What has Information Overload Done to us?

In light of my recent reading on our contemporary technological and visual overload I decided to put together a performance that would re-create this experience of being bombarded by information. I set up a running projection, changing frame every ten seconds. The imagery was a melting pot of historical references, my own work, stolen internet images, book covers and magazine clips in no particular order. Over this projection I gave a lecture, the notes are as follows:

(First slide stated, “What has information overload done to us?”)

1. This is the television slogan for a search engine (google-esque) – apt (the idea of the search engine is) increasing our information overload while capitalising on a fear of doing so at the same time!

2. Global phenomenon created by technology is something that I am really interested in within my work

3. Grant Kester – Conversation Pieces 2005

4. More antagonistic inter-human relationships than Baurriaud’s Relational Aesthetics

-Art’s role to shock us out of perceptual complacency, challenging not just modernism’s fetishism of the visual but also challenging the way an audience related to the work (and can be forced and manipulated to do so) CONJUNCTION WITH ARTICLE on sight (Frieze Magazine)

5. “Only 20% of the neural pathways from the eyes travel to the visual cortex, 80% come from other areas of the brain, such as those in charge of memory.” “If reality is based on snippets from memory about constants in the universe then what is reality, and how can we be certain to possess an accurate perception of it? Vision is a dependable (yet inaccurate) depiction of the world; the brain provides much omitted information to create a complete, coherent idea of reality. If reality is 80% memory its potential for instability increases.”

6. The artist Keith Tyson talks about this destabilisation of our understanding of one unified reality as a direct result of technological information overload

7. (Kester) – Privilege as artists to be able to pick indiscriminately from various disciplines – science, philosophy, history… BUT also fact and fiction

8. specialised knowledge can be a confinement but art can assess the interconnections between various disciplines and is in a unique position to present problems differently, ‘seen in a new light’

9. Hirschhorn – the trick is not to make people see but to make people think

(MY OBJECTIVE)

10. Make an audience actively engage with whatever point I am trying to make (not necessarily the pieces in front of them) – normally to do with our contemporary situation, (point at which this is really hard within the gallery cultural highway) map, guided tour, audio guide, shop, restaurant, BRAND

11. HOW DO I PROPOSE TO DO THIS(active engagement)?

12. Returning to Kester – indiscriminately picking from disciplines BUT ALSO MEDIUMS (for example)

-Reaction to white cube gallery – I used traditional materials to subvert their inherent associations... OBSTRUCT THE NATURAL ROUTE OF THE VIEWER

-As people interact with the work they would also interact with the idea – fox in the gallery space (Francis Alys Nightwatch)

HOWEVER awareness of surveillance control required a more direct approach – the pseudo lecture, the alarms going off – MEDIUM SPECIFIC TO IDEA

RECENTLY...

13. Derrida, second life of outdated objects – the frame, the camera the screen –they become symbols of something else (as they move into history), not interested in the time that they now represent but more that they are defining markers of a time passing

14. “A blank canvas, before a brush lands on it, contains certain assumptions implicit in the art of its era.” – O’Doherty

15. Technology and globalisation – time is passing faster, there is no linear history, the world is paradoxically expanding and shrinking

16. Objects become signs before they have time to reach the mass market consumption

17. Notion of second life is becoming more relevant

18. Laura Mulvey – rear projection, (within old Hollywood films) creating this cinematic sublime and flattening iconic characters against a back drop (Marilyn Monroe against Niagara falls) Niagara 1953 – elevating the idea of the star

19. artist Mark Lewis, taking this idea Rear Projection: Molly Parker 2007

20. (Visual Culture) Madonna video ‘Don’t Tell Me’

21. I have been particularly affected by this idea of a second life when I started to think about documentation, the space between the document and the act and how rather than one representing the other they can become polar opposites

22. Second life may have nothing to do with initial intention

23. A lot of my work is quite exprience based... can this second life be pre-empted, manipulated (through what I chose to keep or throw out)

Finally....

We have come to this bizarre juncture within art, why I chose this format…

It is no longer possible to say, “This is my work, this is what it is about, this is where it came from when we are so under fire from visual and technological information.”