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amazon talk (2014) - video performance talk in English
Presented at the exhibition FULL SATURATION in Kunstpavillon München February 2014.
amazon talk is a speech about child, technology and undaunted earthly territories. It engages itself with what is being-raised-by other species, going out with technologies that are not entirely themselves and inspecting the powers of artificial bodies and things that happen in nonhuman interfaces. The talk is a try to read the accumulated materials and body-thought-processes from a journey with Karin Demuth and Hanno Demuth in 2013 at the Amazon region in Colombia.

The performance-video-talk seeks to be an invitation to explore the notion of interface in software vision, skin, and children. The talk is divided into three tangled narratives: one the social mode of traveling that includes the child—the opposite of the lonely masculine traveler—based on a personal experience in a trip to Amazon in Colombia with Karin Demuth and her three years old boy Hanno; second a multi-headed reading of technologies of interfacing within computer culture and the surface of the jungle; and third a visual representation of the highly technical images recorded by Kinect infrared 3D-scanner/motion-detector. The result of the visualization is a heavily glitchy image, which aims in the performance to link the spatial practice to the perceived and the representational spaces to the real. The recording of the walking in the rain-forest as spatial and physical experience is thus dematerialized and has acquired a digital character. The dense and hot environment of the Amazon is replaced by an abstract graphic structure, thus bringing a new way to learn understanding the locality of the walk. The noise and the randomness of the technical coloring the surface of the jungle provoke an aesthetic fascination, and an appropriation of the impossible image of the forest.


'amazon talk' at Kunstpavillon München, part of the exhibition ‘FULL SATURATION’ Munich, Germany February 2014

Few hours walk deep into the forest in Leticia, Colombia, a small city on the left bank of the Amazon river, and at the point where Colombia, Brazil and Peru come together. (Photo by Karin Demuth) Space always becomes a matter of culture, appropriated and adapted by man using diverse instruments, mentally filled with projections and projects. The Amazon rainforest still resists to remain a radical nonhuman surrounding on the surface of the earth—an environment that is “unfriendly“ in many ways. The performance amazon talk, questions a contemporary understanding of formative surroundings and the way these understandings engage in the technological support of human activity on earth, which more than scientific enthusiasm are also subject to selfish aspirations. performance lecture 'amazon talk' diagram <br />Appearance of eukaryotic cells around 2 billion years ago is probably the most significant event in the history of life on earth. It gave the creatures with DNA two important things: a nucleus that contained all the genetic materials and an interface to communicate with the world outside of the cell—a complex membrane, to talk with the materials that are alien to it. Interface is a critical point of intersection between different life worlds, fields, or levels of organization. They are the areas in which social friction can be experienced and where diffusion of new technology is leading to structural discontinuities (which can be either positive or negative), the interface is where they will occur. The urgent issue of interfaces in social interaction and flow between human-animal, nonhuman, and computer is today becoming a zone of transition of ephemeral technologies, physical contact, sociopolitical boundaries, and metaphor-representation.

© 2014 Sina Seifee