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seaShell telePhoney stay connected o conf unded lou eXcerptz from
future fetish design performance for human advocacy
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written by
prepared for the bureau of cybersurreal investigation
eXcerptZ from confounded | future fetish design performance for human advocacy
confounded | future fetish design performance for human advocacy
First published in 2011 by lou suSi, the bureua of cyberSurreal investigation, dynamic media institute + BijaXOuS suPpleMeNte 6 crooked pond drive boxford massachusetts 01921 617.750.2922 ls@loususi.com @loususi dot com dot org Printed by Blurb, Lulu or some randomly chosen onDemand digital ePress ‘out there’ W & J Mackey Limited, Chatham + Sons, not affiliated whatsoever ISBN 10 0-9669022-4-6 ISBN 13 978-0-9669022-4-2 Not all the information reported + written herewithin is guaranteed to be true at all. Speak to the author in person for further rather gritty details.
This is not a book conditions of sale + REading
This book is subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any way, shape or form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and otherwise without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. visit http://cybersurrealism.com, http://seashellphone or http://bureauofcybersurrealinvestigation for more
© by lou suSi 2011 this revised edition + translation © secret innovation society, the bureau of cyberSurreal investigation + BijaXOuS 2022
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yet
This is not reality qu i t e
eXcerptZ from confounded | future fetish design performance for human advocacy
object Oriented performances
aka improvised Art Devicez
the birth of cyberSurrealism — domain registration starts a movement At the end of my first year at Dynamic Media Institute, I found a seed of inspiration in a presentation that might’ve come across as a random word game of sorts — a stream of consciousness, given one word at a time, one word per slide, with a bit of nervous verbal explanation behind each projected word on the wall. Words like texture, translation, interpretation, blur, focus, inbetween — very vague but sometimes related groupings of words that fit together in series with each other or somehow nicely juxtaposed in little pairs. And at the end of the presentation, I blurted out in conclusion what I thought made the most sense as my proposed thesis abstract: “ People live in a ‘middleSpace’ — somewhere between our new-found dataSpace and the natural world. We interpret sensations and messages from a myriad of mediatypes ( both organic and virtual ) on a continuous basis. A sense of ‘texture’ ( perhaps a ‘surface spirit’ ) is lost when moving from a natural | organic source to a virtual | artificial source. My goal is to create playful and performative, cyberSurreal experiences that explore the edge where texture is lost.” Jan immediately asked me, ‘Is that your word? cyberSurreal?’ And I really wasn’t sure, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed like maybe I did make it up. cyberSurreal seemed like one of these other ying-yang wordplays from earlier in the presentation. Jan encouraged me to register the domain name cyberSurreal, this
concept seemed to sit at the very kernal of my projected work in the program. And funny enough, this encouragement to buy yet another domain name came right at a time when I was trying to control all of the ridiculous web property purchase habits honed over the last decade prior to DMI. Being the badboy of dynamic media that I am
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I not only registered cyberSurreal dot com, but also cyberSurrealism, cyberSurrealist and Bureau of cyberSurreal Investigation { and Lord knows what other semi-related domains I might’ve picked up in the wee hours of the night }.
Owning a domain claims a certain stake of ownership in a concept. And now I completely owned a little corner of the web that implied a new international art movement — the cybernetic extension, perhaps, of the Surrealist Internationale. So many ideas flooded my feeble mind. For many Summer weeks following May 2009 I could barely sleep I was so excited.
the shellGame, explained — pre-project-series inspiration Shortly thereafter, I remember writing a proposal like a madman in the middle of the night. I think I emailed it out to Joe and Jan at 2 or 3 in the morning in the hopes that they might be just as enthused by my clever conceptualization as to point me in the right direction and get this projectwork underway. But sometimes this sort of late-night energy goes into a PDF that disappears into digital ether — the lack of a reply did not, however, discourage me from bringing the idea to Colin Owens’ Summer Prototyping course at MassArt. I don’t even think I presented the idea to the class. It was just a side conversation, a little story I told between official classtime sessions at best. But the conceptual prototype, as explained in my cyberSurreal brief, was a
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case study — stream two — exhibit b
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eXcerptZ from confounded | future fetish design performance for human advocacy
object Oriented performances
aka improvised Art Devicez
Several shellPhones would surreptitiously appear in random locations in, near or around The Greater Boston Area
blueprint for an object-oriented intervention performance. I would fabricate cellphone-like devices and embed them inside 3 to 5 alabaster seashells, preferably large, cartoonish conchshells. My crackpot team of imaginary helpers would plant these shellphones in various key, busy locations around Boston and at a certain time, in the middle of a perfectly ordinary day, the extraordinary would happen. Each shellPhone would simultaneously glow with beautiful bioluminescence and play a deliciously cheesy ringtone — all shells signaling for a human participant in perfect synchrony in extremely urban areas. I wondered if anyone would even notice the shells at first, these wonderfully organic and natural objects left in a totally manmade, city environment. Would they be completely overlooked?
