My Meta Mass

2020

Medium: Interactive Installation with Haptic Sensing VR program 

My Meta Mass is an interactive installation that immerses viewers in a bodily experience of media usage and the immense accumulation of data. The piece demonstrates how corporeal bodies have become interwoven with incorporeal forms of data through media engagement. It speculates how the body is extended and expanded through the production and aggregation of data. The viewer’s body is imagined as a super-structure composed of both physical and virtual material, existing on earth and in the cloud, constructed from the integration of biological and information systems.

The piece explores technology as a “mode of revealing” that circumstances reality. Through the machine-navigation of the performers, viewers experience how technology situates and orients people and things in the world. Through their orchestration, things appear out of the dark into the seeable- to be presenced, to be known, to be felt, and to be held. As the frame that “unconceals” reality, technology holds the power to render a particular kind of reality by dictating the order of who or what gets to be seen and associated, in particular conditions and encounters. The realities we have come to know and the sociality we have come to take part in, emerge from technological frameworks that structure the becoming of our world and our becoming in the world. 

Viewers can explore their body as generators of data and experience data as an immediate extension of their bodily activity. With every touch, the swarm of data grows bigger and bigger. The performance of the viewer’s body produces and exponentially accumulates a virtual monstrosity that is in direct relation to their physical body. The corporeal and the incorporeal become structurally linked, and the human body is reimagined as part of a larger complex of both physical and virtual forms. The project thinks through Stacy Alamo's Transcorporeality in the context of media usage, and imagines the bigness of our bodies in relation to media and massive data production.