are ‘an aesthetics of practice that composes and speculates with more than words, and across porous boundaries of knowledge from material art-making, science, and affect scholarship’—amplifying an older sense of aesthetics as ‘the discipline through which the organism becomes attuned to its environment’. It is in this sense that Waveform reimagines the potential of digital sensors for articulating the world not as a static, delimited formation—as a body of stable attributes, discoverable by fixed disciplines, awaiting utilisation—but as existing in a state of continuous emergence across a spectrum of multitudinous sensibilities. The fact the boundary lines and poetic texts generated by Waveform are marked by the spectre of incoherency does not, therefore, represent a technical limitation, but an expression instead of the uncertainties and potentials inherent in a world that is never fixed, final, or fully graspable, but is always unfolding in unexpected ways, and so necessitating inventive, imperfect modes of adaptation.


It is in this context that digital sensors can be shown not as standing apart from the world, or as having a uniquely insightful grasp on its overall state—artefacts of their global scale and technoscientific veneration—but as operating from within a wider ecology of world-making practices, of which art and literature represent partners of equal power, even if they may not be valued to the same extent, socially or politically. It is through examining the creative interfaces between these domains that an opportunity is created to give an account of phenomena whose qualities might otherwise exceed the encoded thresholds of detection within established sensory apparatus—which are often defined narrowly as standalone technical devices and systems, marginalising their entanglements with that which they observe, in terms of their concrete functioning, their upholding infrastructures, and the socioeconomic formations that sustain them. It is this which constitutes the principle critical and creative vector of Waveform, as an effort at reevaluating what it means to know and to act in the world from within the crucible of advanced digital technologies, environmental devastation, and an increasingly uncertain future.

References

  • Belkhir, Lotfi, and Ahmed Elmeligi. 2018. “Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: Trends to 2040 & Recommendations.” Journal of Cleaner Production 177: 448-463. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.12.239.

  • Boscacci, Louise. 2019. “Ecologising affect and atmosphere in the Anthropocene: dear Rachel.” In 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder, edited by The Meco Network, 193-216. London: Open Humanities Press.

  • Carter, Richard. 2017. “Drone Poetry: On Deploying Sensory Technologies as Tools of Writing.” The Writing Platform. http://thewritingplatform.com/2017/09/drone-poetry-deploying-sensory-technologies-tools-writing/.

  • Carter, Richard. 2018. “Waves to Waveforms: Performing the Thresholds of Sensing and Sense-Making in the Anthropocene.” Arts 7(4) 70: n.p. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts7040070.

  • Carter, Richard. Forthcoming. “Drone Poetry”. In Ambient Stories: Digital Writing in Place, edited by Amy Spencer. London: Emerald.

  • Clarke, Chris, and James O’Sullivan. 2019. Peripheries: Part of the Electronic Literature Organization Conference & Media Arts Festival. n.p. https://cora.ucc.ie/handle/10468/8138.

  • Gabrys, Jennifer. 2016. Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. Minneapolis, M.N.: University of Minnesota Press.

  • Gabrys, Jennifer. 2018. “Becoming Planetary”. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/accumulation/217051/becoming-planetary/.

  • Starosielski, Nicole. 2015. The Undersea Network. Durham: Duke University Press.

Updated: Nov 12, 2020

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.202018 | Issue 5 | October 2020

Ada Hao

University of Brighton


Abstract


This visual essay aims to review a virtual art installation: the cyberformance of NAUT-ADA (2018-2020): a fictional character on Instagram that uses role-playing as the method to provoke the affinity between identity and embodied spectatorship: the overflowing reproductive fragmentation of the self within the hypertextual filter bubble (Instagram), and the irresistible affirmation and validation from others that perpetuate self-abjection. I will use a diffractive analysis along with NAUT-ADA’s visual spectacle to attest to the presence of heterotopia: ‘a spatial otherness’ (Foucault, 1986) in virtual environments. The Instagram character NAUT-ADA underlines a retroactive process of becoming ‘as both matrix and catalyst’ (Ascott, 1966): an intelligent virtual art object acting as a metaphor to perform the embodied spectatorship. The title ‘Noise of Becoming’ is to identify the embodied spectatorship as a primary trigger for self-abjection, which actively discharges an excess of self-censorship as a direct result from the “Instagrammable” affirmation-seeking behaviors and the lattices of virtual affiliation inside of the echo chamber. I will further discuss how to embody the diffractive process in my practice to interrupt the reproduction of the same narrative elsewhere.

Introduction: Becoming known

It is a joy of not knowing: fiction or not. It is a pleasure of knowing: fake or reality.



Fig.1 & Fig. 2 Performance (2018)

The idea of becoming portable or becoming mobile is then carried out in my art practice. This live performance (Fig.1 & 2) was initially conceived within a live event in January, 2018, in the light of moving toward a “room-for-change” to situate the uncertain possibilities of becoming mobile or portable. By becoming mobile, my body was not abandoned, yet been made more aware of itself with newly configured sensory perceptions in reaction to the spectators and audiences in the live situation. The performing body was not only a subject of becoming portable, but also a nameless body in the act of becoming - a nomadic process,

‘that entails the active displacement of dominant formations of identity, memory, and identification… [which] has to do with emptying out the self, opening it out to possible encounters with the “outside”’. (Braidotti, 2011, p. 235)

Performing in a desolate warehouse, I was experiencing the nomadic process of becoming: temporarily decentering from my own subjectivity, while remaining faithful to the possible encounters with the outside world. The “room-for-change” signifies such space of “preserved” (dis)continuity – a vacuum of the parallel reality at a different rate of change.


The “room-for-change” suspends my body in a temporal “future shock” (Toffler, 1970). It evacuates the memories of the body for new archive of consciousness to take place. It compartmentalizes the self-awareness and defamiliarize the body from the known in a transient state of becoming.

Heterotopic body


I use the conceptual idea for Heterotopia (Foucault, Des Espace Autres (Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias), 1986) to draw a parallel alignment between a spatial-temporal performance space for the process of becoming within heterotopias. According to Foucault, heterotopias refer to “counter-sites” that juxtapose with the unreality of utopias to provide a:

‘curious property of being…to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations (that the reality) happens to designate, mirror, or reflect’ (Foucault, Des Espace Autres (Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias), 1986, p. 3).

In addition to the examples given by Foucault (ship, cemetery, garden, museum), I propose that the performing body is also a site of heterotopia. Different from thinking of the body as a site, the body is seen as a fragmented realm that habituates multiple sets of uncertainties Within which, a spatialized “other” flourishes and manifests the imagination of becoming. Perpetuated by the fluidity of the artist’s role in the act of creation, the spatialized “other” functions as a vehicle of research: a mirror, a reflective matrix, and a responsible sounding board for the spectators and audiences.


The ‘noise of becoming’ is to identify the possible traits of otherness that disrupt the representative being and enable the apparition of becoming. This fictional character is actualized ‘in the form of multiplicities made up of differential relations and variations of relations, distinctive points and transformations of points.’ (Deleuze, 1968)

The morphic probable possibility


Performance, as an act of processing, spontaneously triggers the probability and possibility of becoming. In the process of becoming, the set of relations effaces the integral vision of what the human body is and what it could become. During the course of actions, the body becomes a not-quite-human subject, or “abhuman” as pointed out by Kelly Hurley in her book ‘The Gothic body: Sexuality, materialism, and degeneration at the e fin de Siècle:

‘a not-quite-human subject characterized by its morphic variability.’ (Hurley, 2009, p. 3)

The ‘noise of becoming’ also means to abject. By being the abject, the body is granted with extended sensational encounters with the outside world: embellished with the interactions with the spectators and audiences, which could liberate the body from its own habitual way of being by bringing about in an environment it hasn’t been before.

