The Specular Highlights Institute was an installation project created for the 2017 Art in Odd Project Orlando festival. The theme was noise. When distinguishing between what is the center of interest and what is everything else, we use many sets of terms: foreground/background, positive space/negative space, and sometimes signal/noise. I chose to think of this last set of pairs when interpreting the theme.

The Specular Highlights Institute gets its name both from its similarity to the term coined by Guy Debord, “spectacle” and the way photographs- particularly digital camera sensors- record specular highlights, the bright spot of light that appears on a shiny object such as a body of water, polished metal, or in a person’s eyes. These areas of an image tend to attract the viewer through contrast, pattern, and shape but the details in the highlight are blown out, there is no information captured there. It’s all show and no substance. Using the Situationist International concepts of the spectacle and commodity fetishism I will reawaken the viewer’s sense of their surrounding environment, allowing them to make new connections.

The installation will use three different types of engagements: alternative fact “info signs” that mimic museum fact cards, selfie spot signs that parody the picture spot signage found in amusement parks, and absurdist safety card pamphlets that lampoon airplane safety cards. Three different absurdist safety cards will be hidden throughout Art in Odd Places locations each day at cooperating businesses both encouraging participants in the know to set out on a Easter egg hunt and creating an opportunity for unknowing passer byers to happen upon something unexpected. The Specular Highlights Institute will conduct itself as a serious organization that no one will actually be expected to take seriously. All branding will fall under a spec sheet guideline of The Specular Highlights Institute. The goal is to appeal to both viewers unfamiliar in critical theory through humor and color and to those in the know through referential moments throughout the piece.

Absurdists find the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life humanly impossible. Therefore, any quest to do so will ultimately fail (and hence is absurd). However, as Albert Camus stated, we should defiantly continue the search while simultaneously embracing the absurdity of it all. So what lessons should one take away from The Specular Highlights Institute? Firstly, what do we as a capitalist society pay in our social relationships for technological advancement, increased income, and increased leisure? And secondly, if the aforementioned things aren’t the end all be all, then what is? The Specular Highlights Institute suggests that people find meaning in life through their actions in it, not by what they say or philosophize. Make it happen, captain!

Art in Odd Place Orlando took place along Orange Ave in downtown Orlando Friday November 10 through Sunday November 12, 2017.