Sad Ghost Experiment

“Sad Ghost experiment” is a code that arises from an audiovisual research project. The objective of the study was to delve deeper into the p5.sound library and develop a reactive audio code. The code itself, as a composition tool, allows us to weave skeletons that we can then cover with certain aesthetic content, generating an environment or a “psychological climate.” The premise of the work is not the audiovisual section itself, but the investigation into the ever-changing possibilities that derive from composition through the use of code. So the fundamental basis of the code-work “Sad Ghost experiment” is its mutable root, in addition to what it currently is: an embryo. Its past and its future are part of the work, as well as the user and his intervention in it. At present, the work consists of an oscillator to which the user can assign the wave type and amplitude. At the same time, a square and a point are affected by the frequency and amplitude of the sound.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

In this post-media era, it is extremely appropriate to be able to rest from the overdose of data and reasoning to which we are permanently exposed, in the capacities that digital media offer us to reach new expressive results that coincide with the increasingly overstimulated human sensitivity. We inhabit a society that is surrounded by “(…) a modernity whose complexity surpasses us on all sides (…)” (Guattari, Felix, A Refoundation of Social Practices) without being fully aware of both the negative and positive consequences of this permanent overexposure for which we are neither biologically nor psychologically prepared. Like a primitive human when we leave the cave for the first time in the middle of the night, we find ourselves surrounded by media that bombard our sensitivity, turning us into passive users, recipients of information chewed, sweetened and sifted by the media. The great upheavals of the time are evaded, creating an absence of social reflection, thus generating a favorable climate for the human/user/market area. Your house is a market area. We are all human, we are users and all our access to the digital space turns us into a market area. Humans must accept themselves as users and, thus, perhaps, begin to disintegrate the passivity in which they find themselves involved. “Sad ghost experiment” alludes to the discomfort that comes with the disagreement and anguish of living in a contradictory and self-lacerating universe. The work also silences the language of servile aesthetics (which Marechan Fiz refers to in “Environments and playful spaces”, point III) used by the great powers, to configure the appearance of reality. It tries not to fall into the immediate satisfaction of the viewer, it makes an effort not to be a work cooked for passive consumption, and definitely not to generate an unattainable desire in the user, but simply to wrap it in a psychological space in which it is allowed to be vulnerable. The work itself is the embryo of a search. That of finding new ways to stimulate human sensitivity.

Literature

GUATTARI, Felix. (1992). Una refundación de las prácticas sociales

MARCHÁN FIZ, Simón. (1994). Ambientes y espacios lúdicos

MCLUHAN, Marshall. (1964). El medio es el mensaje

SONTAG, Susan. (1962). Los happenings - un arte de yuxtaposición radical.pdf

David Cronenberg (1983) Videodrome