But if they were noticed, if a city-dweller decided to engage in this unusual experience and pick up the shellphone to take the call, they would hear a pre-recorded voice messaging system quite mechanically say,
“ Thank you for calling the shellPhone, Boston. We appreciate your participation in our project. Please listen carefully and choose from one of the following options, the numbers have changed: press 1 to leave a voice message; press 2 to send a text; press 3 to take a picture; press 4 to listen to sounds of the ocean; or press 5 for more options.”
Each shellPhone would reach out via cyberSurreal seaSide ring-tone to random passersby — a literal call to action, or better still, a call to interaction
And at that point I sincerely hoped the telephonic participant would willingly press a number, leave a response of their choice on the shellphone, and hopefully put the tech-embedded shell back on the original parkbench, fountain lip or sidewalk they found it on. Off to the side, hidden away in the bushes, a few of my associates and I would videotape any strange reactions and other interactive activity between these random people and the shellphones, with resulting footage to report back coming across in the spirit of Alan Funt’s reality television show from yesteryear Candid Camera { all cyberSurreal video captures sans laugh tracks, of course }. All the video footage and collected responses would then be posted on one of the myriad cyberSurreal domains I could
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case study — stream two — exhibit b
0101 develop into full-working websites and then the entire seaShell telephonic system could be shipped to Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Paris, wherever, to then collect further cityCentric ethnographic data for geoLocative data discovery, all varying in interest and proportion. Strangely enough, I didn’t run out to the seaside to find the raw materials needed to create this system of misplaced oceanic object phonage. I think I took my son Maceo’s plastic lobster toy, a wooden crate, and other sundry items to the fourth floor studio space and started with a lobster payphone. Just a physical, non-working prototype, of course — I really know nothing about what goes on inside a phone to really make it work. And at that point
eXcerptZ from confounded | future fetish design performance for human advocacy
object Oriented performances
aka improvised Art Devicez
I thought I would really need to learn that level of prototyping to make a successful DMI project come to life. But, a few nails and a die-cut pizza box later and a rather cute sketch for this payphone with a lobster receiver implied the cyberSurreal technologies that logically proceeded the invention of the shellphone.
relationship now smacked of complete unorginality. I might’ve even seen the Lobster Telephone in my pre-DMI Surrealist research, come to think of it. But I continued to evolve the idea over the next few semesters with similarly non-functioning, physical prototypic proofs-of-concept springing up in the DMI Studio space.
A little peripheral research quickly uncovered Dalí’s famous and Surreal Lobster Telephone from 1936 — the silly accompanying quote from the artist himself, “I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone.”39
These pieces, I came to realized, represented a sketching process — a sort of sculptural sketchwork to understand the physical relationship between the viewer-participant and the object I have in mind, what I want to create. And this word, the notion of the sketch, if you will, as in a comedic sketch, also comes nicely into play upon closer examination of some of my later object oriented performances.
Needless to say { but I’ll say it }, I felt a bit disappointed that the crustacea-to-phone
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“Lobster Telephone.” Fine Lobster. Web. 19 Oct. 2011. <http://www.finemainelobster.com/lobster-telephone/>.
from seashells to pinecones — organic nature as prototype
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case study — stream two — exhibit b
Come Autumn 2009, I found a parallel, subconscious thread emerging from my . work in Gunta Kaza’s Design as Experience. In the enigmatic first assignment for . that semester, Gunta gives each student a paperbag. Inside the bag is an item that she specially hand-picked for each of us. We’re not supposed to open the bag in class that session, but we’re given the task of finding a private, personal place to look at what we have in the bag and then produce a visual response for the next week. 0103 I looked in the bag on the ride home. I think I was driving home along the Tobin Bridge, heading back to the North Shore over the span of water. Inside the bag I found a red dishrag — soft, warm, a bit ripped and warn. I drove the rest of the way home without a clue, no idea how I could visually respond to the dishrag. Almost the entire week went by. I waited and waited, postponing the inevitable. I spent a long, lonely Saturday with the dishrag and some items I gathered from my basement. I knew I didn’t want my response to directly reference the dishrag. I also felt that all the other students in class probably found a similar item in their paperbags that week and I wanted whatever I brought to class to be completely different, even if I needed to lie about what was in my bag.
