“ITCH: Individual Technology/Community Hacking” presented by Kim and Colubri
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Mapping Virtual Skies
Presentation Title:
- ITCH: Individual Technology/Community Hacking
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
ITCH is “an unpleasant sensation that causes the desire or reflex to scratch”.
This project is a broad artistic exploration of new phenomena originated by mobile communication/computing technologies. It consists of a series of experimental works, research activities, and workshops to investigate the media devices most closely connected to human bodies and its surroundings, and ultimately find new forms of individual expression with them. In contemporary urban life, people continue to grow increasingly consumer oriented, forcing our bodies to deal with media screens that provide commercially and politically stimulated contents while individual subjects disappear along with personal style. Individuality is critical in recreating everyday life within the otherwise closed world of continuously recycled and redundant mass-media imagery. Smartphones, for instance, took the already omnipresent TV/computer screens [Bourriaud, 1998] into the individual place.
From Virilio’s pessimistic takes on the effects of technology in our society [Virilo, 2006] to the utopian techno-fascination [Maes & Mistry, 2009], passing through humorous and/or scientific observations about the “social sacrifices and opportunities to interact with one another lost due to our own self-involvements” with always-available media/communication, we must find the spaces for transgressive uses of these technologies. It is within technology’s greater risks for control and isolation where the greater potential for transgression and liberation exists [Galloway, 2004].