Fig. 3 Performance (2019)

The experience of enduring the first five minutes inside of the polished bronze dome, as shown in Fig. 1 -3, triggered an extended sensory mechanism in my body to communicate with one eye, faceless. Hence, the eye dictates the body in deprivation of knowing. The memory of the five minutes has become the catalyst for

‘an organism, as it were, that derives its initial programme or code from the artists creative activity, and then evolves in specific artistic identity and function in response to the environment which it encounters’. (Ascott, 2001, p. 102)

This organism can also be a way to reframe the heterotopia in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s BWO, which projects a relational understanding of the symbiotic relationship between the artist and audiences, in opposition to the institutional organization of the body that the artistic activity evolves from. It was a nameless “thing” when initially performed in the live performance, five months before it was named NAUT-ADA, and ten months before it took over a Batman’s fandom account with 20k followers on Instagram.


Fig. 4. Performance (2019)

What if….as if…


John K Shaw and Theo Reeves-Evison mentioned in the introduction of the book, Fiction as Method (2017), about David Garcia’s use of “as if” during his curation ‘How Much of This is Fiction’ (2014):


‘If “what ifs” lead to satirical acts designed to unmask the workings of power and “as if” ‘leads to forms of activism that rather than demanding change.’ (Shaw & Reeves-Evison, 2017)

What if this nameless “thing” wants its own name and identity, as if it has its own power to demand change or stability? What if this nameless “thing” wants to transition from the process of becoming to a metamorphosis of being? As I was performing at different live event as a nameless “thing”, I started to question the integrity of this “thing”. It was a nomadic entity with a certain extent of fluidity of what it could become. What would happen to this process of becoming if this “thing” were to be situated in a virtual environment, where the performance of role-playing is more prevalent for this “thing” to continue the process of becoming? Will the “thing” cease to become, and begin to actualize what it is?


As I was becoming more familiar with this creature and its relational attachments with the spectators and audiences in live performances, there became less uncertainty. From an artistic perspective, there was no more synchronization with premeditated imagination. The performance of this creature evolved into a cycle of repetition and memory-actualization. The memories of performance accumulated from each live performance situation have saturated.

At this point, a friend gifted me an Instagram bot account: A Batman’s fandom account sold online for digital marketing. It used images of fandom art of Batman to accumulate followers. It occurred to be me that there might be a parallel alignment between the accumulation of followers on Instagram (that uses visual aesthetics to attract attention for its recognition and popularity) and the sedimentary process of creating the nameless “thing’ (that used visual trope of uncanny to legitimize its presence). I then uses the visual signifiers to search for the uncanny resemblances between the nameless “thing” and other mythological creatures and mundane objects.

This search is driven by the desire to find a doppelgänger for the creature. So that its singularity could be re-addressed with possibilities of what it could become. I found that the nameless “thing” has a particular uncanny visual resemblance with the wild and lawless one-eyed Greek mythological creatures: the Cyclopes (Fig.5 &6), brothers who were giants with a single eye, who traded one eye in order to see the future; with the pataphysician Alfred Jarry’s best known character Ubu, in his play Ubu Roi (Fig. 7); with the zebrafish embryos (Fig. 8, a contemporary standing light cover (Fig. 9 & Fig.10), and with an astronaut (Fig. 11 & Fig. 12).


These visual references not only inform the possibilities of what the nameless creature could become, but also entail a coded visual archive that shares the common traits of uncanny resemblance between themselves. The memory capacity for this creature is increased through data collection and image searching. This coded archive then reinforce the individuality of this nameless creature with an extended memory. According to Braidotti’s nomadic methodology, ‘memories need the imagination to empower the actualization of virtual possibilities in the subject’. (Braidotti, 2006, p. 169) The imagination of what could become the subjectivity of this performing body, and how to recompose my own memory in coordination with its subjectivity entails the nomadic methodology to empower the creative alterities.

(Left to right)

Fig. 5. Cyclopic infant;

Fig. 6. MONSTROSITY: Cyclop. Ulisse Aldrovandi, Opera omnia Bononiae: apud;

Fig. 7. Veritable Portrait of M Ubu (1896), Alfred Jarry;

Fig. 8. Zebrafish Embryo;

Fig. 9 & 10. Image of vintage brass floor lamp;

Fig. 11. NASA Astronaut Class Mercury 7 (1959);

Fig. 12. Astronaut Thomas Pesquet photographed during a spacewalk (2017)

It is important to differentiate the memories of the performance from memories of the act of performance. The former is a reflective process to remember what happened during the performance, so that the performance is held at a distance to be looked at later; while the later involves a diffractive process that allows the performing body to recompose its “spongy” ability to encompass the discursive entanglement during the act of becoming-other.

A diffractive process was first introduced by Haraway (1992), then further developed by Barad (2007). It is a process of ‘reading insights through one another in ways that help illuminate differences as they emerge: how different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions matter.’ (Barad, 2007) In the context of this project, the process of looking at the insights through the series of coded visual archive and the eyes of the beholder allows the performing body to re-negotiate with the accountabilities of the possible traits of uncanny. This leads me to work with the hypertextual online social media environment, Instagram.

Popular on Instagram


The Instagram account was sold to me online for around 200 pounds. For digital marketing, companies buy this kind of “ready-made” Instagram account that comes with a high number of followers to establish the trust relationship with their customers. The price of the “ready-made” Instagram account corresponds to the number of followers. Social media is a demanding area that requires constant engagement and status updates from its users. (Xin, Wenyin, & Jian, 2019) Social media is recalibrating the way individual interact, not only the marketing, but also the creation of art. This marketing communication is sustained by the mobile internet. When Instagram was launched in Oct , 2010 only four month after, the iPhone 4, the first mobile device featuring an improved camera with 5MP (in comparison to the previous iPhone had only 2MP or 3MP sensors with relatively poor lenses quality). (Mottola, 2016) In the paper on Art in the Age of Social Media Interaction Behavior (2019), the group of digital media researchers pointed out that,

‘Social media is all about people, about understanding what triggers people as individuals and in groups, it embedded six persuasive psychological forces, which are reciprocity, social proof, liking, authority, scarcity, and commitment.’ (Xin, Wenyin, & Jian, 2019, p. 10)

Instagram operates its users’ demographic to amplify the experience of making and creating art, while artists have become facilitators who collaborate with audiences by sharing the experience of creating and curating their artworks. However, for Instagram users, it is difficult to identify the authenticity of social media account and to practice conscious ‘audience gatekeeping‘ (Shoemaker & T, 2009). The visual experience on Instagram is dictated by psychological forces and digital marketing advertising pushed in the front of individual’s Instagram feed.

How to be aware of the six persuasive psychological forces (reciprocity, social proof, liking, authority, scarcity and commitment), so that the users could prioritize the cognitive processing (to think) before the perceptual processing (to see and to like a post on Instagram)? How to use the power of ‘audience gatekeeper’ to trigger deeper interaction between the artist and the audience on Instagram, beyond the superficial interaction, such as “Like” and “Follow”?


Instagram has tools and strategies to block such digital marketing bot-like account, by collecting users’ data on engagement. How do I use this digital marketing Instagram account as a new virtual environment for the nameless creature without alarming Instagram’s cyber security? How to use the bite-size ephemeral posts as an entry point to produce virtual-real experience?


While conducting research on Instagram, there are also limitations: how not to fit the Instagram algorithm? How to not become another product for public consumption? Admist the substantial numbers of digital content creators and fictional characters on Instagram, how can I use the universality of fictionality to further explore the limitation of fiction?

Consumer, Content creator, Instagrammer


I take care NAUT-ADA’s Instagram profile like grooming my hair. The spectacle, the fictional narrative and the possibility of what NAUT-ADA could become are perpetually interrupted by the present eyes of the beholders: the Instagram followers. The Instagram profile of NAUT-ADA plays the role of a malleable digital avatar that is made up of the decent of the human body.


If a city’s population increases from 100k to 1 billion, the government will be redesigning the city. Instagram has successfully transformed its identity from an iPhone photography product to a governed community since it first launched in 2010. As a gross product, it has reached 1 billion monthly active users by June, 2020. While Instagram encourages its users to connect with more people, it however has failed to curate the conversations in this internet community.

