Synchronous Glitch: The Serious Play of Digital Matter
Briony O Clarke · Journal of Analytical Psychology · 2023
I am an artist-designer and researcher working with and through ecology, computation and feminist speculation.My approach is compatible with what Jungians would call myth-making because I operate in dialogue with the unknown psyche, including how the psyche interacts with the almost infinite capacities of computing.In my work I design and fabricate objects which pull upon possible alternative ways of seeing and being. 1 Via the screen of the computer, a virtual place 2 is formed and like the edges of an empty page or canvas it contains my image work and the serious play it necessitates.A difference between the material page or canvas and this virtual place is that data, a strange digital matter, pours in continuously and can be contained in this place.This for me, like paint or clay, is a medium.Digital matter as I meet with it, is a new medium and as such, it enables new forms of art.Crucially it is like paint or clay in that it can be worked with as ensouled or inspirited.I have, for some time, been questioning the psychic suitability of the computer as a vessel for my explorations and of digital matter as a creative medium.I have come to realize that I am not alone in seriously playing in virtual space; perhaps others, in their own way, are also visiting forums, playing games and drifting through the internet; maybe they, too, are intuitively seeking and searching this virtual space for meaning.In 2018, I began a Practice as Research Ph.D., based in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex (UK), 1 For example, SeaFax is a machine I have designed.It is synced up via satellite to a data buoy in the Atlantic Ocean.It takes this data and translates the otherwise remote waves into wave tank movements and pushes oiled ochre inks onto sheets of paper.The resultant prints are called NewPapers and are not images for looking at but images for looking with (see Davis, 2015). 2 A virtual place can be defined as "the perception of bounded space imbued with meaning", virtual space can be defined as "the sum of all virtual places" (C.Saunders et al., 2011Saunders et al., , p. 1080)). In my full exegesis I draw a comparison between virtual space and place and imaginal space and place.