[ISEA2016] Artist Statement: KEVIN DAY — THE MATERIAL COUPLINGS OF IMMATERIAL MACHINES

Artist Statement

Single-channel video, 2012, 20’00’’

“The Material Couplings of Immaterial Machines” is a 20-minute piece that utilized the dynamic and sound-reacting iTunes visualizer to play and interact with a political science lecture from Yale University on French political theorist Alexi de Tocqueville’s notion of democracy, as obtained freely from the open source of iTunes U. In the lecture, the nuances that democracy might take and the cautionary tone with which Tocqueville approached it are emphasized, touching on notions such as the tyranny of the majority and the danger of soft despotism. The result is a video of captivating and flowing visuals interacting with and moving to the cadence of a political science lecture on the anxieties surrounding democracy. The installation was conceived to be set up in a room with chairs to resemble a pedagogical setting. Referencing the student roots of a large number of political movements (such as May 1968 in France and the more recent Sunflower and Umbrella movements in Taiwan and Hong Kong), the project intends to examine the relationship between democratic aspirations, the possibility of political revolution, distributed online learning, interactive visuals, and how the massless collectivity may be sedated rather than empowered through the merging of large institutions of pedagogy and digital media. In an age where the phenomenon of open access, free culture, and MOOCs (massive open online courses) has gained tremendous traction, how might such an enterprise be utilized as a banner of democracy and openness while concealing underlying powers and their strategic motives? Is the liquidity, porosity, and coupling of media titans and prestigious academia one that is demonstrative of democracy? And if so, of what kind? Following Georges Bataille, media theorist Trebor Scholz talks extensively about the tyranny and aggression with which gift economies perpetuate the dominance of power structures. As he cogently argues, “openness functions as public relations.” The joint venture of iTunes and the top universities such as MIT and Yale might be veering on the side of despotism as the lecture forewarns. The visualizer, which has its nascence in the political movements of the 60’s, has been completely co-opted as the standard in media entertainment, for the consumption of ‘everyone.’ This illusory and oppressive moniker of ‘everyone’ is precisely where Tocqueville’s anxiety emerges – who are ‘the people’? Is the online sphere a site for mobilization of the collectivity or merely an extension of the failed Habermasian public sphere? The bespectacled form that such a lecture is presented in, is emblematic of the tension between framing ‘the people’ as massless consumers in the digital age and the potential of a mobilized collective, while the techno-entertainment titan and the prestigious academia conflate and reassert their unrivaled leadership and monopoly in their respective industries.

  • KEVIN DAY ’s practice explores the materiality and body of immaterial data in the age of flickering signifiers. His works examine issues such as algorithmic culture, digital memories, cyber control, posthuman concerns, communications, and online subcultures, focusing on the effects the digital interface has on human relations, perception, and cognition, specifically the obligatory mediation through coded language and signals. Through his work, the production and consumption of digital materials is framed as subjugation through language, the digital language of code. In his sound, drawing, text, photo, graph, and installation work, the body persists as a medium through which signals must pass, resisting the notion in information theory that data are free floating and decontextualized, and insisting instead on a situated and embodied spatio-temporality. Day’s practice seeks to resist the codification of being through an insistence on the presence of noise in the interface, which persists within the signals in the capitalist communication industry. As such, the body is the necessarily mediated materiality in the production of immaterial labour, insisting on its position between immediacy and hypermediacy. daykevin.com

Full Text and photo p. 91-93