notes

We live in a sea of fragmented media images. Visual foragers scout out the social spaces we find ourselves in, they have to pass through layers and layers of imagery in the media aether before the skin and clothes of other humans come into view, they search for some sign of something they identify with and then begin the journey back again.

Use fragments of images from our vicarious media field, to show what our visual foragers are looking for and what they think they are seeing - the matches they think they are finding in the scene.

I can do the archive work to find and edit most of the images, participants can contribute their own choices as much as they like. I could arrange collections of fragmented images in augmented space outside of the scene for participants to bring in and use.

Similar to how I brought together collections of materials and objects for people to communicate with in the 'move something' games. It was important then to have a mixture of objects with different materials, affordances, rich with social and personal associations, from different settings and on different scales.

The field of fragmented images should cover and represent a huge range of different ways of responding to the situation - almost every variation imaginable of social, political, emotional performances that would and wouldn't normally be supported in that space. My aim in curating the field would be to find a wide range of fragments of behaviours that society would find in that situation, and a wide range of fragments of people or behaviours who you wouldn't expect to be in that situation and many things in between, there needs to be a certain ammount of free associative randomness.

The field dosent have the borders we find in society, e.g between masculine and feminine, gay and straight, cool and successful and not. I'm interested in how people organise imagery in the space between the characters. How people position images in relation to different characters at different points of the scene. How people try to arrange and order such a complex and contradictory myriad of visual references. How images are minimised and kept apart from each other, how people construct defences and borders in the social space.

Maybe there would be a rule that for each turn, each participant moves every fragment or a minimum number of fragments.

Use images from participants media life to describe how they look around and filter a scene, by showing the range of what they are looking for (able to see).

The range of imagery they could associate or relate to any given thing they encounter in their very local environment in the scene. E.g. the range of kinds of eyebrows, across men, women, gay/straight + ranges of looks and expressions. Showing all the related, associated, but different to things they are looking for and filtering images with.

The idea being to show not the “accurate” image of the eyebrow expression, but the range of all the different looking eyebrow expressions that the different visual foragers think they might be seeing and are shouting back about. So there will be a range of different eyebrow expression image foragers, all looking for different eyebrow expressions, all shouting back with different levels of confidence that they have found their match in front of them in the scene.

Importantly, this image foraging and filtering is being done on a smaller scale and lower level of consciousness by cognitive, perceptual and affective agents moving within and between us, not be the ego or higher level self. This means we get to see all the sense impressions that don't make it through our defences to our conscious awareness.

E.g. Tony from the sopranos slit eye stare, supposedly queer 17 y/o Tupac hand gestures.

All the images that your different visual foragers are looking for but don't find, all the images they shout, it might be this, that they mistakenly think they find or that are close to but not exactly what they are looking for. Some are so desperate, or dumb they only see what they expect to find and shout very loud! Same for mental visual foragers, that are trying to intercept and see what other peoples visual foragers think they see. I'd like to make a similar use of fragmented media imagery from our vicarious fields to represent embodied sensations that do and don't make it to our awareness.