CHArt TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Seeing…Vision and Perception in a Digital Culture |
G. Brett Phares, Marist College, USA
Attentional Surplus: Ambient Media Art and the Myth of Looking
‘Looking sideways, always sideways, rejecting fixity of attention, drifting from the object to the context, escaping from the source of habit, from the customary seems to have become impossible. The perceived world ceases to be deemed worthy of interest... ‘
-Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of DisappearanceThe world floods our senses, and were it not for a set of natural neurological processes, we would lie prostrate in a house of mirrors, mesmerised by the unending stimuli. Ironically, the same brain processes that allow us to get on with our daily life also blind us from seeing much of it. Mass narcissism, enabled by an always-on, highly customisable media engine migrating us to like-minded social communities (physical and virtual), further obscures our individual and collective abilities to attend to the world.
In this environment, different forms of normative subversion become necessary to reveal the world as it is and break up the 'like me' discussion. Following a brief interdisciplinary survey in Human-Computer Interaction [HCI] research, advertising and musicology, I will showcase different art work, from Jill Magid to Olafur Eliasson, to equally useful but lesser-known artists (including myself), as examples of ambient media art [AMA]. AMA pre-empts the neurological and environmental processes that shape our mental bureaucracy, to go beyond ‘our right to blindness’ as postulated by Paul Virilio and the Neural Darwinism foregrounds our attention, with something that unlocks fruitful opportunities in individual growth and social discourse.