Immersive interactive sound & projection installation 2020 (2m3 / 3 minutes 50 seconds)
Having had to reconsider approaches to socially engaged work in a post-COVID world, the concept for Human Murmuration has developed from our new reliance on the virtual worlds of social media and reflection on the vulnerabilities this presents. Physically the work deconstructs & reconstructs the Zoom screen wrapping the “virtual world” around the viewer, contained within a white cube space, illuminated like a virtual Rubix cube.
In itself, the white cube makes totemic reference to the aggressive capitalist consumerist marketisation of the artworld in the 90s by the likes of Saatchi & Joplin but containing an immaterial immersive experience that cannot be owned. At the same time connotation with the asylum space is apt when the work is both about and uses manipulation of human behaviour in the orchestration of phenomenological experiences for the audience.
Algorithms that feed our media streams are based on communications observed between murmuring starlings; the hive-mind has a continuous flow of information to control the group response through groupings of six or seven network links interlocking. That information can transfer so fast is exciting, however, the capacity to manipulate the transfer through false-feeds or tactical siloing is unnerving. Companies like Cambridge Analytica have been called out for exploiting the echo-chamber potential to influence elections and referendums around the globe.
Network theory behind global transfer of information is mathematically linked with six degrees of separation relies on super-connectors or hubs. Operating across-discipline and in wider-fields, I thrive as a super-connector and rely on chance encounters to feed my ideas. However, in lockdown physical chance encounters have been limited. Fortunately, I did meet Dave Webb, the coder who collaborated to make Human Murmuration. Choices made dimensioning the work have accounted for the exact constraints of social distancing in a post-COVID physical world while using all six sides of the cube which balances the concepts of caging and connecting.
Video conferencing has exploded as a form of communication in response to global lockdown and is an exciting new medium to explore and test boundaries. I have been developing the concept of chance encounter in the virtual world by inviting random followers of my own social media to meet for Zoom conversations to explore the process of conversation and coincidence as a topic itself and observe the differences when people are more or less connected.
From these experiments came Human Murmuration as I realised how much social media noise is actually Bot generated and many of the Bots use stolen real identities. Coders like Billy Chasen, create Botnet worlds exploring the development of sophistication in AI language between Bots and how this compares with the relatively banal things we find ourselves repeating for real in social media. The economy behind influencing social media and the power it has politically is both sophisticated & corrupt. Cambridge Analytica has not gone away, they have just changed their trading name.
In 2021 I have been assisted to redevelop Human Murmuration as a VR environment to enable the work to travel and be exhibited more extensively. It maintains a 2m cubed viewing space for the same sense of containment however the transparency of the temporary structure creates a very different illusion.