rorschach conversation on pattern recognition, 2011

The installation contains a four-person conversation that is constructed out of found material, namely excerpts from Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, The Critique of Cynical Reason by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, and various conversations on a number of online forums. The structure of the piece comes from a desire to echo the presence of online forum subcultures, where a particular language has developed inspite of and/or out of a desire to emulate real conversational language. The act of translating this vernacular back into 'real' language presents an inevitable mediation that results in an entity that is close yet eerily foreign to live conversations of the real: partially neutral and monotonous, partially choppy and awkward, and partially animated and engaged. The content of the conversation oscillates between an attempt to elicit apophenia (the inherent human desire to see connections in meaningless elements) through the disparate found information and a critique of it, through Sloterdijk’s examination of the fashionable condemnation of rationality and the Enlightenment that was prevalent in much of the postmodern era.