Anyone could exchange the profile picture, account name, people they follow and past posts. Anyone could become anything on Instagram. This is a popular tactic in the field of underground social media PR & Advertising industries: new companies purchasing popular accounts with high number of Instagram followers and “rebranding” the profile with the information targeting its “naïve” followers. Anyone could buy the number of followers to fabricate the appearance of being a popular account. Once the old posts have been deleted, these advertising companies could selectively unfollow the followers, or even better, purchasing more less bot-like followers who follow and like posts just like a “real person” with an extra charge.

I took the similar approach by “rebranding” the Batman fandom account’s Instagram account using the visual and textual performance documentation of NAUT-ADA. NAUT-ADA embodies Foucault’s interpretation of a “mask”: it veils my head and retreats the self-awareness inhabited in the sensory centre with a set of renewed executive functions (updated functionality of the body) possessing the new body as an archive filled with phantasmagoric imagery.


How to conceptualize the encounter with the unknown? When the subject of knowing is in question? How to consent for unknown? As a performance artist, I conceptualized these two questions into a situational encounter with a malleable fictional character, which then becomes a placeholder for my “insignificant” ‘about-body’. This “insignificant” ‘about-body’ is an alter ego, but a speculative creation emerged from the eyes of the spectators, as well as the desire to address the differences from becoming the “insignificant” ‘about-body’.


The Instagram content of NAUT-ADA is treated as an autobiography of this “insignificant” ‘about-body’ (the fictional character), which not only takes account of the characteristics of this ‘about-body’, but also the foreign Other before it has attained a “proper name” or an identity. However, this foreign Other was a “pure” identity itself at the time of the beginning moment of existence. As it came to be, there was no longer a “pure” identity. This foreign Other becomes the ‘about-body’, in Arthur Rimbaud’s words, ‘Je est un autre [I am another].


As the followers of Batman encountering this unknown new body in their news feed, they are ushered into the trope of an-other-space dilated by this one-eyed creature. This body is empowered to communicate with the Instagram users with ‘entirely enigmatic language’: an affective visual spectacle created for its purpose of being Instagrammable. This “secret language” is activated by the desire to connect, to win the click bait, and to obtain the validation of belief and accountability from the Instagrammers they follow. While internet fosters expression and connection, it produces affinity or connection to the virtual space, which produces longingness, a will to stay.


For online environments, it is necessary to identify what this virtual profile entails. As everyone seeks satisfactory feelings from receiving positive feedbacks and validation for a positive presentation of the self, how to create content to trigger audience interaction beyond superficial responses, such as like and follow on Instagram? Instagram users tends to engage with social media interactions on the account of online self-actualization. (Maslow, 1975)


As Instagram has introduced us to the fragmented method of looking, it also encourages its users to look away from the things. Instead, the users are “trained” to look at a lot of things, while not knowing about them. One could say that Instagram is established upon the voyeuristic desire of its users. The ambiguity of what NAUT-ADA is has hijacked the sense of self-actualization.


‘The optimal-arousal theory explains social media users' desire to engage in exploratory behaviour in uncertain or ambiguous situations. This theory also allows us to understand the desires of social media users in uncertain or ambiguous situations, through "moderate arousal," such as "What is this?” to stimulate people's curiosity and result in more likes.’ (Xin, Wenyin, & Jian, 2019, p. 8)


The account had thousands of Instagram posts when I first accessed the account (as shown in Fig. 13-16). I first changed the name and profile picture from heroic Batman to NAUT-ADA. And then, I started to delete the content in the account little by little every day. Starting at 20k followers, deleting the old archive posts while not updating new content. Consequently, the number of followers for this account began to decrease. Meanwhile, I had been receiving private messages from followers and other Instagram users about digital marketing, account advertisement, request for featuring in this account and Batman fans who sent their selfies dressing up as Batman.

I did not engage with these online behaviours or respond to the private messages (as shown in Fig. 17) However, the Instagram will show the user that their messages were read in the private conversation. In addition, I was also following the Instagram etiquette to like the photos posted by people that this Batman’s fan account has been following, in order to maintain the activity level for this account.


Fig. 13 Screenshot (2019)
Fig. 14. Screenshot (2019)
Fig. 15. Screenshot (2019)
Fig. 16. Screenshot (2019)
Fig. 17. Screenshot (2019)
Fig. 18. Screenshot (2019)

After a month of deleting individual photo from the Batman’s fandom account, there are still about a hundred posts left. I changed the name of the Batman’s fandom account to NAUT-ADA. I fill out the biography/personal description section as follows,

Digital Human Naut, Normdic Naut, NAUT-ADA and Jargonaut, Aeronaut, Astronaut, Afronaut, Argonaut, cybernaut, gastronaut, hallucinaut, infonaut, cosmonaut, aquanaut, spationaut, juggernaut, oceanaut, psychonaut, cryonaut…


The pervasive simulation was made, so that NAUT-ADA could be situated as a common digital creator on Instagram. The materiality of internet-situated character ‘is as vibrant as ever, for the computational engines and artificial intelligences that produce simulations require sophisticated based in the real world.’ (Hayles, 2012) By integrating NAUT-ADA’s online behaviors with the Instagram etiquette, such as hypermedia composition, hashtag signifiers, and consistent effortless clicking on the “like” button, I was able to immerse this “foreign” character from a fiction in the heteronormative society to a homogeneous online society as a fictional character.


Instagram as a networked camera


‘Given the limitations of language to reflect the complexity of lived experience’, (Seaman, 1999, p. 174) this assimilation of another account was explicable for the process of becoming. In comparison to previous performances in the live performance situation, the cyberformance of NAUT-ADA was staged to use text and image to re-imagine the memories of NAUT-ADA. The Instagram account of NAUT-ADA is identified as a sedimental archive of the documentation of NAUT-ADA in live performance situation.


Here, Instagram can be seen as a networked camera, (Rubeninstein & Sluis, 2013) an image sharing platform and a multi-functional virtual institution that facilitates the production, documentation, dissemination and consumption of the cyberformance of NAUT-ADA. Through the course of this durational cyberformance, Instagram is used as a fertile realm for the visual trope of a “superhero avatar”. NAUT-ADA then became a networked image, ‘established by the destabilization of the author-audience paradigm, as every participant within the network is simultaneously a viewer and a performer of the image.’ (Rubeninstein & Sluis, 2013) As the followers of Batman’s fandom account started to receive the feed of ready-made image and poetic writings of NAUT-ADA, simultaneously, the number of followers began to drop substantially.


This networked-image not only reconfigures the authorship of the fictional character, but it also acts as a catalyst to signify the reversal process linking the performativity of the image and text with the subjectivity of the viewer. Rather than ‘offer[ing] a reassuring mirror reflection of a subjectivity already in place’, (O’Sullivan, 2012) NAUT-ADA triggers change in the followers’ behavior, mainly the act of unfollow: unsubscribe to the feed of NAUT-ADA.


To follow does not mean to give consent. How to filter spam contents on Instagram? There is no such function on Instagram. Not only is it not possible to filter the contents users see on Instagram, they are also subject to data collection programs that push advertisements and new accounts based on their online behavior. Instagram does not produce a culture for virtual matters, instead it resembles a network under intense surveillance.

Despite the number of followers decreasing since I started to substitute Batman’s fandom comics and film screenshots with NAUT-ADA’s performance documentations, the rate of decrease has been slowing down. By June 1st, 2020, NAUT-ADA still has 13.1k followers on Instagram.


NAUT-ADA is not animated by the internet-situated social media network. It tries to animate the invisible forces embedded within this network. On Instagram, NAUT-ADA has been continuing its performance regardless of the presence of a camera. However, Instagram has been playing the role of the camera that choreographs acts for its users. Instagram users are made self-aware and self-conscious when they swipe, scroll and tap, instead of touching. Meanwhile, the haptic feedback has made the users ignore the emotional void that is created by the act of looking.

