Research

Abstract

“Another world is possible.” This was protesters’ simple yet elegant battle cry during demos around the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Asking how we might “inherit from Seattle,” Pierre Signarre and Isabelle Stengers write that these words’ “power is not that of a thesis or a program, whose value would be judged by its plausibility. It doesn’t authorize any kind of triumphant putting into perspective or offer any kind of guarantee.” [6] Instead, those who voice this cry give rise to an opening for the possibilities of other worlds. If another world is possible, how do we want to live, and how do we want to deal with money, debt, labor, and value?

Concept

Mutual Space is an immersive media environment and apparatus for fabulating new models of economic transaction. Movement sensed by an overhead camera is processed by custom Max/MSP/Jitter code. The optical flow drives multi-channel gestural sound, as well as a fluid simulation and several species of particle systems which are colorized and projected onto the floor. Actions like moving, speaking, sitting, napping etc. in this environment effect forces in the fluid system, which carries clusters of colored particles projections across the floor.

Team

Garrett Laroy Johnson: Research Assistant Ph.D | Synthesis

this work is hosted and supported by Synthesis Center at ASU

additional support from an 2018 experimental fellowship from the ASU Lab for Critical Technics