cycle 2 -simultaneous seeing : the digital self is real
Posted: November 22, 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Cycle 2 Documentation
11.22.2022
Katie O’Loughlin
For cycle two, I worked on creating a malleable environment that was affected by the choices people made within the space. I continued to play with feedback loops, although they weren’t the main focus anymore because of the variety of other choices that could be made. I also continued to think about the impact and effect of seeing and being seen, of framing a body other than your own, and of experiencing the digital image of your body as something less familiar, although not necessarily less real.
In the space, there were three cameras all attached to live feed video being projected in the space. One camera was being projected onto the large flat scrim via a capture card, one was being projected onto the large, curved scrim via NDI watcher, and one was hidden behind the curtains and projecting directly through a pico projector onto a small box. I implemented the pico projector in the corner of the space to play with scale. Where it was located, it would hide the person from the rest of the play space, giving a break from what could be chaotic experimentation.
The main area was carved into a circular-ish space with two curtains pulled around the curved track. The back scrim and one of the circle scrims had the two different live feeds playing on them. People were allowed to pick up both cameras and choose how to frame the room and the people in it. In the middle of the space there was a table with a magnifying glass, some shiny emergency blankets, and some plastic Fresnel lenses that warped and focused objects/people as you looked through them. These items were objects for the participants to play with to filter the images on the screens and change how they were viewing the space.
This cycle definitely didn’t have an end goal – there was nothing I was secretly trying to get the participants to realize. My research is invested in shifting perspective and understanding how perception affects experience. I am curious about how humans can be many things at once, including perceived as many things at once. I find myself invested in discovering how to hold multiple truths at once. As I watched the participants maneuver through the space, filter the images, and choose different framings, I was really interested in seeing the similarities and differences between the image on the screen, and the person I was seeing right in front of me. All of this work is really making me consider how integrated our digital lives are in society right now, and how we have a lot of agency in how we present ourselves, and others, to the world on digital platforms.
How does how we frame ourselves and our world affect other’s perceptions as they look into our world? What does real and fake mean in this day and age? If our digital selves are a representation of our identity, what is the impact on our own perception of self? How much choice do we get in how other people see us, or experience us? How carefully are we holding the idea that how we perceive someone else changes our reality of them, which in turn may change theirs as well?
I like giving participants agency in this work, to make choices and hold their own responsibility. As I do work with the digital body, I continue to be aware of the power structures, hierarchies, and delicate spaces that arise easily within this topic. One of the aspects of this cycle that I found really enjoyable was to see how all the participants interacted with each other much more than cycle one, and how I got to see the interconnectedness between choices and how that impacted the space as a whole.