Becoming in parallel


There is a parallel alignment between this choreographed process on Instagram and the artistic process of creation:


‘The artist's creative activity is also dependent on feedback; the changes which he effects in his immediate environment (or "arena") by means of tools and media set up configurations which feedback to affect his subsequent decisions and actions.’ (Ascott, 2001, p. 102)

On one side, this creative process offers more opportunity for artists on Instagram to receive faster feedbacks. On the other hand, these fast-food-like guided feedbacks on Instagram are not as effective for the artist, as its affect is to impact the artist’s self-awareness.


It is argued by Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010), that there has been changes in how we learn that directly influence how we read and process information on the social networks and searching engines such as Google Search. These changes are affecting ‘our ability to concentrate, leading to superficial thought, diminished capacity to understand complex texts, and a general decline in intellectual capacity.’ (Carr, 2010, p. 141) When we are online, we become a puppet for the ‘juggler’s brain’. (Carr, 2010)When using Instagram, I was not physically double tapping each image. I was experiencing a tactile feeling of the screen. By touching the screen, I ‘enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning’. (Carr, 2010, p. 116) I was less focused and more easily distracted by the pop-ups, the news, the media that are “underneath” this screen. Philosopher Katherine Hayles described these changes and influences on our daily life in her book How We Think (2012) from her personal experiences of imagining a scenario of no internet connection:

‘I feel lost, disoriented, unable to work – in fact, I feel as if my hands have been amputated (perhaps recalling Marshall McLuhan’s claim that media function as prostheses).’ (Hayles, 2012, p. 2)

By going under the cover of NAUT-ADA, I try to bring awareness to such feelings of distress. I posted photos of NAUT-ADA with text that I used in live performances (as shown in Fig. 24 to Fig. 30). When I perform as NAUT-ADA on Instagram, my self-awareness was choreographed by the preferences of the other users. I did not know the identity of the other users. However, when I see the number of likes each time when I post a photo of NAUT-ADA in the action of performance, I cannot help but notice that the number of likes is a limited descriptor of my interaction with other users. NAUT-ADA encourages and invites the public to look at the phenomena of mediated culture through touching, swiping, tapping, and pinching. As Karen Barad defined in her book Meeting The Universe Half Way:


‘phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of the observer and observed, or the results of measurements… phenomena are not mere laboratory creations but basic units of reality.’ (Barad, 2007, p. 139)

It is common to say that the ‘basic units of reality’ exist in the contemporary social landscape in the form of independence and freedom as social phenomena. Then performance, as a collective unit of the society, is also a phenomena and an entanglement that does not separate the artists and spectators in the shared common ground of immanent understanding of the ‘basic units of reality’. We are all together in this entanglement that offers a close look into the intersection of archival presence of the human body and its performativity in the practice of everyday life.


Fig. 19. Screenshot (2019)
Fig. 20. Screenshot (2019)
Fig. 21 Screenshot (2019)
Fig. 22 Screenshot (2019)
Fig. 23. Screenshot (2019)
Fig. 24. Screenshot (2019)

Coded Narrative

Fiction is a method. It is employed in administration as a coded narrative. It draws up the contract, articulated by Catherine Gallagher, that attracts what is non-reference (this is not real) with the verisimilitude (this could be real):


In England, between the time when Defoe insisted that Robinson Crusoe was a real individual (1702) and the time when Henry Fielding urged just as strenuously that his characters were not representations of actual specific people (1742), a discourse of fictionality appeared in and around the novel, specifying new rules for its identification and new modes of nonreference. (Gallagher, 2016, p. 337)

Fig. 25. Timeline of NAUT-ADA (2020)

The retrospective Instagram posts of NAUT-ADA and the non-reference of the fictional character creates such discourse of fictionality that triggers the disbelief and decrease of interest in its followers, especially when comparing with the previous “tenant” of this coded profile, the Batman. However, the fictional character’s cyberformativity opens up the possibility of agency through an embodied engagement, which is the extended bodily sensation generated by the process of becoming-other and the interaction with the followers. Looking back at the memories of performance through video and photograph documentation, the inter-corporeal experiences of performing in live situation allows situational encounters.

The death of NAUT-ADA


Cyberformance of NAUT-ADA invites the viewers to create unexpected encounters on Instagram. Instagram, as an online society, provides the essential criteria for the cyberformance of NAUT-ADA. However, I still haven’t found a way to end the expectancy of this fictional character on Instagram. A scene in J.G Ballard’s short story, The Dead Astronaut (1971), proceeds as follows:


‘The figure of this dead astronaut circling the sky above us re-emerged in her mind as an obsession with time. For hours, she would stare at the bedroom clock, as if waiting for something to happen.’ (Ballard, 1971)


It is impossible to picture the ‘death’ of NAUT-ADA: Even if the Instagram account is deleted, the information will remain in the form of coded characters and images. How is it possible to put an end to the fictional character? Is it necessary to arrive at an ending? Perhaps it indicates a new beginning for something apart from coming to be? If the Instagram account of NAUT-ADA is left online with no further maintenance, would it be like Jeremy Bentham’s preservation of his actual body and his well-dressed skeleton hidden in the closet of an institution as an archival presence of an iconic utilitarian? (See in Fig. 31. for Jeremy Bentham’s Auto-icon in UCL, London) NAUT-ADA’s performance on Instagram has been acted as a virtual presence for the absence of an off-line role. It is automated by the automation of Instagram.

This research character is fixated on an alienated future that is overlooked by the melancholic present. The fictional character NAUT-ADA did not create entanglements in relation to the spectators and Instagram followers, it was observing the entanglements that have already taken place. Neither does it create fiction. It was observing the fiction that has already taken place.

I notice that there is another parallel relationship between the growth of Instagram and the process of becoming for NAUT-ADA: both are works in progress. Retrospectively reviewing the process of taking NAUT-ADA to Instagram, it has become apparent that this is just another ‘fictional character’ on Instagram. It’s fictionality is blurred by the vast amount of fictional characters who are even closer to the reality. However, the experimentation of using Instagram as a networked camera is not necessarily a failed attempt. Thus, if you want to invite people to witness a performance, few media technologies would serve you better than Instagram does. Instagram offers the users motivation to touch the screen, double tap the like button, and follow people they empathize with. Concurrently, it does not motivate the practice of deliberation.

Fig. 26. The Jeremy Bentham Auto-icon at University of College, London (2020)

Fig. 27. Screenshot (2020)

From a political standpoint, it is necessary to have both motivation and deliberation to achieve the state of democracy. In a democratic state, individual citizens are actively engaged with the practice of deliberation: knowledge exchange, communication and constant activity to recalibrate the state in relation to its individual citizen’s ability to practice such deliberation. As stated by Siva Vaidjyanathan in Antisocial Media (2018):



‘Democratic republics…need countervailing forces to be able to compete for attention and support within the public sphere… needs norms through which ’those who differ can maintain mutual respect for the process, if not for each other.’ (Vaidjyanathan, 2018, pp. 9-10)

The structure of Instagram is very similar to Facebook, which allows the thread of posts in the same format, regardless of advertising from official account, or the content posted by the general user. In the same format, the comments are located below each image in abbreviation. The text is a supplement that relies on the image to be read. Within the restriction of the word count, like Twitter, the users are nested in a restricted way of speaking, conversing and commenting on Instagram. They are encouraged to respond promptly based on the observation of image on their smartphone. Thus, the users could have a higher chance of commenting rashly. When users leave a comment underneath the image, this will consequently be visible to the public, provided the account is not private and only visible to its followers. To be Instagrammable is to design content to echo among Instagram users.


To post an image on Instagram, the user either needs to crop their content or fit the content to the frame into a smaller scale. The unified aesthetic design provides consistency of the images. This consistency has encouraged the users to become an attention-seeking. Between the technological devices (like an Alexa speaker or Google GPS navigation) and the mobile sensors we ‘increasingly strap to our skin and carry in our pockets, the ‘attention brokers’ need no longer compete for our attention’. (Vaidjyanathan, 2018, p. 99)


According to Instagram’s official websites, these are their main features: sharing stories using Instagram’s 24 hour story post to record , starting a conversation privately with friends using direct messaging, watching long-form videos to discover original content ‘from Creators you already love, ‘shop as you scroll’ from your “favorite brands and creators, and [finally] discover[ing] content that Instagram suggests based on your viewing activity.’ These suggestive features encourage the users to actively engage with this “user-friendly” platform. However, the users are not actively warned about the habitual way of viewing and thinking they nest themselves in when using Instagram repeatedly and over long periods of time.

