A project for The Post-Screen Festival, Lisbon Portugal, 2014.
Recently while perusing the mail archives of –emprye, I was drawn in by a conversation between Rob Myers and Timothy Morton in which Myers somewhat provocatively declares that he is ‘watching Raiders of the Lost Ark on a baguette’(Myres, 2012). Perhaps not surprisingly given the irreducibility of the Speculative Realist object, Morton struggles with this statement that to him seems like the “sound of the world melting again” (Morton in Myres, 2012). But what is actually proposed by declaring a sandwich to be a screen and how does this change the way we negotiate the screen as an object in-itself?
waiting event: 64 bytes does not offer itself as a gastronomic screen. Rather, it explores the screen, and in particular the digital screen, as an event. It seeks to understand the relationship between objects, events and materiality in the context of emerging Speculative Realist notions of time in which ‘outside and inside are offset against each other as different regions defined by the boundary’ (Massumi, 2011) that temporalizes and spatialises itself.
waiting event: 64 bytes operates across wireless networks to connect a series of remote sites from which participant-events provide data input. Mimicking the method of sports scoreboards that quantify and tally events as discrete units of data, a series of basketball hoops installed on the streets of Lisbon is used to provide ‘scores’ – data for content that is visually aggregated and displayed on an LED dot-matrix display(DMD). Live video footage of the DMD combined with pre-recorded event footage is streamed to the festival’s Virtual Gallery.
In speculating on the function of physical objects as time-based entities with reference to both the affection-image (Deleuze, 1989), and semblance (Massumi, 2011), waiting event: 64 bytes presents itself as a series of discrete or digital events that are re-screened as fresh instantiations in the experience-event of the screen work.
waiting event: 64 bytes is the screen as a body of discrete (digital) events that operate across spatial and temporal sites that constitute an event that is both screen and baguette, that is both in-itself and beyond itself at the same time.
See – Post Screen Not Displayed Keynote address on theoretical issues raised by and underpinning this work.