[...] an interface to communicate with the world outside of the cell--a complex membrane--to talk with the materials alien to itself. Interface is a critical point of intersection between different life worlds, fields, or levels of organization. They are the areas in which social friction can be experienced and where diffusion of new technology is leading to structural discontinuities (which can be either positive or negative), the interface is where they will occur. The argent issue of interfaces in social interaction and flow between human animal, nonhumans, and computers is today becoming a zone of transition of ephemeral technologies, physical contact, socio-political boundaries, and metaphor-representation.
Since antiquity, representation has been the foundational concept of aesthetics and semiotics. In the modern era, it has also become a crucial concept in political theory. In a discussion of law and ethnography, Clifford Geertz calls into question the Western distinction between matters of fact and matters of value. “Facts and law we have perhaps everywhere; their polarization we perhaps have not.” Geertz's hermeneutic approach leads him to focus on the relation between the grounding of norms and the representation of fact. Therefore, he concludes, representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.
The performance-talk is divided into three tangled narratives, one the social mode of traveling that includes the child--the opposite of the lonely masculine traveler--based on the real experience and a personal story in a trip to Amazon in Colombia with Karin Demuth and her three years old boy--Hanno--, second a multi-headed reading of technologies of interfacing within computer culture and the worlds of other species, the meaning of inter-facing with the other, and third a visual representation of the highly technical images recorded by Kinect infrared 3D-scanner/motion-detector. The result of the visualization is a heavily glitchy image, which aims in the performance to link the spatial practice to the perceived and the representational spaces to the lived. Affirming the “unnaturalness” of the image makes it a transposition of universal means of communication--the language--that would like to provide a direct, unmediated, and accurate representation of the jungle.
The performance is an engagement with the notion of companion species elaborated by Donna Haraway, in an experience of walking in a tropical jungle with a computer in one hand and in the other hand the hand of the human child. The work deals with questions of the other-space that is mentally filled with projections and projects. The recording of the walking in the rain forest --as spatial and sensual experience-- is thus dematerialized and has acquired a digital character. The dense and hot environment of the Amazon is replaced by an abstract graphic structure, thus bringing a new understanding of the locality of the walk. The noise and the randomness of the technical coloring the surface of the jungle provoke an aesthetic fascination, and an appropriation of the imposible image of the forest.



Traveling to the Amazon to experience its radical Otherness is a European tradition. It unintentional affirms the ideology of a “state of nature” that is prior to culture.


Lacan: i am led to regard the function of the mirror stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality - or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.

This developement is experienced as temporal dialectic that decisively projects the function of the individual into history. the mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation - and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body image to a form of its totality that i shall call orthhopaedic - and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. thus, to break out of the circle of the Innenwelt into the Umwelt generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications.

Electronic Reserve Text: from Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience

Delivered at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zurich, July 17, 1949

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Flusser, Gestures - beyond machines (reading)


the project investigates the way in which Seifee as an artist engages tactics of fieldwork, embodiment and materiality (in a manner that reveals or instigates processes of knowing).
(In this moment of increasing standardization and specialization regarding how people learn, art is a space for innovative thinking and experimentation outside given frameworks.)


...our ability to share the experience of the habits of the world that we discover. (Kohn)

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Campbell on Harman's philosophy
(problem of) object-oriented ontology as social theory [insights of object-orientation mechanically applied to the social by Harman, “immaterialism"]
•innovative adaptation of phenomenology
•critique of how objects have been failed by philosophy
•insistence upon an aesthetic attitude of investigation
--but-->
•object-oriented social theory lacks the rigor and imaginative potential to envision the ontology of the social
•the way object-oriented ontology is stuck in a no-man's-land of not-quite-nonhuman-not-quite-human
•as ooo enters social theory it commits a performative fallacy --> missing the fundamental starting point of social theory: ***objects come into the social world as expressions of (negotiated, perceptual, political, agentic) value*** [social theory is fundamentally predicated on the socius --> social theory is about the association between things =/= homogenous things]
}=/= Campbell's *posthuman relationism*: another form that better understands the abyssal point between the non-human and the human


(2007 conference) speculative realism {antipathy to “human-centred” intellectual traditions} ~=> object-oriented ontology

(objectivity =/= obliqtivity)
Harman's immaterialism: realism without materialism : objects can only ever be captured obliquely

object-oriented ontology's development:
•characterised by a consistent lament for how post-Kantian philosophy in general (Continental philosophy in particular) has abandoned hope of describing objects as objects
•the real: absolute autonomy of objects (withdraw from subjects)
◦objects: sleeping giants holding their forces in reserve
•prefer the excess of the aesthetic over the reduction by the scientific (materialism's tendency to reduce objects to a primary substratum ==> rendering them susceptible to mathematical capture) --Campbell--> *aesthetic foundationalism* [==engender==> an attitudinal response to objects] (@apass, this is also a problem in artistic research):
◦aesthetic appreciation above the reduction of the phenomenon achieved by science --> “art (art criticism) is a style that gets us closer to the nature of objects” (+ bad example of Clement Greenberg)
◦(to make the invisible deep conditions of objects perceivable) prioritize *allusive style* above *literal description*
•claims to post-phenomenological sovereignty
•over-mining approach to knowledge production =/= objects's surplus of reality
◦methodological approach which encounters objects as objects (=/= actor network theory's manner of focusing upon an object's effects) [+ bad example of Dutch East India Company]--Campbell--> object-oriented social theory produces a rudimentary narrative with no discernible innovation on the level of:
◾objects --> the actors are recognisable companies, personalities, infrastructures
◾relations --> the major symbiotic moments are legal contracts, infrastructure and formative moments in a human's life
◾time --> there is standard chronology from birth to death, with emphasis on human-centric causes and effects
•“social theory = a mode of knowledge production” (=/= a decontextualised reflection of the world) ==> withdrawal: a psychological alibi, an aesthetic (=/= cognitive concept) ==stimulate==> an attitudinal response: humility [+ passivity?] in the face of overwhelming non-human existence [~ appeal ==produce==> a paternalistic-arrogant-instr[...]