5,710
edits
Changes
no edit summary
[[Home | <<< back to Wiki Home]]
=Abstract=
My dissertation project, ''A Machine for Living In'', places intelligent systems in domestic space to explore the nature of cognition and identity.
Building on my work with imaginary relationships and constructed intimacies, I turn in the current project from explorations of individual attachments to the home as a system encompassing multiple relationships and flows. Offering a multitude of material anchors and cultural narratives as points of engagement, the home becomes a framework for improvisation and a space to perform within. Architectural details and domestic dramas excised from the flow of the everyday become the events and occasions to stage my machinic interventions.
Drawing on Bachelard’s topoanalysis (“the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives”) I take a systems approach to the study of the home and the network of relationships within. Where do systems understandings lose their traction in engagement with the messy conditions of home, family, love, and desire? Where do they succeed? What truth is there in Corbusier’s idea of “the home as a machine for living in”?
Embracing tensions between past and future, self and other, biography and fiction, the imagined and real, I rehearse possible futures and perform possible selves through the pieces I construct. Staging my efforts as real interventions in lived space, and restaging them to produce a composite, fictional “home” in the exhibition venue, I push a critical implication of my identity in my efforts, along with the home and machines within.
=Methodology=
Placed in closed loops with domestic inhabitants, the intelligent systems I construct foster a reciprocal examination of human and machine. How are our ideas of cognition, perception, and desire changing with the advent of intelligent machines? Which, if any of these, remain strictly the domain of the human? What are the special capabilities, wants, needs proper to each? Their objects of desire? Where do the blurred boundaries between self and other lie? I will harness the productive friction arising from the substitution of machine for human (and human for machine). Given the explicit comparison of one to the other, a mutual diagnosis and critical appraisal arises from the incommensurability of experience and inequality of terms.
Techno-poetic methods.
Machine observers (auditory, visual).
Speech recognition technologies
Speech synthesis technologies
Database structure and query
Computer vision (active shape models, trackers, etc)
Literary
Bildungsroman, Küntslerroman
fictionalized autobiography
structured by recurrent imagery (Austerlitz, Rings of Saturn)
memory of place.
home as the site of development.
=Sites=
kitchen
bedroom / master bedroom
bathroom (home sewage)
children’s room
basement (cellar)
attic
family room (fireplace)
living room
dining room
home office
garage
home theater
home exercise room/gym
the drawing room.
home loan
home video
house fire
home wiring plan
home network
home sewage system / septic tank / septic field
dog house
closet
=References=
As the son of Robert Ryman, it is my job to walk in his footsteps to the front door of the family mansion and burn it to the ground; then claim that the conflagration is not so much a rejection or celebration but a negotiation-worth-having, which must be lived consciously in the space between contradictions. In this sense, there is no such thing as contradiction, only the fire that burns amidst the networks made up of them. (WP.L, 2005)
