CEDI Multisensory Installation, NYC, 2010
All words + images © Kateri O'Neil 2019
CEDI
TriBeCa, NYC, 2010
A multi-sensory installation by Mary Rasmussen and Kateri O’Neil,
With sound environment created by 45sON33 (Bryce Hackford and Kyle Garner)
With sound environment created by 45sON33 (Bryce Hackford and Kyle Garner)
Today’s human condition resembles the very incarnation of a Baudrillardian nightmare: our world has become so simulacra-driven, hyper-real, and over-mediated that even familiar signs and symbols seem clichéd and devoid of meaning. As we navigate this digitized era—an era in which one’s own experience of perceiving, documenting, and sharing “real life” incidents often involves infinite filters and excessive curation across multiple channels—the visceral and sensual experience has become increasingly irrelevant and antiquated. The very notion of reality has been brought into question and is currently perceived as a relative and mutable concept that may be applied to a range of experiences, be they virtual, vicarious, simulated, or augmented. In a society increasingly governed by technology’s extensive and tenacious tentacles, we “civilized” humans are faced with an ever-growing challenge: if we do not willingly adopt and adapt to new modes of perception and communication, we will inevitably be forced to yield to the hijacking whirlwind of digital evolution.
Whether or not we are being thrust forth by some cosmological constant, a pre-apocalyptic angst seems to be infiltrating and contaminating our collective psyche. This malaise is creating a growing need for individuals to escape subjected time and seek alternate realities: in a new world order in which humans are creating android-cyborg avatars out of their own likeness, we begin to probe and dissect the current ambiguity of human identity at large. In a time when many human beings are living their own lives virtually—even vicariously—through neo-real “games” like Second Life, we must start to consider the evolution—or regression—of human culture and civilization. Furthermore, we must contemplate what “reality” really consists of as we become increasingly aware of the simulated, synthetic experience.
As human interaction becomes more complex, convoluted, and fragmented, we look to symbols charged with instinctive or intuitive substance and significance in the form of easily-identifiable iconography, cultural mythology, and fundamental human gestures of communication. Just as Neanderthals used elemental signs to convey meaning, “Cedi” (the word for “yield” in Esperanto) functions as a vigil—and a crypt—for civilization that ventures to imagine a technological meltdown within the context of the first human attempts to record, chronicle, and document information.
As languages and dialects are succumbing to extinction at an alarming rate and the very fabric of human interaction is being unraveled by innovations in technology, artifacts and long-lasting caches of materials or data may be the only enduring tools left to help preserve contemporary culture and prevent an eventual digital dark age.
“Cedi,” in this sense, serves as a petrified futuristic time capsule, highlighting the shifting modes of communication with the simultaneous deterioration of the substance of culture through the juxtaposition of primary symbols within a post-apocalyptic “extra-terrestrial” landscape. “Cedi” explores various dichotomies, exposing the challenge of the analog versus the digital, the organic versus the synthetic, the metaphysical versus the material, the authentic versus the artificial, exploring and exemplifying Baudrillard’s theories on simulacra and simulation. Just as signs and symbols are being stripped of their embedded and autonomous meaning and significance, so too are our senses. As we move closer to entirely simulated experiences, sensual stimulation—a form of stimulation that cannot be exactly reproduced or replicated—seems verging on retirement.
In creating a multi-sensory, inter-disciplinary pastiche of anachronistic and sometimes-antiquated forms of expression and communication, “Cedi” highlights the oversaturation and eventual dissolution and disintegration of the very foundation of civilization: human interaction. And in attempting to engage the public, a single channel will not suffice; rather, we must engage on multiple levels in order to stimulate and arouse as many human senses as possible. This multi-channel approach allows us to connect with the public on a more visceral level by enticing individuals to insert themselves into a constructed and controlled environment—a hermetic pocket that could just as well be a dream as it could be a nightmare.
As we continue to embrace and disrupt the influence of technology, we ask ourselves how best to reconcile being a “human” in an increasingly mechanical world in which a vicarious experience of reality—of existence—is acceptable as a standard, default mode of “living”. How do we define and assert our human identity in an era that engenders genetic engineering, cloning, cyborgs, avatars, and virtual, second-life reality? In an era in which it may no longer be possible to deconstruct and peel away layers of representation to arrive at an original source or reference point, we must exercise a more intimate, intuitive way of communicating and interacting. If we have indeed reached a point in which the “precession of simulacra” interferes with primary sources and actual reality, we must strive to incubate these vestiges of the original and the authentic in order to preserve what it is that allows us to engage with the world without a single filter; we must ultimately exalt in—and commit to—our five human senses.
“The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgment to separate truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.”
“When the real no longer is what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality: of secondhand truth, objectivity, and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of lived experience, a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us—a strategy of the real, neo-real, and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.” - Jean Baudrillard
