UN[dis]CRIMINATE
BIOGRAM
by Mark Cypher
Biogram is a net-art work that generates real-time topological visual and aural models based on the sentiment analysis of tweets that reference ‘experience’. The art-work contends that rather than being a singular subjective event, the space of experience is entangled with multiple networks of human and nonhuman objects that help us perform what we might express as ‘experience’.
In Brian Massumi’s words these tweets are Biograms, event-perceptions irretrievably entangledwith combinations of senses, times, networks and software; in constant flux. Just as the Twitter tweet is a transitory mediated reflection of the user, the artwork is a mirrored topology that reflects and carries the user’s experience out of herself. Within the artwork Biogram, tweets that refer to an experience (if in fact it was ever singular) become animated performances shot through with ‘other’ontologies that render ‘experience’ as a multifaceted mirror.
The tweet becomes the signifying host for the generative possibilities inherent in the relations between image and text, user and device, experience and distributed orientation. The etymology of the word Biogram translates into ‘living-word’, but in amongst the tens of thousands of tweets a week that reference experience the signification of each tweet is short lived. The net artwork Biogram references how these tweets live on as transient sentiment, in ghostly half-lives, within the network, ever inflicted by chance.
Mark Cypher is an Australian artist and designer and works at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. Mark has exhibited in over 25 international exhibitions over the last 12 years, including, ISEA2017 (Colombia), Al-Tiba9 2017 Arab International Exhibition of Contemporary Art (Barcelona), ISEA2011 (Istanbul), 404 International Festival of Electronic Arts (Argentina), Salon International De Art Digital (Cuba), Siggraph 2006 (USA), FILE -Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica ( Brazil), NewForms06 (Canada), BEAP -Biennial of Electronic Art (Australia), Haptic 07 (Canada), Bios4, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Spain), Transitio_MX (Mexico) and Currents, Santa Fe International New Media Biennale (USA). Mark Cypher’s artwork is also represented in several Australian state and national collections.