Instagram Narcissism


When I started to use NAUT-ADA as the new performance space for this project, it was important to occupy this performance space as a media, rather than a technology. As media can amplify a movement that is already present. The character NAUT-ADA was such a ‘movement’, that has its own form, substance and momentum to be present in the internet-situated environment. Instagram is a meditated technology, which has a critical dynamic of freedom or oppression built into it. When this dynamic of freedom and oppression is inherent within the versatile online social media environment, the likely minded users would follow each other and like each other’s photo. However, they form an echo chamber, or what Eli Pariser defines as a ‘filter bubble’ to

‘describe the ways that Google and Facebook reward users with more of what they tell the companies they want, thus narrowing fields, of vision and potentially crating echo chambers of reinforced belief.’ (Vaidjyanathan, 2018, p. 6)

It means that Instagram will reward users who engage with the platform more by recommending content in relation to what they like, and presenting less information with which they wouldn’t be interested in or disagree with. Instagram becomes a technological machine that dictates the freedom of choice for its users. By exchanging the content of the old Batman account with NAUT-ADA’s visual performance documentation, I attempt to overwrite this authoritarian technological intervention that is practiced by Instagram quietly.

The filter bubbles on Instagram distance us from those who with opposing viewpoints by encouraging the practice of positive affirmation significantly different to that has been previously discussed. The affirmation of positive reaction on Instagram is propelled by an unitary vision that encourages users to actively engage with the platform for lucrative growth of the media company. While the positive affirmation, that has been referred to early in this visual essay, is not undermined by a unitary vision, is a non-unitary prediction and can accommodate a broader range of possibilities that could be affirmed. Patterns of these unitary affirmative possibilities influence the construction of subjectivity.

The cyberformance of NAUT-ADA creates an echo of the unknown spectators, who happen to encounter this unknown spectacle. By the end of the film, NAUT-ADA: Here Lies (2019), there’s a delicate female voice singing the following words:

‘I want something to hold on,

something, that you no longer cherish.

While holding my breath,

I can feel that,

there’s a beat for each goose bump pumping.

As one porous purging,

the next one sucks me in.

All are singular, we all are singular.

All are singular, we all are singular.

My mouth,

your words,

say I love you.

My mouth,

your words,

say I love you.’


Footnotes


[1] cyberformance – experiments at the interface of theatre and the internet’, where she used the term to describe the practice of ‘live performance that utilizes internet technologies to bring remote performers together in real-time, for remote and/or proximal audiences’. (Jamieson, 2008)

[2] According to Foucault, heterotopias refer to “counter-sites” that juxtapose with the unreality of utopias to provide a ‘curious property of being…to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations’ that the reality ‘happen to designate, mirror, or reflect’ (Foucault, Des Espace Autres (Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias), 1986, p. 3). I use the ‘Noise of Becoming’ to identify the possible traits of otherness that disrupt the representation of the self-being, and hence enable the apparition of becoming. The fictional character is actualized ‘in the form of multiplicities made up of differential relations and variations of relations, distinctive points and transformations of points.’(Deleuze, 1968) In the context of my art practice, the ‘curious property of being’ is the performance body, and the ‘set of relations’ is the set of uncertain relations of the reciprocal relationships between the role that the performance body is becoming and its embodied spectatorship in the virtual public sphere. The virtual public sphere is identified as a heterotopia that is curated by the social media customs as censorship, which blurs the boundary between private and public sphere in digital realm. Such virtual heterotopia is seen as ‘an organism, as it were, that derives its initial programme or code from the artists’ creative activity, and then evolves in specific individual identity and function in response to the environment which it encounters’. (Ascott, 1966)

[3] Deleuze and Guattari have define the BWO (Body without organs) a: ‘opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism’. (Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, 1980, p. 158) D&G’s BWO is compared to Antonin Artaud’s presentation of the identity of the One and the Multiple as a dialectical unity. For Artaud, the unitarian identity reduces the multiple by gathering it into the One. Artaud posits the idea of the body against the organs: ‘The body is the body. Alone it stands. And in no need of organs. Oraganism it never is. Organisms are the enemies of the body.’ (Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, 1980) This project takes the D&G’s BWO as a starting point to not think in opposite to the body and to the organs. When I refer to the ‘body’, I am identifying the body as in opposition to the organism, the organization of the organs.

[4] How much of this is fiction. is an exhibition involving artists as tricksters and featuring work which involves the direct use of deception, tricks, hoaxes and hacks. These politically inspired media artists use trickery and deception to exploit the shifting boundary between fiction and reality in a world of ‘post-truth’ politics. How much of this is fiction. is curated David Garcia and Annet Dekker, in collaboration with Ian Alan Paul (Director, Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History).

[5] Sokolowsky, J (2017) Art in the Instagram Age: How Social Media Is Shaping Art and How You Experience It. Available online: https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/visual-arts/art-in-the-instagram-age-how-social-media-is-shaping-art-and-how-you-experience-it/ (accessed on 1 June 2020).

[6] Instagram founders Kevin Systrom says in 2010, after the app has reached 100k users after it first launched in 2010, that ‘Instagram has taken on a life of its own — it’s definitely no longer our product anymore. It belongs to the community.’ (https://www.viralblog.com/mobile-and-apps/instagram-is-taking-off/, accessed on Aug 25th, 2020)

[8] On Instagram’s official website, it says: ‘Connect with more people, build influence, and create compelling content that's distinctly yours.’( https://about.instagram.com/, accessed on Aug 25th, 2020)

[9] ‘NAUT’, from nautes, the Greek word for ‘sailor’, is a suffix to be used to create travel-specific words, like astronaut, to literally mean a ‘star sailor’; or a cosmonaut, meaning a cosmos/universe sailor. The second part of the name adheres my first name, which is an English name that I have been using since I started to learn English as a child in China. I named myself after Ada Lovelace, who is the first computer programmer in the world. The name was personal to me however, it is not essential for the spectators to acknowledge in live performances. The first stage of substitution process lasted about a month, until it had nothing left from the original profile. Roland Barthes once wrote that ‘the argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form.’ (Barthes, 1977) Barthes wrote: ‘The ship Argo…affords the allegory of an eminently structural object… by two modest actions (which cannot be caught up in a any mystique of creation): substitution (one part replaces another, as in a paradigm) and nomination (the name is in no way linked to the stability of the parts)… nothing is left of the origin: Argo is an object with no other cause that its name, with no other identity than its form.’ (Barthes, 1975, p. 46)

[10] NAUT-ADA is not a strategic tool to introduce or to trigger a completely alternative reality like utopia, neither the metamorphosis of humans into non-human nor post-human. It is presented as an actor in all utopias, however, it neither creates nor proposes any idealisation for utopias. NAUT-ADA stands for the limitation and constraints of the human body (my body). It also embodies the human desire: to disappear from the what I appear, and to survive in a perpetual and timeless imaginary space outside of any conventional notions of a place. ‘It is to place the body in communication with secret powers and invisible forces. The mask…lay upon the body an entire language, an entirely enigmatic language, an entire language that is ciphered, secret, sacred, which calls upon this body the violence of the God, the silent power of the Sacred, or the liveliness of Desire. The mask… put(s) the body into an other space….usher(s) it into a place that does not take place in the word directly… make(s) of this body a fragment of imaginary space, which will communicate with the universe of divinities, or with the universe of the other, where one will be taken by the gods, or taken by the person one has just seduced…(is) operation by which the body is torn away from its proper space and projected into an other space. ’ (Foucault, 2006, p. 231)

[12] Since 2019, Instagram has added a new feature of haptic feedback: when users touch the ‘like’ button, the phone vibrates. It is to encourage the users to actively engaging with content.

