The subConch is an interactive installation currently in development. It involves using EEG sensors to allow cognitive control over sound to produce a unique aesthetic experience. Visit the project site
Artist Statement
Occasionally we long for a connection to nature believed to be severed by the introduction of modern technology. We romanticise a past where humans lived more in accordance with the needs of the earth. We yearn for a more tactile and genuine interaction with our surroundings. We want authenticity. For the lack of this we blame modernity and are often unwilling to see that we are less of an alienated captive than we like to believe. Our interaction with technology has come to shape how we think of ourselves, others and our surroundings. It has shaped our language and our culture and has been deeply embedded in our societies from the very beginning. Concepts such as authenticity also hold an ideological baggage that can and should be deconstructed. Can we claim that drawing a line with a pencil (indeed a tool) is a more genuine experience than writing twenty lines of computer code to produce a line? No, they are just different. And what about the experiencing of the line? The hundreds of luminescent pixels on a black screen indeed have a different aesthetic than the thousands of graphite particles embedded in the fabric of the sheet of paper, but we cannot claim that one is objectively preferable to the other. They are both equally present and equally real. Yet they are not interchangeable. They each hold a unique aesthetic quality that gives way to a unique aesthetic experience.
The bond to nature was severed long before the age of modernity, and perhaps there never was a bond. Perhaps we were “corrupted” with the introduction of language itself, “the Law of the Father”; a language with a grammar that imposes a subject/object relation between us and the world around us – giving birth to instrumental rationality and science.
This science and its offspring permeate our modern society completely. Our experiences are saturated with mediating technologies. We are in essence cyborgs. Our cell phones, our keyboards are extensions of our own body, with the borders blurred. Still, there’s a way to go before we are completely integrated. This might be more due to bad design than lack of technological progress. For instance, a keyboard combination is much more like an extension of your mind than the cumbersome hand-eye coordination needed to point and click on a button. But what if the input device was to be removed altogether, or at least rendered “invisible”? What if we could just think of something and the device would just make it happen. Or that the technology knew how we felt about something and then acted accordingly. Would that make us feel alienated or empowered? The answer is obvious. Our culture is drunk on technopower, fuelling the hubris of man; we’ve become almighty deities since we started burning the black gold. Cyborg existence is, and has always been, the ultimate goal, the final separation from the animal kingdom, the escape from our bodies, the escape from mortality. To be human is to be machine. To be machine is to be God.