Superficial Blue
Summary
The project Superficial Blue explores the relationship between the human and technology not only from a technical point of view, but also approaches to this relationship from an aesthetic and cultural perspective. It focuses on language as a cultural catalyst and binder between the human, matter and environment.
Description of project
Superficial Blue was presented as an interactive audio and video installation, from October to November 2010.
The exhibition takes its name from the chess-player computer Deep Blue, an iconic piece of artificial intelligence which defeated a world chess champion in 1997. The installation is a free recreation based on Gary Kasparov experiences the night before he loses the famous match against this computer.
The show questions where the boundary between the human and the technological lies. If technology becomes a new sense, in the new border between the human and the world, then this border does not really exist; tech¬nology becomes, not an extension, but a part of our senses, another sense such as taste, touch or balance. It is part of our memory. So technology is not in contradiction to human nature, rather a reaf¬firmation of our limitations and our potential. Technology helps us understand ourselves, since we can only understand ourselves in relation to the inhuman. The work Superficial Blue enhances the importance of this. Commenting on Cinema1 – Deleuze’s treaty on how the crea¬tivity of the brain is confronted with machines – the writer Claire Colebrooke writes that:
“Only when the human encounters the inhuman will we know what the human body can do, and only when life opens itself up to violence, destruction and zero intensity will we be able to discern just what counts as ‘a’ single life-its precarious distance and emergence from all its potential not to be.”
Colebrook, Claire: Deleuze: A guide for the perplexed, Continuum, London, 2006, p.4.
In this way the show discusses our relationship with technology and reflects upon the border between the technological and the human; an interactive video of a man turning in circles under the water is exposed. The spectator is encouraged to interact with the video of the installation by using a computer keyboard. The image of the human being becomes clearer as the words are appearing on the video. At the same time the film plays faster or slower depending on the amount of letters on the video projection. Language can act as an interface; this is the basic idea in the exhibition.
Type of work
Art exhibition, Interactive video installation
Published in
Gallery Konstepidemin, Gothenburg, Sweden
Other description
Mixmedia, dimension variable, video projection, Interactive HD video loop, sound 5.1
Date
2010-10-30Creator
Munoz, Marco Antonio
Keywords
Artistic Research
New Media Art
interactive
ritual
interfaces
art and technology
Publication type
artistic work
Language
eng