[13] Jeremy Bentham is widely regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. When he died in London on June 6th, 1832, at the age of 84, he bequeathed his body to his friend Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith, and wrote in his will with instructions that direct the doctor to mummify his body and dress it in his clothes and hat. Beginning in the year before his death, Bentham had written a pamphlet, Auto-Icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living, in which he advocated, on utilitarian grounds, the practice of becoming one’s own icon (thus “auto-icon”) in the manner he envisaged for himself: dissection followed by the display of a near-replica of the original person, constructed out of a skeleton, stuffing such as hay, and a mummified head. The dissection, he argued, would advance scientific knowledge and greatly facilitate medical education (in Bentham’s day, cadavers for medical education were extremely difficult to obtain). The display of auto-icons would, among other benefits, reduce the need for paintings, statues, and other monuments as remembrances of people (because “identity [is] preferable to similitude”), eliminate the danger posed to public health by accumulating corpses, and “diminish the horrors of death” by leaving only its “agreeable associations.” https://www.britannica.com/story/what-is-jeremy-benthams-auto-icon (Accessed on July 1st, 2020)

[14] Relatively recently Instagram allowed its users to change the profile status (personal blog, sportsman, musician, etc.). The function is available only to business accounts, so you cannot change the category on your personal page. Their list is constantly updated, so from time to time appear very interesting. ‘A fictional character is a category that was available for selection in Instagram. Currently deleted. Available only to those accounts that managed to take it. The function itself is still relevant, users can change the profile status, specify the scope of activity.’ On status “fictional character” in Instagram. http://instagram-biz.blogspot.com/2018/01/status-fictional-character-in-instagram.html (Accessed on June 30th, 2020)

[15] Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, according to Mark: ‘ This is an important milestone for Facebook because it's the first time we've ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don't plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.’ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2012/04/09/facebook-buys-instagram-for-1-billion-wheres-the-revenue/#2bdc04994b8a (Accessed on June 30th, 2020)

[16] Maximum Tweet length is limited to 280 characters. Direct message on twitter is limited to 10,000 characters.

[17] Instagram features, https://about.instagram.com/features (Accessed on June 30th 2020)

[18] ‘This joyful affirmation of the ethics of becoming is in respect of Rosi Bradotti’s nomadic thought, which ‘is conceptually linked to the notion of embodied materialism and to a nonunitary vision of the subject.’ (Braidotti, 2011, p. 300) Courtesy to the author, P8

[19] This is the text used in the live performance and the video of NAUT-ADA: Here Lies, 2019. Courtesy to the author. 


List of figures

  • Fig.1, Performance, 5 Minutes of Your Time, Curated and documented by Nigel Rolfe, Doodle Bar (Testbed 1), London, 2018, Archive of the artist

  • Fig. 2, Performance, 5 Minutes of Your Time, Curated and documented by Nigel Rolfe, Doodle Bar (Testbed 1), London, 2018, Archive of the artist

  • Fig. 3, Performance, Beyond The Body, curated by Nigel Rolfe, Asylum Chapel, 2019 (Photo credit to Eleni Tomadaki, Archive of the artist

  • Fig. 4, Performance, Beyond The Body, curated by Nigel Rolfe, Asylum Chapel, 2019, (Photo credit to Eleni Tomadaki, Archive of the artist

  • Fig. 5, Cyclopic infant, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/hvznkfe8

  • Fig. 6, Franciscum de Franciscis Senensem (& others), 1599-1668. p.13. Vol. 12. EPB/172/D. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/juzv4afz

  • Fig. 7, Veritable Portrait of M Ubu, frontispiece for Ubu Roi, A play written by Alfred Jarry (1896)

  • Fig. 8, Zebrafish embryo, Two zebrafish embryos at 3-4 days of development. The one on the bottom is the wild-type showing normal eye development. The one above has been injected with 'Sonic hedgehog' (Shh) RNA, a molecule which, when overexpressed, disrupts normal signalling in the developing forebrain. This results in greatly reduced eye development. (https://wellcomecollection.org/works/crkx6bcq)

  • Fig. 9, Eglo Single Light Floor Lamp Black and Gold Frame (https://www.keslighting.co.uk/eglo-49618-covaleda-single-light-floor-lamp-black-and-gold-frame.html?gclid=Cj0KCQjw-_j1BRDkARIsAJcfmTHDo8dxownFj_O8cfwM52fNIVifJj5BWDEYrynYZHIjy_RIjBRyNwcaAokbEALw_wc)

  • Fig. 10, Vintage Round Brass Floor Lamp Base (https://www.cabtivist.com/vintage-round-brass-floor-lamp-base.html)

  • Fig. 11, ‘On April 9, 1959, NASA introduced its first astronaut class, the Mercury 7. Front row, left to right: Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Donald K. "Deke" Slayton, John H. Glenn, Jr., and M. Scott Carpenter; back row, Alan B. Shepard, Jr., Virgil I. 'Gus' Grissom, and L. Gordon Cooper, Jr. The 'Original Seven' astronauts reported to NASA Langley and shared one office until the Space Task Group moved to Houston’, NASA/Langley Research Center (https://www.nasa.gov/langley/100/mercury7-astronauts-april-1959/)

  • Fig. 12, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet is photographed during a spacewalk in January 2017. During the nearly six hour spacewalk, the two astronauts successfully installed three new adapter plates and hooked up electrical connections for three of the six new lithium-ion batteries on the International Space Station. Astronauts were also able to accomplish several get-ahead tasks including stowing padded shields from Node 3 outside of the station to make room inside the airlock and taking photos to document hardware for future spacewalks. (https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/astronaut-thomas-pesquet-takes-a-space-selfie)

  • Fig. 13, Screenshot of Instagram interface from the perspective of NAUT-ADA’s account (before the transformation from Batman’ fan account to NAUT-ADA), June 2019 , Artist’s archive

  • Fig. 14, Screenshot of Instagram interface from the perspective of NAUT-ADA’s account (before the transformation from Batman’ fan account to NAUT-ADA), June 2019, Artist’s archive

  • Fig. 15, Screenshot of Instagram interface from the perspective of NAUT-ADA’s account (before the transformation from Batman’ fan account to NAUT-ADA), June 2019, Artist’s archive

  • Fig. 16, Screenshot of Instagram interface from the perspective of NAUT-ADA’s account (before the transformation from Batman to NAUTADA), June 2019, Artist’s archive

  • Fig. 17, Screenshot of Instagram interface from the perspective of NAUT-ADA’s account (before the transformation from Batman to NAUTADA), June 2019, Artist’s archive

  • Fig. 18, Screenshot of Instagram from the perspective of NAUT-ADA’s account (before the transformation from Batman to NAUTADA), June 2019, Artist’s archive

  • Fig. 19, Screenshot of Instagram interface from the perspective of NAUT-ADA’s account, Artist’s archive

  • Fig. 20, Screenshot of Instagram from the perspective of NAUT-ADA’s account, Artist’s archive

  • Fig. 21, Screenshot of Instagram from the perspective of NAUT-ADA’s account, Artist’s archive

  • Fig. 22, Screenshot of Instagram from the perspective of NAUT-ADA’s account, Artist’s archive

  • Fig. 23, Screenshot of Instagram from the perspective of NAUT-ADA’s account, Artist’s archive

  • Fig. 24, Screenshot of Instagram from the perspective of NAUT-ADA’s account, Artist’s archive

  • Fig. 25, Timeline of NAUT-ADA, Archive of the artist

  • Fig. 26, The Jeremy Bentham Auto-icon at University of College, London. https://mysearchformagic.com/2015/07/13/the-jeremy-brntham-auto-icon-london/ (Accessed on July 1st, 2020)

  • Fig. 27, Screenshot of Instagram from the perspective of NAUT-ADA’s account with NAUT-ADA in front of the autoicon of Jeremy Bentham, University College London, Artist’s archive

Bibliography

  • Ascott, R. (2001). "Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision" (1966-1967). In R. P. Jordan, Multimedia: from Wagner to virtual reality/ (pp. 95-103). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

  • Ballard, J. (1971). The Dead Astronaut. Chicago: Playboy Press.