With my Fujifilm digital camera as my means of documentation, I drove and drove and drove. I knew where I wanted to end up — I was heading up to Halibut Point, to this lovely little nature walk by the sea. I feel a certain comfort from the ocean, from the rhythmic hush of the waves, and for some reason I wanted to show in a photoEssay presentation my journey to this special place. It became more about place. About driving to that place. About my journey there by car and then about my continued experience on foot as I walked to a tall cliff on the edge of the ocean. There’s a canopy of Autumntide trees, little peeks of the ocean from the quarry banks, trees and sky and vegetation. All shot from a first-person vantagepoint. I take the gradually climbing path to the crest of the cliff. I find a group of large boulders
open container eXcerptZ| from the ancient confounded chinese | future secretsfetish of energy, design presence, performance context for+human cyberSurrealism advocacy
object Oriented performances
aka improvised Art Devicez
the pineCam outdoor surveillance system 37
â&#x20AC;&#x153;Lobster Telephone.â&#x20AC;? Fine Lobster. Web. 19 Oct. 2011. <http://www.finemainelobster.com/lobster-telephone/>.
along the edge of the cliff and I decide to imply I might jump through the photo-footage, but instead I crouch and hide on the other side of one of the boulders, the boulder spray-painted with the number 7. And then on the other side of 7 — that’s where I tell a beautiful lie, that’s where I try to surprise the class with what I found inside my paperbag. A few more photoslides and I actually pull out a few items. Wrapped in the red dishcloth, accompanied by dry flower petals and other found floral organic debris, I pull out a pinecone. A big, dry pinecone. I hold it up to the blue of the sky. The final image, the epiphanic culminating visual response shows my hand against the sky, holding the pinecone high in an nearly-religious adoration. I live in a rather wooded area. Not quite rural, but not quite suburban either. And in the Fall my driveway is riddled with pinecones.
That entire Autumn semester my projects seemed to include these 2 recurring visual objects — seashells and pinecones. In response to a passage from Augusten Burroughs‘ novel Running with Scissors, I created a simple sketch for an outdoor surveillance device called the pineCam from a pinecone, a tree stick, coffeegrounds, a USB cord and pieces of an old broken digital camera. Also part of the dishrag response, I included a shell in a ritualistic gustatory offering — this time a snailshell accompanied various cheeses, grapes, triscuits and other food items delicately arranged atop a road-flattened metal car part. For some reason I felt driven to embed technology in these natural elements.
What subconscious link brought me to seashells and pinecones? I needed to ask this. I needed to think a little deeper about these amazingly complex designs of nature and why I gravitated to them.
seaShell telephoney | stay connected
case study — stream two — exhibit b
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eXcerptZ from confounded | future fetish design performance for human advocacy
object Oriented performances aka improvised Art Devicez
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seaShell telephoney | stay connected
case study â&#x20AC;&#x201D; stream two â&#x20AC;&#x201D; exhibit b
seashells and pinecones, a little self-analysis of
Some surface conjecture pointed me to the naturally correlating input and output mechanisms of the human body, of the ultimate user of these preposterous devices. Seashells as cellphones, pinecones as cameras. I came to the conclusion that my experiments with shells correlated to the aural senses, to listening and to all senses related to the ear. And then, if the shell symbolized the aural, the pinecone now symbolized the visual, and specifically the capture or projection of visual stimuli. Further analysis reveals a certain obsession I have for containers. Both seashells and pinecones serve as hard, protective containers that bring an artifact forward in time. In the case of seashells, a living, soft organism find protection against predators and the rough tidal forces under the sea. In the case of the pinecone, the rather threatening natural design carries the life of future trees to a newfound destination. No wires, really, inside these natural containers. Not like what we find inside the manmade creations of the cellphone and the camera. My sculptural sketching, this sort of found object gameplay, ultimately led to what I consider an important breakthrough in my cyberSurreal,
design investigations. Each object-based theme, both seashells and pinecones, led to other sketches and further conceptual streams. A clamshell GPS would cyberSurreally guide participants in an outdoor scavenger hunt at Boston Common or in Davis Square. The lobster payphone would evolve into more and more wireless sketches, all just waiting to be shown at DMI reviews. But eventually, I found the image I needed.
I discovered an interesting question through the verbal-visual conceptualization of further shellPhone iterations.
