flow field
( 2022 )
Recording illustrating the gesture-based scrolling navigation method.
Home screen of flow field.
Risoprint 8.25” x 10.75”, 144 pages
Our bodies and minds are rapidly intertwining with mass-produced technologies and the corporations that own our data. Our faces remember our passwords, digital interfaces govern our interpersonal relationships, artificial intelligence is deployed to preserve and destroy culture and communities. We are presented with increasing opportunities to escape into virtual spaces, distracting us from the reality of surveillance capitalism. We must return to traditional and indigenous beliefs and practices in order to design sustainable relationships with and within our natural and digital environments.
flow field is an online experience that enables the user to navigate through gesture. It uses the webcam and machine learning to reflect how the self is rendered and surveilled digitally. It is accompanied by printed material documenting cybernetic research into Daoist cosmology of grotto-heavens. Both experiences employ alternative methods of page navigation to draw attention to the ways that we consume media and to ask the user to question the integrity of their relationship with technology. The act of engaging with both materials becomes a practice for finding presence and compassionate connectivity. This is necessary so that we can act with greater empathetic understanding towards ourselves and others, so that we are able to become stewards of enduring cultural communities and ecosystems.
Read The Art of Steering, featured in the print publication, here.