Dark Matter

'Dark Matter' is a fully immersive, physically interactive, three-dimensional digital projection environment. The artwork explores whether the body might be perceived as an absence, inferred from the physical and cultural information around it. In this context, employing multi-agent interaction, people are proposed as emergent 'co-readers' within the context of a dynamic assemblage. The artwork employs the metaphor of dark matter; not only that of a physical character but also cultural. Just as dark matter is believed to bind the universe together it can be proposed that our society is bound by cultural 'dark matter'. In 'Dark Matter' textual material directly linked to events at Abu Ghraib and, specifically, Guantanamo Bay, is employed to explore the nature of the things we "don't know we know", representing a kind of cultural dark matter.

The proposition explored in Dark Matter is that we exist as motile assemblages rather than stable individuals, a subset of a larger assemblage that could be considered a form of 'collective unconscious'. That assemblage is explored here as shaped by the forces of dark matter, in the form of the cultural information and patterns that we "don't know that we know". This is considered a generative ontology, manifest in the artwork through multi-agent interaction with liminal visual and textual information. Interactors interact with textual fragments derived from interviews with a Guantanamo inmate. Depending on the number of viewers the rendering of the 3D space from first, second and third person points of view creates a shifting experience of the immersive environment.

Screen recording of Dark Matter, February 2016.

CC 2017 Simon Biggs

Stills from studio development, Cherryville, Australia, 2016.

Screen shots from studio development, Cherryville, Australia, 2016.