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aka improvised Art Devicez
airport encounters of the heard kind
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eXcerptZ from confounded | future fetish design performance for human advocacy
object Oriented performances
The most Surreal experience I can recall now happens every day. About 14 years ago while traveling in Italy I saw a person that seemed to be a madman. Although impeccably dressed in a suit, shiny shoes and tie, this businessguy paced back and forth near the wall of the airport gate. He talked loudly as he paced, totally speaking as if he were talking to an invisible person in the immediate vicinity. It seemed like a heated conversation, but only half of one, a strange and annoying soliloquy. Of course, anyone living in 2011 sees this sort of thing happen all the time. The businessguy in the airport paced around while talking on his bluetooth, wireless phone. I could finally see the wire. I almost comprehended his activity now. He had an excuse.
The shellPhone series conceptually culminated in these 2 images: The first, totally non-visualized in any way — the bluetooth shellPhone. A snailshell stuck right onto the ear of the performer. I would perform with the snailshell at the mall or at a CVS. I could walk around like the Italian businessguy, just to see if anyone still looked at me like I might be crazy, even in 2011, for walking around talking to myself. Once again I asked myself, ‘Would anyone even notice?’ I mean, in 2011 its completely acceptable to pace
around and remotely converse with an invisible other. But what kind of verbal material could actually grab someone’s attention and make them see my activity as unusual and maybe even crazy? And why did the Italian businessguy seem so insane to me 14 years ago while now any similar behavior — the same exact behavior, in fact — seems commonplace, ordinary and acceptable?
After 2 semesters of talking about these shellPhone devices, Colin divined my interest wasn’t in building an actual working seashell-embedded cellphone but I was more interested in this sort of public intervention performance art, this sort of social litmus test through implied technologies. This took a lot of the pressure off and made the impossible suddenly seem more fun and within reach. Returning back to the bluetooth shellPhone, I thought about the snailshell nestled into the human ear. The juxtaposition of human and animal matter — yet another ying and yang relationship here, and the connective technology that would stick shell to ear. Then I thought about an actual snail inside the shell, sans implied digital technology, and how the shell now represented some unnatural union between animal, human and technological. I thought about snails and leeches, and about the subtle difference between the symbiotic and parasitic. And then I thought about our modern relation-
ship with our technologies. I wondered, ‘Are we now in a symbiotic or parasitic relationship with our devices?’ We’ve develop a dependence on information, on machines, on technology. Does it weaken or strengthen us? Or does that sort of question even matter now? Maybe our technology — our devices and information — extend the definition of what it means to be human. We evolve through our own inventions. Or do our inventions, now, almost autoiterate and suggest the next generation of our technologies all on their own? The vision of the future from the 1930s suggested technology would serve us, that innovation would improve our quality of life and make our lives easier, more comfortable. But maybe now that paradigm has flipped. Maybe we now serve our machines.
seaShell telephoney | stay connected
case study — stream two — exhibit b
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Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll never need to feel disconnected again with the 4G shellPhone
eXcerptZ from confounded | future fetish design performance for human advocacy
seaShell telephoney | stay connected
eXcerptZ from confounded | future fetish design performance for human advocacy
object Oriented performances
aka improvised Art Devicez
formis Andalou The second image, I derived from analysis of the infamous Surrealist film ‘Un Chien Andalou’ co-created by Buñuel and Dalí. I found an interesting coincidence smack dab in the middle of the bedroom scene where the ‘Chien’ himself almost seems to be using a modernday mobile device. Watching the passage from ‘Un Chien Andalou’ — the man and woman stand, staring into the palm of the man’s hand, both mysteriously mesmerized by the vision of ants as they run in and out of a stigmata-like opening in the center of his palm. As a living, breathing witness of incessant and neverending myriad similar watchers, similarly hypnotized fiends visually engaged with all that dances in the palm of their hands ... well, I cannot help but ask about the data that plays within these, our daily apps — ants, data, information — the device itself, perhaps this is the hole. Our own informatic stigmata of sorts. A newfound, willingly self-afflicted weapon. Dalinian ants reborn again as the very data that makes us dance around like ants in our own unstoppable puppetshow afterlife. We follow the data. We watch and check and the remains of something once alive. And here in ‘formis Andalou’ I show a cracked iPhone held by the mystical hand of Jobs — ants busily climbing from the crack, taking over the hand and the device.
