Arca∂ia
By Camila Chebez
With the reality of 350 million photos uploaded daily to Facebook alone, have the data-centres that store and preserve these materials become one giant landfill? What role has the individual played in the creation of this wasteland?
Arcadia speculates on a world where the virtual identity of the user and their footprint has conceived an accidental topography, turning stagnated accumulation into a regenerative ecosystem as the very hummus for a fertile land. Arcadia is a fractal haven for one's pixel-cells which have now begun to morph, fuse and evolve into new organic rearrangements.
The video piece I @te I is an inquiry into the state of current digital-debris and ego-feeding social platforms. Can it be that this cannibalistic behaviour and addictive consumption are the result of a Westernised fear of death with the hope for a digital afterlife? The word Arcadia is a name for an idyllic vision of unspoiled wilderness or an attractive secular alternative to Nevaeh (or garden of Eden). By using virtual reality in a Unity-generated environment, the visitor can glimpse and experience the dynamics of an alternative oasis — where immortality is not achieved, but instead paradise is restored to its biological cycles of decay and renewal.
Research
Images can be seen as a form of memory of (and for) humanity — a way of preservation. The 'memory' of nature in biological terms is inscribed in DNA. This is how nature archives its information so that it won't occupy space, won't get lost and won't become waste. Evolution has limited and eliminated all but that which is not essential. As a species we have become producers of these by-products that do not fit into the logic of cyclical renewal, accumulating to the point of eventual interference by becoming hazards in the way of living organisms.
After requesting personal data from the designer's main social platforms (including Facebook, Google and Instagram) they were struck by how much image content had been preserved, spanning back to their childhood. The proposed intention of the research is to envision new ways of processing the years of accumulated pixels to the point of decomposition as a means of placing this digital hummus back into the logic of nature.
Sources
[1] Emanuele Coccia (2020),METAMORPHOSIS, 16th talk from RIBOCA2 online series. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3t1fq7a5Yc
[2] Marvin Heiferman (2013), The River. Fotomuseum Winterhur. Available at: https://www.fotomuseum.ch/de/2013/11/05/the-river/
[3] Benjamin Bratton (2016), The Stack We Have and The Stack To Come. The Gray Area Festival. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRiAF6ILpxw&list=LL&index=86&t=92s
[4] Jorge Luis Borges (1949), The Immortal "The Immortal", § IV, in The Aleph (1949); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions. Article about it available at: https://alexsager.com/2016/08/13/jorge-luis-borges-city-of-the-immortals-utopias-and-dystopias-5/
[5] Allison Meier (2013), Documenting the Digital Degradation of Images in Project LOSS. Hyperallergic. Available at: https://hyperallergic.com/96925/documenting-the-digital-degradation-of-images-in-project-loss/
[6] Hieronymus Bosch, (1510) The Garden of Earthly Delights, Museo del Prado, Madrid.
[7] Ali Eslami (2017), FalseMirror.net . Available at: https://alllesss.com/false-mirror/
[8] Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács (2019), Forest on Location, exhibition view Point Cloud, Old Growth, Foam Photography Museum Amsterdam. Available at: https://akinci.nl/artists/persijn-broersen-margit-lukacs/
[9] Michiel Vandevelde (2018), 'Eating Each Other', Kunsthal Extra City. Available at: https://extracitykunsthal.org/en/exhibitions/eating-each-other
Excerpts from Sources
For Emanuele Coccia, all living bodies, present, past and future, are the same life that is transmitted from body to body, from species to species, from era to era. Coccia argues that metamorphosis is the relationship that unites all living beings with the planet, and that from this viewpoint, life is a metaphysics of mixture perpetuating itself through the very circle of mutation, nutrition and sexuality. [1]
The Stack is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. Interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales, it shows how we can better build, dwell within, communicate with, and govern our worlds. [3]
There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. [4]Data
Prototypes & Experiments
These prototypes and experiments explore digital and physical methods of processing, eroding, composting and digesting images.
To consume oneself means cannibalising the alter-ego. Analysing the way image filters and profiles contributes to the formation of an idealised, fictional self.
Giving shape to Arcadia: the genesis of a world whose topography distorts the agglomeration of the images collected.
