Ken Linehan, AIR 2004

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

Para_arts current research: Studies in Total Information Awareness

Para-arts current research involves media technologies that lie on the brink between omnipresence and obsolescence. Studies in Total information Awareness endeavors to study these devices in much the same way that the mediums of the early 20th century practiced their craft, opening conduits of communications with the dead as a way of gaining a knowledge which transcended “normal” experience. Where these spiritualists sought to commune with the spirits and memories of the human dead, it is the obsolete and discarded technologies, the refuse of our electronic memory that is at the core of this work.

The data captured and transmitted by these devices as impulses of light and electricity exists as a virtualization of ourselves, transducing our patterns and behaviors into an electronic ether and back again. In a society reliant on these electronic systems as a medium for the retention our knowledge and memory, the information stored within them has, to a large extent, become a replacement for direct experience and first person communication. It is the potential depth of this electronic resource that has led some to a belief in the possibility of a “total information awareness” or a complete transduciton of all that is knowable into a medium from which the future may be revealed in its formative stages.

Projects currently under development comprise a series of “instruments” which explore these issues through a direct intervention into the electronic systems of discarded consumer electronics and their recorded media. Initial investigations are rooted in a series experiments involving the use of the ever-present magnetic data card (credit cards, subway and identification passes, etc...) as a medium for electronic manipulation. Much like the soon to be obsolete magnetic audio tape, these cards use a narrow magnetic stripe to carry information to the devices they interact with and subsequently, to the people who control them.

Using modified cassette recorders, the information stored on these cards is quite literally given voice via a direct transference into the physical vibration of sound. Rendering audible the vast quantity of data which flow daily through these systems as electronic representations of our individual and collective identities. Underlying all of this, is the belief that through the re-configuration of these systems, new channels can be opened through which to experience information in ways which transcend normal perceptual experience. Opening conduits through the medium in both its normal and para-normal states and enabling an experience with the unknown.