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cannot help but come back and gently stroke our shiny, beloved touch-interface objects of desire. I drew up a quick Photoshop sketch. I think I put it together for another DMI review. But a simple satiric reference to this scene from ‘Un Chien Andalou’ depicts my cyberSurreal iPhone app ‘formis Andalou’ in homage to the hand and the hole and the ants. Dalí put a special symbolic meaning on the presence of ants ... ‘ants point to death, decay, and immense sexual desire’40 From my previous research the inference is multivariate and deep and actually suggests a sort of societal decay. Ants and flies feed on the carcass,
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These images serve as Freudian slips. My opinions and fears about technology. Subconscious expressions of how I feel about data and our devices. And this personal anxiety about our technology is what directly fed my more functional — or should I say dysfunctional — object Oriented Performance prototypes and scenarios.
“Lobster Telephone.” Fine Lobster. Web. 19 Oct. 2011. <http://www.finemainelobster.com/lobster-telephone/>.
seaShell telephoney | stay connected
case study â&#x20AC;&#x201D; stream two â&#x20AC;&#x201D; exhibit b
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formis Andalous Based on the uncanny posturings of the central antihero character from the famous Surrealist film Un Chien Andalous, this cyberSurreal conceptual prototype expresses a certain dystopic outlook regarding the ubiquitous technological devices we seemingly swim in on a daily basis.
eXcerptZ from confounded | future fetish design performance for human advocacy
aka improvised Art Devicez
Stills from the Surrealist film Un Chien Andalous
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Shouldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve gotten the extended dataPlan
eXcerptZ from confounded | future fetish design performance for human advocacy
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surfing
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ego
About lou suSi lou suSi is an artist, designer, musician and performer living and working on the North Shore of Massachusetts. He and his wife Carol own and operate the new media + web design boutique BXOS !nteractive! { serious business | smart design }, leveraging the power of design thinking and user-centered design processes to promote excellent design everywhere He teaches design and performance at Endicott College, SMFA, MassArt, UMass Lowell and The Cloud Foundation He collaboratively curates interdisciplinary, thought-provoking, eclectic exhibit-events in the Boston area and always looks for new opportunities to push the boundaries of the
experience both in and out of the gallerySpace ( recent shows include: American Cheese: the introspection and Provocative Objects: the extradition, mediaLuscious Design + Art Review, fauxShow and forensicEvidence ) lou blogs on Social Media North and Coffee Thirsty dot com among other myriad bloggish destinations ‘out there’ currently lou conducts research and experiments extending from his MFA in Communication Design at The Dynamic Media Institute at The Massachusetts College of Art and Design He recently sat on the board at Mobius: Boston’s constantly evolving platform for experimental, interdisciplinary art in all media.
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eXcerptZ from confounded | future fetish design performance for human advocacy
about eXcerptz eXcerptz from
confounded | future fetish design performance for human advocacy comes
from the original writings and research from my DMI MFA Design thesis ‘confounded’. My thesis work for ‘confounded’ took 3 and a half years to complete through Dynamic Media Institute at Massachusetts College of Art and Design between the years 2008 and 2011. Through ‘confounded’ I carefully researched and examined humor, laughter and the area residing between what’s funny and what’s not actually funny. Through the medium of humor and lightness, I was able to gently critique our technological progress, oftentimes commenting and reporting back to The Bureau of cyberSurreal investigation and my colleagues and the faculty at DMI on my qualitative findings on the current state of our human experience. seaShell telephoney discusses a series of physically prototyped dumbphone ‘sketches’ I created to humorously explore our ever-expanding notion of acceptable conversationSpace in higly public settings. As usual with my work, I try to follow the streams of my subconscious to see where it will take me. The writing here, although not particilarly formal from a typically staid academic and intellectual perspective, attempts to capture and follow threads of my spontaeous thought as they unraveled, evolved and finally met their demise. The dead end I discovered in this loose and unruly sketchwork nicely set up an important foundation and rhythm for what later became my series of provocative objects — also known as improvised Art Devicez or object.Oriented performances —all prenomers to what I eventually decided should be called future fetish design performance
for human advocacy.
full documentation, research
and writings from my MFA thesis in Design ‘confounded: future fetish design performance for human advocacy’ can be purchased in hardcover onDemand book format from Blurb at: http://www.blurb.com/b/2779835-confounded
love and thanks to my wife Carol and our family for always supporting me no matter how impractical and strange these journeys into cyberSurrealism turn out.
extra special thanks
to Dynamic Media Institute, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design — some of the most challenging, thought-provoking and enjoyable times of my life were guided and influenced by my graduate design research at DMI circa and betwixt the years 2008 to 2012. This time was simultaneously a hideous, chaotic mess for me, too. huge shout out and thank you
seaShell telephoney | stay connected
eXcerptZ from confounded | future fetish design performance for human advocacy