PROJECTS INCLUDED
you.got.a.pic?
Human Memory Database
Sentinel #002
ROLE
Artist
Web Development
Interaction Design
TEAM MEMBERS (cMAS)
Dr. Gabriela Aceves Sepulveda
Dr. Hannah Turner
Jo Shin
Frederico Machuca
Xavier Wu
Background
Witnessing is a series of three new media projects developed by cMAS students at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Art and Technology (SIAT). Witnessing was conceived of as a response to the 2016 exhibit “Witness” at New Westminster’s New Media Gallery (Joyce and Duggan 2016). The three projects, including my own piece you.got.a.pic?, all address thematic issues raised in the original Witness exhibit – that of human machine communication and mutual surveillance. Each new media work demonstrated the uneasy marriage of our shared technological fears and desires.
The Projects + Zine
Witnessing consists of three new media projects:
- “Human Memory Database” by Frederico Machuca is an ominous interactive future database of human memories.
- “you.got.a.pic?” by Jo Shin draws upon themes of immediacy in a hyper-mediated world where selfies sent to an AI responds with a distorted machine vision.
- “Sentinel 002” byXavier Wu imagines an AI capable of recording and learning from human language through Twitter feeds.
These projects, accompanied by the Witnessing zine, imagine a future archive of humanities’ attempts to communicate with an all-seeing machine. The zine includes analog counterparts to the digital projects and encourages the reader to contemplate how future machines might learn of our thoughts, memories, languages, and vision.
The Process Book
Documentation of the Witnessing project including each artwork and zine was published as a process book called Witnessing in 2017. The limited edition of Witnessing books contain a hardcopy of the original zine.
The Web Archive
Created as an online archive of the Witnessing project, the web archive was launched as part of a publication about the project in Immediacy, an online media journal by The New School’s School of Media Studies. I developed the website as a brutalist web design that reflects the glitchy dystopian nature of the project. Each of the artworks can be found and interacted with online while the lo-fi zine is available for download.
Outcomes
An installation version of “Witnessing” was shown at the AHVA Gallery at the Audain Art Centre as part of “Under Super Vision” a symposium held by the Art History, Visual Art and Theory (AHVA) program at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
Witnessing was “published” in the following venues:
- Zine by cMAS (2016)
- Book by cMAS Publications (2016)
- Web Archive (2017)
- Under Supervision group exhibition, Audian Art Centre, UBC (2017)
- Presentation at the New Media Gallery (2017)
- Online publication in Immediacy, The New School (2017)
- Brutalist Websites listing (2018)
