Marlot Meyer

A new form of embodied language that perceives and communicates the world more intuitively is exactly what artist Marlot Meyer and neuroscientist Marcel de Jeu are looking for with their project Hacking Heuristics. They want to challenge and break through our deep urge to control everything with our words and our eyes. It is time to recognize that our language and visual culture are dominant and determine the nature and quality of our thoughts and actions. But now both the artist and the scientist say we need a more multidisciplinary sense and holistic awareness to understand and respond to the complexities that have become part of our lives. With Hacking Heuristics, they tune in to bodily sensations and unconscious responses in the prefrontal cortex. By hacking into these responses and learned reasoning, we can begin to see beyond what we cognitively think we know and potentially explore new meanings and interpretations of knowledge.

https://v2.nl/works/the-collective-algorithm-of-care

LIMB-O was created in the digital and physical world, yet exists in spaces of the physical installation, the body, the digital interface, and the continuous flow of data between these human and non-human participants. Through the audience, the body, and the network’s participation, both online and offline, LIMB-O attempts to illustrate that one is continuously creating the other. Actions and reactions entangled in each other, communicating through live streaming platforms, microprocessors, valves, compressed air, tubes, touch sensors, inflatables, bodies, electrical impulses and the Internet. In LIMB-O the technological elements act as the tools which accentuate the already existing powers and dialogues that occur within our body, and our environments. Producing a space where human intuition is encouraged with the aid of technological ability to push them into a wider range of possible experiences.

Een web van slangen die plotseling bewegen, ballonnen met lucht vullen en via electroden lichaamsdelen aansturen. Marlot Meyer (Kaapstad, Zuid-Afrika 1997) studeerde onlangs af aan de Koninklijke Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Den Haag met ‘LIMB-O’: een interactieve ervaringsinstallatie, waar zij zelf fysiek deel van uitmaakt. Met kabeltjes en sensoren aangesloten op haar werk is ze overgeleverd aan de acties van de toeschouwer, die – offline in de tentoonstellingsruimte of online vanuit huis – de installatie en dus ook haar lichaam kan besturen. Bij Expo Bart maakte zij voor de Nieuwe Oogst expositie een vervolg op haar afstudeerwerk: LIMB 2.0. Video: Koen Kievits

Marlot Meyer talks about LIMB-O and self design

We all have an identity. Or at least some-things we identify with. But what makes these fictional characters we call ourselves, become real? And when is it real? We take from cultures, gestures, experiences. We identify with something, and then call it ours. And so it becomes us. These immaterial ideas based on material objects, histories, rituals, exteriors that we use to paint a picture of who we are and what we identify with. What would happen if we didn’t have an identity to begin with. If we were seeking for one in all the places that have been learned to us that symbolise this. That because of this desire to please, to entertain, to keep them watching. You hand yourself over to others. Strangers behind screens. However, to you in that moment they feel real, as if they were all there, anticipating for something to happen.

Opera is a format that strongly magnifies situations that you can recognise from reality and it is exactly with this aspect of the magnifying glass that translated this dramatic concept A Paradise Built in Hell - after the book of social critic Rebecca Solnit, who describes the purposeful joy that fills human beings in the face of disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes and even a terrorist attack: “These are clearly not events to be wished for, yet they bring out the best in us and provide common purpose. Everyday concerns and societal structures vanish. A strange kind of liberation fills the air. People rise to the occasion. Social alienation seems to vanish. Our response to disaster gives us nothing less than “a glimpse of who else we ourselves may be and what else our society could become... The recovery of this purpose and closeness without crisis or pressure is the great contemporary task of being human.” A Paradise Built in Hell challenges the traditional concept of the dramatic opera format as we know it today. It opens up the opportunity to experiment with alternative narrative structures, unconventional produced music (and musicians) and suggests a scenography that mimics ‘the real’ while it no longer differs from your couch-perspective; a videogame. It plays with interactive transmissions and invites you to a (virtual)-reality-walk through... Paradise? Hell? Act 2: Excess “We have created a manic world nauseous with the pursuit of material wealth. Many also bear their cross of imagined deprivation, while their fellow human beings remain paralysed by real poverty and suffering. Based on the Pakistan Heatwaves of 2017, here the idea of the Sun, is seen as a symbol of God, the life giver to all. The sun’s energy gives pleasure to millions be it on beaches or even going so far as artificially recreating the sun because we crave him so much. But every paradise will turn into a hell if it lasts too long. The excess of heat is something inescapable, we melt in the thick sweetness of our sensual excess, and our shameless opulence, while our discontent souls suffocate in the arid wasteland of spiritual deprivation.” Music: ‘Industrial Heat’ by Juan Luis Montoro Santos Scenography: Marlot Meyer

Act 3: Digital Disaster “How casually do we deal with someone else’s life story? What kind of stories are we willing to hear? What kind of stories move us? Why is it that the same audiences that are driven to tears by fictional blockbusters, remain affectless in the face of actual human suffering? Based on China’s floods and landslides, this idea of overflowing of data, information and stories of either joy or horror simply become distorted and lost to the point where suffering of others becomes so distanced from our personal experiences it does not even effect us.” Music: ‘Shrine’ by Germán Medina Calle Scenography: Marlot Meyer

Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that. The post human condition introduces a qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet and perhaps other planets. This issue raises serious questions as to the very structures of our shared identity - as humans - amidst the complexity of contemporary science, politics and international relations. Discourses and representations of the non-human, anti-human , the inhumane and the posthuman proliferate and overlap in our globalised, technology mediated societies. Who am I? I am learned Code. Everything is a code. From DNA structures to motherboards. And so we become the human machine. Things are repeated. Everything is built from its predecessor. The idea of the circle; “You never step in the same river twice”. There is no origin, things grow and die out, there is no final layer to finding the new in the old, because it is all it. As are you. (Design a product for commercial space travel) When travelling for a long time, let alone to a different planet, you lose your sense of earth, your sense of orientation. Let alone what it physically does to your body with regards to the extreme changes to your external environment. The effect is that we lose who we are, our identity as a human of earth. We seek a connection or orientation to what? Earth? Mars? How do people orientate themselves? How did we do it in the past? Navigation in humans is the same as the patterns within machines. Our bodies are designed for Earth’s gravity, it creates orientation. In space there is nothing but “space”, creating disorientation and high anxiety. Our bodies are not designed for Mars. There are double the amount of days in a year, 1/3 strength of the gravity on earth. Meaning you weigh less, move slower, jump higher Human instincts allow humans to survive in the wild. Without human instincts people would have to learn everything that they do. An instinct is a trait that is not learned, but passed down from generation to generation. It is a skill that is already known and perfected without training, or practicing that skill. Instincts are learned first through observation, then by mimicking. The ones who learned the fastest would be successful, then brought into the gene pool, kind of like a Baldwin Effect. The one instinct that has defined and empowered us as a superior species, the upright walk, is instinctively imprinted in us, as you see with babies already stepping and kicking in the air, training for walking. Since nobody has ever been born on mars or even walked there, the experience would be like taking a lion to Russia and expect it to understand ice. We are completely unconditioned to this new environment. So we must create a tool that will teach us this to prepare for the future.