record

Thesis Info

LABS ID
00255
Thesis Title
What are the metaphoric and spatial implications of a paranoid technological gaze?
Author
Martha Patricia Niño Mojica
2nd Author
3rd Author
Degree
MA Digital Art and Technology
Year
2007
Number of Pages
59
University
University of Plymouth, U.K.
Thesis Supervisor
Mike Phillips
Supervisor e-mail
Other Supervisor(s)
Language(s) of Thesis
English
Department / Discipline
Media Arts
Copyright Ownership
personal
Languages Familiar to Author
English Spanish
URL where full thesis can be found
www.martha-patricia.net/master.pdf
Keywords
gaze, technology, metaphor, telematic, robot
Abstract: 200-500 words
The text will first give a definition of paranoia as an element that implies the victimisation of the innocent; paranoia is based on the rejection and denial of vital parts of the self and the construction of an invisible enemy. In this way, it is a powerful element of society that is worth revising. It also highlights the function of metaphor as the fracture of traditional meaning in a creative way. The first part contextualises some traditional technologies important for the changes in the paradigms of vision and how they imply a particular view of the concepts of distance and subjectivity that can take a paranoid twist in society. A society that is usually described as in a constant state of emergency. The discourse of traditional surveillance is displaced towards “dataveillance” and cyber perception since technology is used to serve as a mediator of our own image of self and others. The last chapter will concentrate on possibilities for the further development of technologies of vision and surveillance as a tension between the panoptic architecture and the tacit voyeur appliance object. The practical work of my thesis is an installation that is composed of a modified home/office appliance (a vacuum cleaner) that acts also as a robotized vision appliance. The object will display three different kinds of misbehavior: firstly it is paranoid, secondly it is intrusive (but denies it) and thirdly it is a redundant consumer. The object interacts with a totalitarian panoptic architecture that has a wireless video link and thus acts as an extension of its own video surveillance. The device questions the limit between the public and the private, between the collective ‘We’ and a selfish ‘I’. The thesis discusses the implications of a paranoid gaze posed by a third kind of paranoid “intelligent” objects that lets us reflect on the paradoxes of vision and therefore the construction of subjectivity and otherness; the tensions between the public and the private. Technology sets a distance that not only sets up doubts about things and their representations but it also creates a double movement: a pervasive gaze that generates a disappearance of the public sphere while generating an uncanny space that can be seen as a hybrid form of art installation. Such space still has creative and experimental possibilities.