Atopia is the nonexistence of place, an experience masquerading as an environment -- a set of pointers to sets of data which only exist in the encoded, mediated universe whose sole occupant is information -- the world wide web. It is easily mistaken for a place, inhabited by corporations, bloggers, fetishists, and anyone else who believes they have something to say, show, or sell, but it has no objective reality as locale or terminus. Our habits of speech and ways of conceptualizing the day-to-day world lead us to believe that there is a destination at the end of a link, but there is no actual place -- there is only a flow of data, an act of accumulation and disposal.
levigation: the smoothing and reduction of difference
We can only make any sense at all out of this pseudo-environment because of a strict set of rules dividing a stream of zeroes and ones into files of different types, which are further ordered and structured for our easy consumption. Normally, this information is decoded by a browser, making a stream of apparently random numbers into something comprehensible. The heavily mediated nature of this project is all but invisible to us -- we simply accept this mode of consuming information into our construction of Ônature.Õ This project uses an almost Luddite technique of simplification, whereby all the structure and complexity of the encoded information is returned to the simplicity of a bitstream in the form of sound. Data from a web crawler is downloaded and interpreted entirely as audio samples. Different file types all have a particular audio signature - HTML files, .jpegs, all have a unique sound quality. Any audio files the crawler stumbles across are simply played back -- a stark contrast to the general incomprehensibility, and a reminder that even sound is nothing more than another form of encoding. The ÔtrueÕ form of information, the foundation stone of atopia, remains insubstantial and always unreal.
apophenia: the perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena
As the files are being played, the original elements of the files are displayed on the computer screen: HTML code, images, and so on, disassociated from the links and instructions which create the impression of a unifying context, assemble and disassemble themselves in a constantly shifting collage, collected from atopia and presented with no concern for the expected contextualization. As meaning-hungry creatures, we cannot help but put it together -- as two dots over a horizontal line cannot be seen as something other than a face, the rush of incoming data cannot help but tell a story. I am interested in revealing this mechanism: to make consciousness aware of its own activity as a meaning machine.
Initial research and development of Telemusic was made possible by a grant from Harvestworks, Inc. in New York City. Thanks to Cory Arcangel, Dan Aronson, and R.Luke DuBois for Unix and Jitter programming assistance.
atopia demo (mp4) ==