Kevin Day: feedback loop of commensurability
to
The New Gallery 208 Centre Street SE, Calgary, Alberta T2G 2B6
Kevin Day, "feedback loop of commensurability," 2018
Opening Saturday, September 29 from 8PM till late
A floor-based interactive installation, feedback loop of commensurability consists of several speaker units positioned in a grid, communicating with a computer situated on the side. It collects information (movement, color, and density, et al) from the viewers/users at regular intervals, translates this information into a coordinate (x, y), and plots it on the grid in the form of a notification tone emitted via one of the speaker units.
In such a way, the viewers/users experiencing the piece will be subjected to the compulsory and clandestine operations of surveillance and the machinic abstraction of distilling human subjects to quantifiable traits that will come to determine their identity, regardless of how decontextualized and inadequate they may be. Through the process of experiencing the piece, the users become abstracted, reduced to a single node on the grid, while their data continues to influence their behvaviour as they navigate through the piece. The process emphasizes the ways in which one ‘becomes’ the data that has come to represent them, confounding the relationship and questioning the neutrality between the subject and their data-representation.
––Day’s practice and research examine digital media polemics such as algorithmic culture, big data, mediation, cyber control, post-human concerns, and information capitalism. Informed by philosophy of technology, media studies, and critical theory, the research questions the ubiquitous logic of framing the world through information, indicative of a cybernetic way of knowing. His work seeks to resist the reduction of codification through an insistence on the presence of noise in the interface, which persists within the signals in the capitalist communication industry.