Brook Konia

Affective Resolutions( );

Affective Straight
Projection on screen protrusions.

Social cognition is how people perceive their social worlds and attend to, store, remember and use information about other people and species in a social world. Human presence is immediate to our creation, the inevitable pairing for survival builds local language rules, the discrepancy of preferential paradigms, spoken noises and facial expression - patterns of understanding that prepare the human for a social future. 

With continuous technological advancements, western societies have built the human body to exist between physical and virtual worlds. With its capacity for movement and sensation, the body is inside a contemporary screen culture of excessive information sharing and image broadcasting. Social situations with language rules of conversation and interaction have changed to virtual experiences. ‘Affective Resolutions ();’ explores relationships between the virtual interface and people.

Using touch-sensitive input technology for real-time performance, a language of colour and shape is generated as a projection of light to bring the discussion of dialogue into the space. Directed toward screen protrusions I introduce the viewer to the internal pathways technology uses to exchange data from executed input. The projections travelling through blank areas inform the interjections of junk-space and particular positions within a place. The relationship of each shape is by set prefixes. Each occurrence is a calculated emulation of a shape, trading RGB codes and reformatting itself based on interaction with the person in the room.

Touch screens, switches and sensors are nothing new to today’s audience. The touch screen’s history, mapping acoustic waves since E A Johnson’s model developed in 1965, provides an efficient coupling between man and machine. Object response activates sensory displacement into this active engagement with visual and tactile stimulation. With open availability to input, interaction gives design influence over the programmed projection - a conversation evaluated by the viewer to perform with the computer.

“Where you would sit in the cinema would dictate to some degree your enjoyment of the film” (Brian Massumi). Self-awareness and position become important functions in discussing thought – with a designed and coded program. Reacting and modifying the output of projected light from a defined touch-point addresses metacognition. Both artwork and audience deliberate the placement of self within the open space.

Iterations of cultural obstructions in communication continue occurring between people. Misunderstandings and interruptions pose threats to empathy and education as populations increase and migration challenges societies. With language in mind, I propose the tactile to visual interchange of this work to bring attention to the globalised activity of virtual-platform information-sending as an example of cross-continental and indigenous acceptance and validation.

The Elam Grad Show installation displayed exists as two statements of the originally designed program art, ‘Affective’, with two designed touch-plinths near the centre of the room. Behind, the central computers execute the programs through two wall-installed projectors which propel light toward the screen protrusion.

Affectiv Plinths
Installation - viewers can press and manipulate the track pad sensors.
Affective Screenshot
‘Rotate Matrix();’ allocates x,y variables to resize an ever-spinning, overlaying, generative triangle.
Screen Shot 2016 08 16 At 1 29 45 Pm
‘Randomiser();’ allocates x,y variables in a dispersed manner while maintaining a transparently built overlay of RGB rectangles.

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