July 2 - December 23, 2022
University of Wyoming Art Museum
CONCEPT>> Rec Lobe TV maps the labyrinthine processes through which human experience is perceived and transformed - from observation through language - into a multi-sensory simulacrum that affects consequent behavior and beliefs. RLTV follows this chain reaction step-by-step, rendering the results visible, no matter how bizarre: from real-time accounts of local events and national news reporting, into the untethered time-space of the internet and AI intelligence. Like mapping a complex, multi-directional game of telephone, RLTV mirrors the process by which we come to believe what's real in the world, as direct observation of a singular phenomenon mutates through law enforcement, media, AI, stochastic stimuli, and storytelling into eerily uncanny phenomena. Like Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22, “Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
PRESS RELEASE EXCERPT>> Bringing together real time events, collaged footage, global patterns of journalistic story-telling, chatbot AI, and appropriated human commentary, Rec Lobe TV portrays several 'intelligences' attempting to make sense of each other and the world at large. In ways both fascinating and terrifying, the slippages that perpetually dislodge any emergent logic send us down the rabbit hole. Each output (projection, graphs, media, web browsing) represents a specific method through which we, as human beings, attempt to understand the world via the media around us, and, simultaneously, how these same media cycles can confuse, obfuscate, and ultimately cause us to lose our senses of self. While there are parameters within which RLTV operates, our collective forfeits a significant degree of agency to the system we create, embracing the unpredictable at each step, as the moment-to-moment outcome cannot be anticipated. Simultaneously humanistic and technological, Rec LobeTV advances our investigation of the uncanny entities that shape our lives.