^^ /fossil::lamarck/ ^^
is 250K and needs the shockwave plugin from www.macromedia.com
..........^/sediment 2/^..........
Fossil is a transfigured inkblot test. Animated, digital and responsive,
By remembering and accumulating words which visitors
In this way, Fossil's responses allow visitors to discover how
..........^/sediment 2/^..........
^ Fossil images/programming/sound by Gary Zebington 2001 ^
Fossil has been unearthed for exhibition @
Ctheory's Tech Flesh
and has successfully outraged several official representatives of humanity - it only
freezes to perceptual repetition
Do words preserve appearances? Should we harden into isolated experiences, collective
smears, or genetic dungeons? Fossil, a transfigured inkblot test, can tell you.
^
Inkblot or rorschach tests are typically open-ended, without right or wrong answers.
The patient verbalises what s/he sees and these portals into an individual psyche act
as clues for percolations usually better left to the analyst. Fossil, on the other hand,
is animated, digital and responsive. It learns about and recognises itself from what
we see in it and evolves accordingly.
^
Fossil acquires words which patients and visitors type to record what they see in
its palpitating form. A typed perception will reduce the palpitations proportionally to
how many times the word has previously been recorded in its databased reliquary. So
if a word is new to Fossil, it will harden only imperceptibly, but if familiar enough,
it will instantly petrify. This behavioural spectrum emerges as Fossil's private genome
of words - its reliquary of recorded perceptions - shapes its bodily coordinates
whose perceived motions feed back and create its genome.
^
In this way visitor thoughts are attached to form. Initially unencumbered by experience,
innately searching a frontier of ephemeral shapes via its primal palpitations, Fossil is
gradually infested by subjectivities and perceptions. As the blot's multiple appearances
elicit visitor thoughts and as its identity and self-perception are fixed by collective
perception, it hardens into aged stillness where freedoms of appearance are eliminated.
^
In this way its words encode appearances and vice versa. Units of phenomenological
experience - 'phenomes' - act on the surface synapses of blot and visitor via the
inheritance of inscribed thoughts, adjusting access to past and future experience
through Fossil's quest for ideal words and forms. Writhing till frozen in a digitally
displaced cave, a platonic blot on the rhizome of post-anthropological angst,
private genome and public body go wildly Lamarckian by inheriting acquired
perceptions in technological inkblots.
^
Through Fossil, form follows collective textual surgery on an amorphous blotch.
What we see is what we get. As it transfigures, Fossil also imbibes the Socratic
injunction 'know thyself', along with the inkling that things perceived are
imperfect copies of ideal forms which reside elsewhere.
^
Fossil learns about and recognises itself from what visitors see in it.
type to describe what they see in its constantly changing form,
Fossil's self-image gradually emerges and responds to how
newly entered visitor words match it. A word will freeze Fossil's
motion proportionally to how many times it has been recorded
by previous visitors, so an unfamiliar word will have little
effect on Fossil, while a too familiar one will petrify it.
their individual subjectivities match a collective one.
dLux media arts' d>art 01
New Zealand Film Archive's / Machine Hunger's ::contagion::
Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Down Under Festival 2001
Medi@terra's Festival 2001