Marilyn Allen
Tempestas Digital (The Tempest, Act I, scene ii, /Â BBC, 25 August, 2020), 3â00â film, 2020.
The socially habituated practices associated with digital technologies have engendered, perhaps inadvertently, a socio-technical network between human and digital subjects. Our perception of creative production has historically adopted an asymmetric formation wherein authorship has been attributed to the corporeal subject, thus consigning our computational others to a subsidiary role; however, with the proliferation of artificial intelligence systems this appears less certain.
On 25 August 2020, I (the human subject) typed the words âStorm Francisâ into a computational search engine wherein a series of new relations and potential alliances were generated. A BBC weather report occupied the first position in the page rankings (location services identifying my location in the UK), with a reference to Shakespeareâs The Tempest also forming part of this algorithmic configuration. The Internet has the capacity to perform what Kenneth Goldsmith describes as ânet neutralityâ, enacting the proposition âthat all data on the network be treated equal, whether a piece of spam or Nobel laureateâs speechâ (1) – the Shakespearean canon or a national weather report. Tempestas Digital is a ânet neutralâ constellation, a digital storm characterised by the principle of variance; a âpataphysical syzergy generated through a non-hierarchical human/digital relation. The alliances produced by our algorithmic others do not necessarily proffer logical narratives, but rather the potential for new narrative flows to be produced through an effective/affective, digital/human, relation. A multitude of divergent narrative associations, both profound and preposterous, may be generated from a single Internet search, thus placing the âmasterpieceâ (The Tempest) in a perpetual state of flux.
From search engine to film media, Tempestas Digital performs a series of negotiations between the human and the digital. There are no technically proficient processes at work, rather, pre-set functions within the editorial software are used to de-hierarchize the authorial process. The software effects for âspeeding upâ and âslowing downâ the human voice enact a deterritorialization of human speech, wherein an indistinct oscillation between non-semantic utterance and articulate language is generated: An oscillation between sense and nonsense. Jean-Jacques Lecercle uses the French word dĂ©lire to refer to âan utterance which, at the very moment when it plays havoc with language acknowledges the domination of the rules it transgressesâ (2). Pre-installed effects and plug-ins were used in the production of Tempestas Digital to suggest a becoming-digital of the human and a becoming-human of the digital. As Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari proffer, the process of âbecomingâ is not that of similitude or analogy, it is rather an assemblage of influences. Becoming is a process wherein phenomena is deterritorialized from its original function to form a new relation with previously discrete forces. Thus, becoming resides not in the transformation of supposedly fixed elements (the human voice and the digital voice) but in their alliance (3). In Tempestas Digital human vocality, as a dominant language, begins to disappear and the tangibility of a human/digital alliance is performed.
Words, whether those of The Tempest or a weather report, are no longer imprisoned in contextual stasis; within a socio-digital ecology they have the capacity to escape one context and be dispersed into new situations and configurations. The gestures which formulate this processual thought experiment (words typed, search engine results, words spoken, postproductive methods and dissemination) leave a trace upon visual-audial utterance: Conversions and translations, both human and digital, successively disrupt the materiality of narrative information, thus, Tempestas Digital is a work that resists homogenous meaning, it does not âsettleâ, but rather keeps itself in play between phenomena.
References:
Goldsmith, Kenneth. 2011. Uncreative Writing. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lecercle, J., 2018, Philosophy Through the Looking Glass: Language, Nonsense, Desire. London: Routledge: 55
Deleuze, G., and Guattari. F., 2004, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum: 262
Goldsmith, K., 2011, Uncreative Writing, Columbia University Press, New York: 34
Marilyn Allen is an artist, writer, lecturer and collaborator. Allenâs recent praxis manifests through a collaboration with technology and examines how meaning is distributed between human and digital voices. Allen explores the potential for new narrative flows to be produced through the anomalies generated between the human voice and computational voice recognition systems. Allen describes this process as enacting âword eventsâ which generate a speculative space for the intensification of language. The diverse collaborative iterations and interactions adopted by Allen are a methodological approach to facilitate the synthesis of different voices and practices.