The title, “Interacting | Processing,” is a nod to Robert Anton Wilson. He was a thinker profoundly interested in just about everything, but became very invested in showing people how they are co-creators in their experience of reality. (Who is the zen master who makes the grass green?)

This piece was partially inspired by the concept of the “reticular activating system” in cognitive science or psychology. When you’re in a crowded room and suddenly you hear your name spoken in a group far away, suddenly all your attention goes to that group, even though you hadn’t been listening to their conversation at all.

The implications of this are interesting: some part of your mind had been listening to that conversation all along, even though consciously, you’d been focused on something else. As soon as something relevant occurred in the other conversation, the filter came down, and your awareness was redirected to the other conversation.

The implications of the fact that our mind filters out vast amounts of data, only allowing a bit into our consciousness for us to focus on was part of the premise of the piece. There is layer upon layer of video footage of the figures filtered through, and blended upon each other.

Some of the figures are nude: “naked experience,” was what I was holding in mind conceptually, and in the footage sigils are being projected upon the figure.

I was working with the idea of concepts, mental models, maps, filtering our experience of reality. Rather that being totally present as much as possible, and experiencing the moment, the situation, and other human beings without filtering it through beliefs, assumptions, self-fulfilling prophesies, we often experience life in a sort of sleep walk: not consciously aware of how we are distorting our experience through our mental maps.

The fact that we as humans can process the raw stuff of experience through language and symbol systems is both our greatest asset and our greatest failures. (See “General Semantics”).

I was thinking about experiencing a real live person, not as the process you can empathize with in front of you, but rather a race, or a sexual orientation (which generally takes the linguistic form of a noun, a object), or distorting reality and experience to fit our expectations and assumptions.

We do this much more often than we realize, and it takes absolute self-awareness and constant double checking to not fall into this cognitively and linguistically built-in trap.

About An Unmasking

A short animation–stop motion and motion graphics.

This animation was originally conceived of with a very specific use in mind: produce a surreal animation that could continue forever seamlessly without a beginning or ending. The original intention was to produce a myspace profile picture (animated gif) that would catch and keep attention for a bit.

I believe the piece is successful for what it is– a sort of M.C. Escher-esque piece– only using the dimension of time to produce the endless loop rather than space.