http://add-art.org/4226/shows/4226
BY JULLIA KIM
The idea for subterraneans, started as a poem which I wrote to encapsulate the disparate ideas at play in the space of banner ads: the random juxtapositions of interfaces streaming instantaneous information, the interruption of public and private spaces, the porn industry at the forefront of this technology, and how our senses filter the inundation to stitch a comprehensive narrative together.
On average, people spend 8 hours of their day in front of digital interfaces, navigating this virtual terrain. If all technology is an extension of our psychic or physical self, then what is the reality of our existence in the World Wide Web?
Our limits to know the world, are our own limits. I wanted to expand those limits, moving beyond the conscious into the unconscious to find insight on how to navigate this new territory.
Robyn Davidson, an Australian writer best known for her book Tracks, about a 1,700-mile trek across the deserts of west Australia writes in her Quarterly Essay on nomads:
One could say that the Dreaming is a spiritual realm which saturates the visible world with meaning; that it is the matrix of being; that it was the time of creation; that it is a parallel universe which may be contacted via the ritual performance of song, dance and painting; that it is a network of stories of heroes – the forerunners and creators of contemporary man.
I invited 8 visionaries whose works deal with play and exploring the edges of dreaming and waking, public and private, past and future to respond to my poem in hopes to create a songline of dreams, the beginnings of a map to the ever expanding virtual landscape that incorporates the unconscious.
Dreaming
the world awake:
A collide-oscope
distorted over many retellings.
Interfaced situations,
reflecting patterns,
creating the medium to
define your role,
a place for everything and
everything in its place,
softening the limits,
of explicit rigidity,
closing the gap between
thought and action.
