Thoughts on programming made for the installation "Persona" of Concha Jerez and José Iges
"A finger is needed to point the moon" (zen proverb)
The interactive design of this installation has its roots in the idea that the visitor, far from being the protagonist who struggles with the controls in order to achieve a certain result, instead becomes a catalyst that unleashes with his actions unexpected and incomprehensible reactions of which he may even end up being the actual victim.
We permanently produce an elaboration of meaning in our actions. A elaboration of meaning that answers a need for orientation, firstly, in relation to itself. And, in turn, in that activity, we discover and construct ourselves as we contemplate ourselves in our permanent actionn in our constant production.
The constant production of individual actions can therefore be better understood as a realization of a parallel self-observation, by which a reference that serves as a support for future actions is produced. Autopoietic production cannot be separated from the self-observation and self description operations.
The sensors, scattered throughout the installation to gather information, alert the system to the presence of activity and send the necessary signal to set a random mechanism in motion that follows its own rules. On passing through a certain place, requests to trigger audio, video and lighting processes are activated. The preferences organized by the system to establish its own inner homeostasis select and direct those distracted requests towards various kinds of filters that nay change their final destination and even dismiss their claims. Thus, the two systems converse with one another according to their own needs.
The "sensory organs" of both are like the stomach's lining, since they work as filters in order to protect the system from the violence or toxicity of the environment. On one hand, they should be fit to admit the piece of "news", but on the order they also should be capable of retraining excessive impact. This is performed through a variation of the organ's response according to the intensity of the stimulus. The logarithmic scale precisely corresponds to this situation: the effect of incoming energy doesn't increase according to its magnitude, but only to the logarithm of that magnitude. The difference of effect between one hundred and one thousand incoming energy units, will equate the difference of effect between one unit and ten units.
The information that the system can accept /and will enable it to survive the interactive situation) conforms to the logarithmic scale. Thus, in the system there is a great sensitivity to very small impacts, which is not needed to evaluate stringers ones. This, for instance, would allow us to detect any murmur and, at the same time, not being deafened as we hear our own voice when we scream.
Therefore, from the redundancy obtained in the interaction with the system no evident objectives necessarily follow nor meaningful chains can be easily constructed. It could be said that the information lodged in the resulting hole forms according to the principle: "a difference that makes a difference".
And the observer's peculiar sensitivity is what determines which differences constitutee a difference for him. In a sense, the spectator finds himself before the void of interactive meaning, face to face with hiw own chains of meaning elaboration, his peculiar constructive epistemology.
Every piece of digital information relates to that "difference". In the relationships between map and territory (whatver the kind and in the broadest sense), that which passes from the territory to the map is always and necessarily a piece of news of the difference. If the territory is homogeneous, and can be a partially subjective quality, there will be no marks in the map.
Besides, we could say that what the spectator "perceives" is an image constructed by means of processes in which he doesn't participate on a conscious level. It would be insane to say that "he" construct those images. He hardly has any control over the making of such images. In this perspective, volume and shapes appear situated according to the mechanism that emotionally regulates where conscious attention should be directed to in order to create a resultant image already permeated by the dialogue between form and background, and it is almost impossible to predict in each case when will emerge a variable with the capacity to destabilize the current homeostatic process and become a detectable difference.
According to how information operates in our interior, a revision of the description we make of our inner state emerges, reflecting the contact with the environment from which sensory stimuli arises. A circular paradox that belongs to a wider process, in which we are contained, that permanently revises those descriptions.
Thus, we walk through the installation lead by our own algorithms which create for us a map of what we see. The meaning provisions they obtain generate, through an isomorphic process, true chains of meaning that constitute an underpinning for our acts. One of the most relevant is the fact that our reality needs to be permanently constructed from our own intention, and that construction, in turn, serves as orientation for the image of "self", central support for the "person" concept.There doesn't seem to exist any psychic nor organic substratum for such a concept. Instead, it could rather be an artifice of observation through which we interpret (digitalize) what we perceive. Therefore, the "person" concept would be permanently reconstructed. Such a simplification serves the orientation adaptational beds, providing a sufficient conceptual framework to generate the "person" feeling.
This permanent illusion would be reised through the feedback with the environment, constantly showing relevant data, many of which would be notced for the first time, putting forward new turns in the process of meaning elaboration we are dealing with. Identity, associated to such schematism, is arrived at by linking our own operations and thus becoming different in its own productive idiosyncrasy until it achieves the suitable mechanisms in perception orientation that may simplify the chive of behavior, decisions and general dynamic.
Thus, it could be said that what we finally obtain simply is a not too sharp image of ourselves and we react before it.
An anecdote about Picasso says that, as he was traveling by train, he was addressed by a stranger who asked him: "Why don't you paint things the way they really are?" Picasso hesitated for a second and said he didn't understand what this gentleman meant; then the stranger produced a picture of his wife from his wallet "I mean something like this. That's how she is", said the man. Picasso coughed irresolutely and finally said. "Well, she is quite small and rather flat".