  • Barad, K. (2007). Meeting The Universe Halfway. Durhan & London: Duke University press.

  • Braidotti, R. (2006). Transpositions: NonNormadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press.

  • Braidotti, R. (2011). Normadic Theory, The Portable Rosi Braidotti. New York: Columbia University Press.

  • Carr, N. (2010). What the Internet Is Doingto Our Brains. New York: W. W. Norton.

  • Foucault, M. (1986, October). Des Espace Autres (Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias). (J. Miskowiec, Ed.) (October, 1984), pp. 1-9.

  • Foucault, M. (2006). Le corps utopique (Utopian Body). In C. A. Jones, & A. Davidson, Sesorium: Embodied experience, technology, and contemporary art (L. Allais, Trans., pp. 229-234). Masachesetts: Masachesetts Institute of Technology Press, List Visual Arts Center.

  • Gallagher, C. (2016). The Rise of Fictionality (In: Franco Moretti : The Novel ed., Vols. Vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  • Hayles, K. (2012). How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • Hurley, K. (2009). The abhuman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Maslow, A. (1975). Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper & Row.

  • O’Sullivan, S. (2012). On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Infinite-finite Relation. London: Palgrave.

  • Rubeninstein, D., & Sluis, K. (2013). Chapter 2: The digital image in photographic culture: algorithmic photography and the crisis of representation . In The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. London: Routledge.

  • Seaman, B. (1999). Nonsense Logic and Re-embodied Intelligence. In R. Ascott, Reframing Consciousness: Art, mind and technology (pp. 174-179). Portland, Oregon: Intellect Books.

  • Shaw, J. K., & Reeves-Evison, T. (2017). Fiction as Method. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

  • Shoemaker, P., & T, V. (2009). Gatekeeping Theory. Abingdon: Routledge.

  • Toffler, A. (1970). Future Shock. New York: Penguin Random House.

  • Vaidjyanathan, S. (2018). Antisocial Media. New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Xin, K., Wenyin, C., & Jian, K. (2019, December). Art in the Age of Social Media: Interaction Behavior Analysis of Instagram Art Accounts. Informatics, 6(4)(52).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.202019 | Issue 5 | October 2020

Dr. Mikey Georgeson

University of East London



Abstract


Kimey Peckpo Hatches Out is the title of the film around which I created a performative installation and features a fictional projection of a nomadic keynote performance speech persona. The problem in identifying the film’s place in a causal creative chain highlights my methodology of using the fiction machine as a means of speculating about an aesthetic ontology, which I regard as a realm where making and making-up are the central mode of being or becoming. The film is a further development of a methodology established in the keynote performance I gave of the Technological Nonconscious, created with my then supervisor Professor Tony Sampson for the 3rd Affect and Social media conference at the University of East London in October 2018. This performance had the effect of situating the peripheral story of KPHO in the middle of my practice and led to the development of the film as a direct interrogation of how an aesthetic ontology could be inhabited by a relational, opening-out of the self, moving towards an embodied knowledge. As the film’s opening demonstrates, KPHO became a means of exploring this self as the body without organs:

The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings (2003:19)


Research Statement


Having found myself struggling to define myself as an artist via representational values, I am grateful for the speculative aesthetic ontology my doctoral research helped me to construct. Central to this process was my early intuition that art has an excess that delivers understanding outside of conceptual cognition. Which is to say, art operates through material and aesthetic registers that need to be given space to reconnect audiences with the artist in shared experiences of discovery. In this speculative realm for the construction of art, feeling becomes the essence out of which reflective cognition emerges. Towards the latter stages of the doctorate in fine art, my research shaped itself into an idea of the aesthetic machine (The Vision of the Absurd: 2019) - a sideways reaching for the Abstract Machine (2005: 75) and Whitehead’s actual occasions (1979: 54). Through a process of encouragement and collaboration with Professor Tony Sampson I let my aesthetic machines bleed into a dialogue with fiction machines. Sharing a mutual interest in affect and non-representational theory, we asked how we could, at the very least, disrupt the manner in which the human command-post within academia demands that all data is processed via cognition to be understood. We aimed to achieve this by entangling theory into an aesthetically vital audio-visual performance. I delivered a speech at the 3rd Affect and Social-media conference UEL, as Professor Kimey Peckpo, which was the name of a character in a quasi-creation myth I had written several years earlier and had meant to return to. I found myself contingently engaged as a fictive key-note speaker (The Fiction Machine Bath Spa, Affect and Social Media UEL) and thus the ability for art to become an assemblage tapestry, into which theory was woven, took on a personal and more immanent meaning. A doctorate in fine art was a way of turning me back again and again to face my practice, like a meeting with an alien culture, “Art as aesthetics then becomes the acculturation of the senses.” (2015). To make sense of this use of the word, Terry Eagleton returns the aesthetic to its original etymological meaning: "Aisthetikos is the ancient Greek word for that which is "perceptive by feeling." (ibid) With KPHO I sought to place myself and my work in the heart of A N Whitehead’s idea of the aesthetic, distilled so clearly in Debaise’s Nature as Event:

In this way, Whitehead’s gesture consists in making feelings the most fundamental characteristic of nature, rather than a supplement added onto it. The aesthetic becomes the site of all ontology; it is the plurality of manners of being, manners of doing, capacities to be affected (2017: 58)

In terms of practical methodology, KPHO is a digitally assembled video that treats the use of technology with an analogue sense of contingent emergence. I see it as a broadcasting of the pleasure of the green screen’s capacity to “take everything and make it a matter of expression” (2000: 67) – the moment when I remove my socks (I had forgotten to) and the geometric concrete breeze blocks showing through at the side of the blue tarpaulin green screen. My reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s above idea is to use aesthetic (feeling) to assemble stuff (filmic episodes) as matter for expression in which tangible moments of material vitality produce a percolating feeling in my tummy. As a fictional figure, Kimey Peckpo thus embodies the reinsertion of pleasure into art-making via the understanding of material vitality. In 2018 I spoke at the Royal Geographic Society’s annual conference on a panel about Felt Understanding. I applied because I had a hunch it was something affecty and relevant to my practice. My practice, such as this film and accompanying installation, is about a desire to manifest the hunch and understand it through the process. Rather than transporting the symbols to the command-post, perhaps we can experience them as integral to bodily experience. There seems to be a new materialist idea here that the body and the act of making itself is central to the generation of ideas within a temporal relationality. This assemblage model of fictioning is succinctly captured by D H Lawrence in the collection of his post-human writing the Phoenix:

The whole is a strange assembly of apparently incongruous parts, slipping past one another (1936: 536)

The methodology of the aesthetic machine became a means of constructing a realm for assembling all capacities for experience of felt intensity, and I was thus able to freely weave song writing into a visual digital tapestry. Perhaps song-writing is a way of understanding my approach to the fiction machine as generating a contingent or temporary realm of aesthetic ontology. I often feel that when asked about my songs it’s better to sing them – to accept the phenomena as a means of knowing. When you report back to the human command-post (outside of the song’s inside), ideas about understanding through relationality and feeling can be reduced to a valuing of flux over stasis. Deleuze’s invitation to reshape the model of thought is what the fiction machine gives me access to. The human command-post (possibly sometimes represented by the Woodal Owal in KPHO but not always) demands the spatial activity of shuttling from fixed point to fixed point where all sense data is converted to symbolic values for it to be processed cognitively. Kimey Peckpo’s skin is thermal underwear painted as a translation of one of Blake’s reimagined classical figures. This is an absurdist act of material vitality inviting the sense of unification in Blake’s paradigm-defusing fictional thought mode of fourfold vision,


