We created a chat room filled with digital haze. Inside this chatroom, every message sent goes through a special filter. Through this filter, some words are masked and destroyed. Messages become incomplete, fragmented, irreparably broken. The filter algorithm runs blindly to the literal meaning of the message, without bias or human manipulation.
enter the hazy corner (wip)
Background
Almost all of our day-to-day communication is now conducted through computational means. However, we must acknowledge the fundamental distinction between computation and the other traditional medium. The computer materializes a practice rather than a presence, an effect rather than an item. Our digital messages are transmitted between terminals. The information is kept in a database and processed by computer algorithms. By utilizing computational medium, the “uncomputable” characteristic is eliminated. When the recipient receives the message, it is displayed in an environment full of buttons, links, and useless information; the reality conveyed by the message is fragmented; and the message is invariably instrumentalized. The message is “dehydrated computationally.”
The Haze
There is an impending need to create a completely different way of communication facilitated by digital interactive media, such that engagement provided by computational objects can be both absent and present.
Computational randomness corresponds to infinite volumes of data that are meaningful contingencies which refuse to be fully comprehended, compressed, or sensed by totalities (i.e.,by the mind, the machine or the body). This also means that algorithms do not exclusively channel data according to preset mechanism of binary synthesis, as they also enumerate the indeterminate zone between finite states.
“Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space” – Luciana Parisi
The Computational Haze intends to leverage computer algorithms to construct a cyberspace for us to escape from computational mediation and be free of its effect to radicalize ideology. This line of research investigates computation’s tendency to radicalize and explores the possibilities for digital signals to be approximated but not instrumentalized – to place one within the zone of the uncomputable.
The Hazy Corner is the beginning of the series. It utilized one of the most basic and well-known forms of internet communication as the experimental ground.
How would our interconnected digital universe feel if we stopped relentlessly promoting externalized effectiveness and instead attempted to strike a balance between openness and functionality?