Stare. Print. Blue. - Voyeuring the apparatus​

Performance-installation

 

International Digifest Toronto

Date: May 7-9 2015

Venue: Corus Key Toronto

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Slowness is one of the biggest provocations possible today. We live in times of rapid acceleration. In physics, acceleration is the rate at which the velocity of an object/body changes over time. But acceleration is also present in the rapid capitalist production that is heating up the scales of desire and consumerism while destroying the resources of our planet. Everything needs to happen in an instant and it needs to be translated into results, products, and real-time ranking. Data streams are racing through our bodies and through the machines/apparatuses/computers that we use and mostly don't understand. We're starting to wear them as wearable technology, providing ourselves with constant statistics on our being, thinking, and feeling. No time for process, for critical making, creation, experience, contemplation. Brecht, writing on taking the time to think about the relationship between artists' naïve assumptions of independence and their dependence on a socio-cultural apparatus within which they work, comes to the conclusion: Thinking that they are in possession of an apparatus, which in reality owns them, they defend an apparatus over which they no longer have any control. (Brecht GW 17, pp.1005f.) The "Blue Brain Project" is currently trying to create a synthetic, computer-based human brain. Banking machines radiate blue light non-stop. Smart phone apps like the color blue. Let's stare into the apparatus and see the desire for the color blue evolve in a woman-machine creature, a modern-day Centauris' virtual acceleration and material mess colliding in slow-mo. Patience. Anxiety. Fear. Fascination. Endurance. You will be on the street, staring into the machine monitor/window until the obvious blurs and starts to make sense. Take the time. Be brave. Survival in/with slowness. Slowness is beauty. Go slow: A form of industrial action in which employees work at a deliberately slow pace. (A Dictionary of Business and Management, 2014)