"Now I a fourfold vision see

And a fourfold vision is given to me

Tis fourfold in my supreme delight

And three fold in soft Beulahs night

And twofold Always. May God us keep

From Single vision & Newtons sleep" Letters, To Butts, 22 Nov 1802 (1976: 210)


Blake’s aesthetic ontology emerges in a unified atmosphere of immanence, quite unlike the conceptual idea of connecting ideas as a mind map, because nothing was separate to begin with because we are in the middle of things and this is world Kimey Peckpo hatches out into. Kimey Peckpo could be seen as an attempt to manifest Blake’s radical empiricism, which has a similar unified register as Whitehead’s invitation to expand our modes of thought:

Connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types. It is of the essence of types, that they be connected. Abstraction from connectedness involves the omission of an essential factor in the fact considered. No fact is merely itself. The penetration of literature and art at their height arises from our dumb sense that we have passed beyond mythology; namely, beyond the myth of isolation. (1968: 9)

Spatial thinking of the fixed coordinate variety continually installs hierarchies and KPHO is my way of speculating about an aesthetic ontology where the processing is done within the emergence itself and the conceptual signifiers are footholds in a collective rock scrambling endeavour. I think now that KPHO was an attempt to express a temporal openness. The story was written as part of my 10-year practice of writing for 20mins upon waking and the idea was to keep writing until I felt the story was complete. I dared myself to continue beyond the point when my toes began to curl and my bottom shifted uneasily on my seat. The result would be, not a moral fable but the textual equivalent of a gongshi. My understanding of how this methodology might produce an artefact that continues to emerge and reveal new understanding was not fully formed but I knew that I needed to write it to work out what this could mean. My approach to writing the story was shaped by a sense that writing could be part of a materially vital approach rather than a synthesis of pregiven ideas. This mentality towards fiction as generative is embodied in Blake’s idea expressed in a letter to letter to Rev John Trusler in 1777 that ‘the imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself’. My sense that text and symbolic motifs could be haptic, imaginative material was clarified by the unclasping of signifiers displayed by Deleuze’s stage-maker bird harnessing,

the appropriation of something in order to use it in a completely different way… the base or the ground of art. Take anything and make it a matter of expression (2003: 349).

My awareness, then, of how the story and film would function was not complete when I created them, but I knew I wanted to make something emergent that would retain a fascination by feeling known yet alien. I didn’t want to be weird for the sake of it, but instead tried to follow a familiar feeling into the unknown. So now when I return to the story and the film, I can see how much of a part the act of walking and movement plays in its meaning (percolating feeling in my tummy). In the film Kimey can be seen stumbling along through the pink blancmange desert landscape digitally crafted for me by a lifelong friend, Benjamin Evenden, now working in in Egypt. I see Kimey like Kierkegaard in The Old Ways, “so overwhelmed with ideas” that he can “scarcely walk” (2013: 21). This stumble-walking occurs right after the hatching and the whole thing takes on the form of thought itself but not as a strange loop but as something always in the middle but outside of the causal shuttling from point to point that rejects felt or embodied understanding as folk-science. The film’s use of path walking and path forming occurred to me when reading the Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane who suggests, “paths are the habits of landscape. They are acts of consensual making.” Kimey finds himself in a blancmange desert where creating a path might be difficult but the text already feels as if the path was always there. The Old Ways also gave me an insight into my use of landscape in the story. The landscape is like a character in this sense – the ubiquitous consciousness of an all engulfing b-movie blob – but also a manifestation of the sense of emergence found in the model of Massumi’s thought in becoming (2002: 15) where there is no beginning only the middle of things. Steven Shaviro’s Discognition was also instrumental in animating my understanding of the blob organism’s nonhuman consciousness I intended to evoke with KPHO. In one chapter he asks how slime mould might:

Think and feel, and encounter the world? The organism known as Physarum Polycephalum is so strange that it seems like an alien life form from a science fiction novel (2015: 193)

The delay’s for taking stock and grieving brought upon us by the Covid 19 pandemic have allowed me to return to the film and rework some of the stitching. Having made a video for a song using the collaborative entanglement of the internet I was engaged by a friend’s performance that seemed to embody the same physical energy of deaf signing. I felt myself drawn to the possibilities for expression in this physical language. In my thesis 'The Vision of the Absurd' I discussed how part of my methodology has been shaped by my life-long deafness and late arrival in the fixed clarity of hearing aids. My education and social-life as a child were muffled but this, I speculated, gave me access to understanding the feeling of things as a strategy for filling in the gaps. It was only after art school that I entered the defined space of hearing hard sounding consonants designed to speed you through life like the info-graphic signs found in an airport. Ironically Kimey Peckpo strikes me as a kind of senseless character having no face and no obvious means of channelling sensory data. Instead they feel almost entirely immersed in sensation – a more visceral experience of the landscape than the refined data processing of the Spring Watch presenter, who despite their arm waving, embodies anthropocentric critical distance.


With these feelings in mind, I invited the above collaborator, writer Dee Davie, to contribute what she described as lackadaisical signing as a further deconstruction of the videos background and foreground landscape patina. Her signing is not entirely fictional, and it emerges wholly from the joy a physical engagement with the content in the same way that any humour in my practice is found not through a satirical reconfiguration but instead by descending to the state prior to linguistic order. As a fiction machine KPHO speculates that symbols are built into the nature of the cosmos and therefore by extension the human body but the trap of modernity is to think the symbolic as solely part of intelligent human ingenuity. Whitehead suggests that language arises from and works within bodily experience and offers a way of diffusing the split we have in thinking of it as a codified version of experience, “this general relation of words to things is only a particular instance of a yet more general fact” (1985: 13). KPHO operates as a fiction machine generating this symbolic mode of bodily experience.

My aim in making KPHO was to immerse myself in a speculative approach to inhabiting an aesthetic ontology via a methodology of feeling and sensation, which is not a rejection of linguistic concepts but an experiment in placing them within the context of felt understanding. In the introduction to Deleuze & Guattari and the Production of the New, Simon O’Sullivan points out that, “It is a belief in sensation as an antidote to our shame at being human that animates much of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on art” (2008: 13). My understanding of this statement comes not from a citation or borrowed knowledge but from having experienced it as a dislocated, stuttering and yet fully committed assembling of what I call a digital self-annihilation myth. In creating the story as a vinyl LP and video I was trying to summon the thrill I had felt as a child on hearing and seeing vividly coloured albums and television transmissions of stories that felt meaningful yet confusing because I wasn’t sure where their feeling of a familiar longing came from. Part of the doctorate artist's methodology is to seek out feedback from audience members. One suggestion was that my practice was a kind of “optimistic nihilism” and now when I see the entangled journey of Kimey Peckpo seeking a cuddle from Momo, I recall Simon O'Sullivan’s further suggestion that “art returned us to Nietzsche’s innocence of becoming and to the child’s wide-eyed visions of the eternal return.” (2008: 17)

References

  • Bivar V. (2015) Theories of Media available here: https://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/senses.htm

  • Debaise, D (2017) Nature as Event Duke University Press

  • Deleuze, G and Guattari, F (2003) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Continuum Press

  • Georgeson M. B. (2019) The Vision of The Absurd available here: https://repository.uel.ac.uk/item/872qq

  • Kazim A. Ed (1976) The Portable Blake, Penguin

  • Macfarlane R. (2013) The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Penguin

  • Massumi B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual, Duke University Press

  • McDonald E. D. ed. (1936) Phoenix. The posthumous papers of D. H. Lawrence Viking

  • O’Sullivan, Zepke S. eds.(2008) Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, Continuum

  • Shaviro, S (2015) Discognition Repeater Press

  • Whitehead, A N (1968) Modes of Thought Lecture 1: Importance Macmillan

  • Whitehead, A N (1985) Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect, Fordham University Press

  • Whitehead, A N (1979) Process and Reality Macmillan

  • Zepke, S (2005) Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari, Routledge

An interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed and open access academic journal devoted to pushing forward the approaches to and possibilities for publishing creative media-based research. 

IJCMR_Footer_Black.png
bottom of page