Confounded: Future Fetish Design Performance for Human Advocacy

Lou Susi, MFA ’11

thesis abstract

Modern day people live in a transitional point in time and space that is located somewhere bet ween our new-found dataSpace and the natural world. We inter pret sensations and messages from a myriad of mediatypes (both organic and virtual) on a continuous basis. a sense of ‘texture’ — perhaps a ‘surface spirit’ — is lost when moving from the natural | organic to the virtual | artificial domains. More and more, our relationship to the world and the people we meet involves informational mediation through a strange involvement within society — a sort of ‘betweenSpace’ — ‘surface spirit’ ‘the invisible other’ shadow presence of devices, technology, and information.

My work explores with this by creating playful, performative, cyberSurreal experiences for the user-participant. using both pretend and prototyped devices, I touch and tickle the subtle boundaries of our ever shifting social conventions as increasingly influenced, stretched and blurred over time by the introduction of new inventions into ‘betweenSpace’ our technoHumanic ecosystem.

I fabricate and utilize entire systems of tools (ranging in style and media of delivery ) to discover the boundaries and report back my findings to the fictional Bureau of cyberSurreal Investigation. the information i glean produces controversial discourse — revealing areas of unintended usage and potential exploitation points in the i am testing ‘out there’ in the world. My personal interest in the build up and release of psychoSocial tensions drives my based on qualitative data collection — hopefully resulting in humorous insight into our supposed ‘progress’ as a society dealing with found systems first-person commentary The Information Age.

Download “Confounded: Future Fetish Design Performance for Human Advocacy” (PDF, 87 MB).