While reading a text we were provided for this unit, Four Moments/Movements for an Expanded Art Practice (following Deleuze following Spinoza), I found the fourth point to be particularly interesting.
"4. Virtualities. An expanded art practice locates itself at that ‘seeping edge’ between the virtual and the actual (Massumi). The virtual understood as those past moments and past movements (the histories, the memories) but also the future possibilities and potentialities (the moments and movements yet to come). The virtual is also the untimely, the immeasurable - the realm of the ‘not-yet-actualised’: a space of potentiality (precisely the realm of affect). Any and all materials might play a part in actualising these virtualities: maps, photographs, architectural plans - and any and all manipulations of these materials: drawing, painting - making and marking. And technological prosthesis too (the www) - a redefinition of the body (the collectivity) and of what a body can do. As such an expanded practice in its practice becomes a machine for creativity, a machine for the production of new archives, new kinds of thought, and new kinds of action. An expanded practice in this sense is both, and at the same time, a critique of the present and a call to the future. A part of the city in which it takes place and yet different to, apart from, that very city space. "
This explanation of virtuality's role in expanded art practice helped me connect with the brief because I was unsure of which analogue process to use for this project, and am generally more drawn to contemporary, computer-based techniques. I began researching scanography and scanner art, as well as theoretical concepts of mind uploading, as this is what the text made me think of initially. Looking at Paul Kneale and his scanner painting technique, Navid Baraty's fabricated nebulas and Bruno Levy's aluminium/clingfilm colour fringe experiments, I discovered the many ways artists have used scanners imaginatively. Initially, my idea was to move elements along a flatbed scanner to distort how they came out. However, I had trouble choosing what would relate to this concept I'd hoped to explore.
This led me to rethink my idea, and I gathered inspirational art in a few moodboards to give me a better vision of what direction to take this in. I was also inspired by digital multimedia artist Mishko and the vibrant, dreamy quality to his work.
Using subjects around my room such as chains, posters, string lights and quick drawings, I then had a little play around with an Instagram filter that gives a slit-scan effect and edited the images in Photoshop in a vent/weirdcore style. Below are the raw and edited versions, where I only used curves to crush the blacks and whites, layering everything using a blend modes and occasionally using warp transform to achieve an interesting look.
I realised how much this idea relates to the anime Serial Experiments Lain, and saw a lot of art in my research that used its motifs, so I wanted to use a female model/perspective in the film. Here is the storyboard I created at first - I ended up rethinking some of the shots while drawing in Photoshop.
My original ideas were to use Blender to import a human model from Turbo Squid, then print images of the renders and distort them using a scanner. However, this changed from being the bulk of the project to a certain part, once the subject of the film has uploaded their mind. I wanted to deform the body to show how the uploaded self, though ideally a perfect copy of the person, is an entirely different form of the soul - a digital emulation of the self may not necessarily be who they were before mind uploading.
Mind uploading is also known as Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) and while this has not been developed yet, there are theories as to how this could be engineered. From computer simulation to mapping the brain and systematically replacing neurons by copying and deleting, the work being done on this topic shows how pertinent a question this is in our current stage of human evolution. Transhumanism links closely with this idea, as the ultimate transhuman self would not be human at all, fully adapted by technology. However, while researching what makes this idea appealing to people, I began looking at the downsides. Transhumanist figureheads worship the idea of progress, which tends to leave out marginalised groups, as well as environmentalist concerns about making life better on the planet rather than in the Cloud. My perspective changed, and the script I wrote for the film ended up being an exploration of uploading one's mind as a personal choice to express one's identity, rather than promoting an idealistic "next step" for all of humanity. I also realised that a lot of what I value about literally being stuck in my own body is the sensory experience, which may well be entirely lost, were I to upload my brain tomorrow. These worries also made their way into the script, but I presented it through the lens of someone who maybe doesn't care that they're leaving their senses behind. In the end, transhumanism can sound much like a cult, but the possibilities it opens up gives people option to experiment with the continuity of their identities, giving food for thought and encouraging some introspection. Would you do it if you could? (Research links included at the end of the post.)
I downloaded the model and used a displacement map to distort the surface texture, material properties to add glossy reflections, an HDRI for more vibrant neon city lighting acting as reflections, 2 point lights in different colours and a function to loop the revolving camera for the animation. It took a lot of playing around with modifier, material and textural properties to find the look I was going for. My housemate kindly tutored me on Blender to help me achieve this result. I also followed about halfway through into Blender Guru's doughnut modelling series on YouTube, an informally mass-agreed standard for beginners online, and made notes - mainly on hotkeys, functions and lighting theory.
I tested the pixel sorting effect in Photoshop, using wind, stagger and repeating the process until it achieved the look I wanted. I wasn't looking for a refined piece on this so I didn't do any complicated masking or effects other than this, but it was good to get used to it.
Using MuseScore 3, I composed a short piece initially using harpsichord, which I ended up changing to harp and piano parts. I then brought it into Audition, where I added a plethora of effects such as flanger, delay, parametric EQ, distortion, hard limiters and pitch correction, many of which I also applied to a generated wave tone that I played around with to sound like a bass sample. I then sliced it up and repeated it throughout the more ethereal/eerie-sounding track to give some extra dimension to the audio.
After I had composed the music, I took some photos with crystals in front of the lens with my DSLR and used them in Photoshop as backgrounds, using my drawing tablet to illustrate on top according to my storyboard. I also cut out the trunks from a NASA image of the pillars of creation, found in the Eagle nebula, and used content-aware fill to fill in the background. I then animated these in Premiere Pro, where I added text, displacement effects, an adjustment layer, played with blend modes, used crossfading and some light keyframing for elements like the pillars of creation.
This is how the final timeline looked:
Here are the shots I took for the film in total, and the final render from Blender:
Here is the pixel-sorted background to the render (photo of lights overlaid twice in centred smaller sizes with curves and gradient map adjustment layers), as well as some vent art I made during the process:
Synopsis:
A delve into the thoughts of a transhumanist during the process of uploading their mind to the cloud forever.
Bibliography
http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/Reports/2008-3.pdf
https://sim.me.uk/neural/JournalArticles/Bamford2012IJMC.pdf
https://stuff.kajsotala.fi/Papers/CoalescingMinds.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqPd6MShV1o&ab_channel=PhilosophyTube
https://www.thebioneer.com/mind-uploading/
"A Cyborg Manifesto" by Donna Haraway
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