The uncanny valley
So if Bombay was the ‘-dividual city’ – that is, the forces that come before the individual: flows, moorings, speeds, halts, accelerations – now the case shall be somewhat the contrary. London. I am interested in seeing London as a city of ur-individuals, that is, that which supercedes and exceedes the individual. Not less or before the individual – but that which is more than the individual: individual++?
Cities like London are the promised playgrounds of lifestyles, of fashion, of trends, of branding, of being cool. Go to areas such as Bricklane and Shoreditch you can see people form all over the world performing their individuality to the maximum. So the obvious outcome of this, therefore, is not to see London as a city which is before the individual but rather seeing it as a city that is MORE than the individual, that which is in excess of it: of branding, of fashion, of advertisement, of musical subcultures, of utopian reflections of one’s self projected onto the canvas of different lifestyles and imagined freedom. And what else better way to explore this than to take pictures of that which is more than what is, to introduce that which EXCEEDS the individual into everyday life in London. So for this purpose, to begin the first stage of this experiment, I will breed artificial characters into everyday scenes from London. Avatars. Virtual realities bleeding into imagined realities until both seamlessly inhabit the same space we live in. Call it, again, perhaps, the magical realism of the 21st century where, instead of spirits and surrealism of the everyday minutae, virtual reality-bred creatures invade scenes we are familiar with and cause a little bit of havoc .
The working title of the project will be Uncanny Valley based on the robotics theory where the hypothesis is “that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness (wikipedia)” Is not the idea of consumerism and lifestyle also based on this impossible proximity: the closer you get to what you are after there further you are…? Whatever the concept that will eventually emerge, another technical experiments here for display to see what I am thinking off…