Marlot Meyer
Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies / Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst / April 17 – June 9 /
Curators: Zane Cerpina, Boris Debackere, Espen Gangvik, Florian Weigl.
Hotspot (2023)
Hotspot is a shared experience of uploading yourself in order to reconnect to yourself and each other inside a sentient, listening space. It is an experience of letting go of control in exchange for connection and communication. By listening through internal biosignals and expressing through electricity and air, Hotspot exposes our insides to the outside, and in doing so, brings the outside inside through a situated extra-sensory perception that moves beyond individuality and logic.
How we perceive, understand, and interact with our world is becoming increasingly detached from our physical and tangible reality. We prioritize thinking over feeling and data over knowledge. As humanity’s primary activity becomes the crossing through screens, it becomes clear that the self can exist in more than one place or in more than one body at a time. We increasingly try to relate to ourselves, each other, and our environments through virtual images, data, social media posts, shared photos and videos, and documentaries. This is also the predominant way to engage with information about the world or communicate with each other.
The distinction between knowledge and data is blurring. The problem with data is that it is abstracted and detached from the reality it represents. Data, by default, can only represent the things that are quantifiable. It breaks a complex system of connected things into isolated parts. For us, it creates a fixation with numbers, values and graphs in order to give us meaning. But by doing this we lose touch with our intuitive knowledge making processes.
As our identities and values become increasingly entangled with data extraction, representation and creation, we feel we are changing from subject to object, and fear exposing or sharing ourselves to unwanted eyes, demanding privacy and anonymity.
What if instead of separating the physical and virtual, mind and body, and self and other, we were able to directly sense and experience how one intimately and inescapably involves the other? That the inside and the outside are the same thing, and are continuously creating the other.
Entering a jungle of synthetic vines, you join a circle of bodies wearing yellow octopuses on their heads; nobody is talking, yet you have the feeling that they are all making contact with each other.
These little creatures have sensors on their tentacles that they like to wrap around the heads of visitors. Once connected, the sensors collect and upload the biodata of their wearers. But instead of extracting and uploading this data into a cloud or cryptic code, the wearer’s biodata is directly translated into the physical space and sensations of bodies around them.
Once connected to the “Hotspot,” your body becomes a channel in a web of information exchange: your heart rate, sweat response, prefrontal cortex activity, and eye movement reflect how you are feeling and responding to the world around you. Although you cannot actively control these aspects of your body, you feel like a part of you is being uploaded and downloaded in other places. You hear the hissing and puffing of silicone vines as they gyrate around you, spouting gusts of air that tickle your hair and ruffle your clothes.
Electrical pulses are sent to your body—tickling, tapping, shocking; you feel a change in temperature. This is the translation made by a computer of the other wearer’s biodata into sensations that influence your own body. Experiencing how others—both human and machine–manipulate what you feel and think can raise doubts about who is in control and who is being controlled. Although this fear quickly dissipates, as you know, they are feeling your biodata on their body. You are mutually exchanging.
Marlot Meyer (ZA/NL) is an Inter (Active | Net) – Multi (Media | Disciplinary) – Artist whose inspiration and energy stems from her majority analog experiences growing up in South Africa and the contrast between this and the mediated world we live and communicate in and through today.
She uses technology as a tool to infiltrate, examine, and reconstruct the embedded knowledge that lies within our bodies and the cultures, structures, and meanings we have created around them. In doing so she breaks down barriers and binaries and overcomes the problematic notions of separation between the self and other.
Her playful attitude towards technology acts as the driving force to understand and work with digital media, seeing it as a tool to illustrate the already existing, often unseen natural forces and connections around us.
Her work aims to create experiences that picture the body with boundaries extending outside and beyond the skin into a much vaster network of senses, signals, and sources, whereby a new definition of self, body, and space can be created and shared.
marlotmeyer.com
Header Graphics: “Hotspot” (detail), courtesy of the artist.