A Word About Technological Chimeras
Thus the avoidance of contact with the real world and with concrete persons enforces the subject’s dominant position in his or her own world of imagination. The dissonance and noise of the material world, which cannot be reduced to a discursive construction, and the thrilling strangeness of the other are both successively obliterated in favor of a solipsistic turning to an inner world, accompanied by the illusion of control. (Barbara Becker 365)
As I sit contemplating my art practice, one that began some thirty-two years ago, I realize that although my choice of mediums have changed over the past years, my desire to understand the paradoxical and critical intersections of technology and humans have not. This relationship of technology to humans has continued to inform my research and art practice in how our dependency on technology to record, transcribe, and disseminate memory as information may in turn, mediate the experiencing of the world, and reconstruct what is real. Furthermore, I believe that the mediated intervention and overlaying of technology in relationship to our personal and social experiencing – through augmented realities – has begun to redefine our understanding and relationship of what it may mean to be human; bringing us closer to what I refer to as technological chimeras.
The exploration of augmented realities and chimerical processes through technology are framed within my work as poetic and phenomenological overlays: ones which infer human presence or lack there of, in conjunction with what I refer to as Event Memory and the Ever Present. Event Memory explores how an event may be seen, experienced and understood – communally verses personally. Ever Present, explores how the experiencing of an event mediated through technology may collapse time – past, present and future – onto itself, causing the experiencing of time to become one of a perpetual present and now.
My interest of technology’s relationship to human stems from my own childhood experiences, specifically my life long inter-dependency and relationship to television. These concerns have also come to inform my methodology within my art practice, that is, in the appropriation, deconstruction, and reconfiguration of specific elements of technology in order to generate a critical discourse regarding our socio-cultural relationship to technological interventions.
During my MFA studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada (2008-2010), my creative process has focused on the appropriation of common everyday consumer objects, such as TV sets, computers, and DVD players which I then dismantle and re-deploy into what I call ‘chimerical others.’ By ‘chimerical others’ I mean a reconstruction of machine objects and their parts into hybrid sculptural objects and installations. These machine objects are electronic or digitally based media systems used to record, transcribe, and disseminate memory as information. Memory transcribed as information – electronically and digitally – I believe, extends the sense of self and identity, and in so doing, may initiate a desire – personally and communally – to exchange physical identity in favour of a virtual one and in turn trigger the possibilities of technological chimeras.
