Laia Miret
Alternative Explorer performs an algofiction

MRes

Summary
Additional Info

Summary

This dissertation consists of two main parts: a text, ‘Alternative Explorer Performs an Algofiction’, and the film ‘I Round My Lips to Tell You That O is 0’. In the investigation, performance is situated as philosophical and political act, to expose an analytical journey –to critique techno-hierarchy and cognitive occupation– and an experimental journey –to explore techno-diversity and cognitive liberation.

The research yields methodical and aesthetic approaches and ideas that have affected the investigation as a whole, highlighting experience as a canal for building knowledge. The practice is an algofiction created and performed by Alternative Explorer, presented in the form of a video poem and then imprinted in a suit.

By creating and performing a poem, Alternative Explorer –an embodiment of Pegman, the yellow-to-orange little human icon that, by dragging and dropping it, indicates the exact point the user wants to explore on Google Street View– questions aspects of abstraction, simplification and acceleration related to the techno-hierarchical mechanisms of Google mapping systems that affect its users.

The practice and its analysis unlocks a conscious and active emancipation, one that conceives a critical alternative micro-history of contemporary macro-cartography.

The current visual regime is oppressing our cognitive system through cybernetic over-saturation –it is colonising our representational capacity–, leaving no space for it to imagine alternatives. Maps have been tools of territorial, economical and cultural colonisation. Google mapping systems – Maps, Earth and Street View– are, in addition, tools of cognitive occupation. These designed tools establish a global techno-hierarchy to accelerate the reach of Silicon Valley’s singularity.

Additional info

Algofiction is an invented genre for this project that consists of fables that occur in between the digital and the physical, where imagery produced by algorithms and machines is re-contextualised in order to generate alternative histories of technology. Alternative Explorer exists in an algoreality where Pegman is embodied by a human and performs an algofiction.

Alternative Explorer is a figure that comes originally from the digital environment. I invoke this figure and embody it, altering its nature and changing its state from digital to physical. Together we go for an excursion to places that have not yet been registered by Google. The performance is a rite of passage that transforms –or translates– a binary subject with binary experiences into a physical being who feels the complexity of a remote environment.

When Pegman becomes Alternative Explorer they become physical, thus alienated from their original binary condition. Alternative Explorer observes the environment and experiments with it. Senses and emotions become tangible and complex, the whole –if not infinite– in-betweenness is accessible.

A digital product has developed conscience through a human invocation. This invocation provokes a change of state and materiality and posits a new condition to Pegman. Google mapping imagery surrogates the physical experience without ever leaving a computer screen. The proliferation of images aiming to represent physical experience is accelerating the circulation of virtual experiences, subjugated mainly to vision.

Territory is experiential and implies a diversity of sensations an interpretations, it is subjective and complex. Google mapping systems are a macro-cartographic representation where users navigate without interrogating its content, because it simplifies spatial knowledge. It contains billions of images fluidly stitched and processed by algorithms that activate the viewer’s consumption through a simulation of production of meaning, hierarchically distributed.

When we use Google mapping systems, we experience the world through someone else’s abstractions and ordered spaces, whilst the perceiving embodied subject, Alternative Explorer, inhabits the world of practices. In this project, it is the experience of performing a poem created in the context of an algofiction what unblocks a conscious and active emancipation, one that conceives a critical alternative micro-history of contemporary macro-cartography.