Information
Jeffrey Shaw >
»Unmakeablelove«, 2008 - 2008
Co-Workers & Funding:
with Sarah KenderdineModeling and Animation: Conor O’Kane
Software: Scott Ashton
http://www.unmakeablelove.org/
Technology
Software
Beckett’s text, scientific in its exactitude, is capable of being analyzed and coded into software algorithms that computationally animate virtual representations of his characters
Descriptions & Essays
UNMAKEABLELOVE is a revioning of Beckett’s initial investigation that focuses and makes interactively tangible, a state of confrontation and interpolation between our selves and another society that is operating in a severe state of physical and psychological entropy. UNMAKEABLELOVE advances the practices of algorithmic agency, artificial life, virtual communities, human computer interaction, augmented virtuality, mixed reality and multimedia performance to engage ‘the body’s primordial inscriptions’. It locates Beckett’s society of ‘lost ones’ in a virtual space that represents a severe state of physical confinement, evoking perhaps a prison, an asylum, a detention camp, or even a ‘reality’ TV show.
While in UNMAKEABLELOVE the inhabitants of the cylinder remain oblivious in their condition, and we the viewers of their world, with our probing torch lights and prying gaze, are positioned as the ‘other’, forced to experience the anomalies of a perceptual disequilibrium that implicates us in this alienated narrative. The resulting ambiguity and complicit agency in UNMAKEABLELOVE reinforces a perceptual and psychological tension between ‘self’ and ‘other’ generated by the works’ mixed reality strategies of embodied simulation.
Literature
Schwab, Gabriel. »Cosmographical Meditations on the In/Human:
Beckett’s The Lost Ones and Lyotard’s ‘Scapeland.« Parallax 6, no. 4 (2000): 58-75.
Porush, David. The Soft Machine. Cybernetic fiction. New York: Methuen, 1985.
Exhibitions & Events