“Imagine that cloudy and confused intelligence possibly with only the vaguest notion of self trying to make of its new environment…”

The Swamp Thing (The Anatomy Lesson), Alan Moore

Students:

Year

2019

Tutors:

  • Alvaro F. Pulpeiro
  • Sergej Maier

 A Creature Fragmented

Ghost Hardware operates through two contradictory fields that many thought to be irreconcilable: the human realm of that which lives and the virtual sphere of that which represents and abstracts itself. We will build a phantasmagorical dialectic that can only exist within the flexibility of virtual subjective perception and the candor and improvisation of the human touch.

We will be building and orchestrating sound architectures emanating from real conversations with people who we see as invisible and depthless, yet in the dark spaces of their memory, life and truth provide us fragments that will act as body parts, as a cacophony of voices that at the end will be but one ghost. Sound meets form through the digital possibilities of the virtual that has taken its primary form thanks to the framework of reality. This year our reality is the haunted complexity of a forest, an articulation of ecosystems of life that we will record through photogrammetry in order to be later sculpted as hyperreal, slightly surreal (or even Lynchean) environments. This hyper-real CGI environment is the ghost, is its body, or the consciousness it is trying to find.

Out of the real landscape we will be borrowing, copying, distorting, moving, and dramatizing. Ultimately this will become a completely spatial experience, just like Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés, where he understands that the surreal or the post-real is only given birth when reality and fiction dance and fight, creating a new world view.