RENDER
HoloCenter on Governors Island during July and August, 2015
then at Fort Jay for the Governors Island Art Fair in September, 2015
Almost every facet of our lives is now grist for the mill of government and corporate surveillance and data mining. To this network of systems, we exist only as sets of quantified information — not as creative, freely operating beings. Maximus Clarke‘s 3D video installation, RENDER, is a depiction of human personhood under the reifying gaze of the new panopticon.
In computer science, reification is the process of creating a data model for classifying all aspects of a subject. In gestalt psychology, reification is the perception of a complete form based on fragmentary information: for example, the apprehension of depth in a stereo image. In Marxist theory, reification occurs when social relations, and those involved in them, are reduced to mere objects.
RENDER will comprise an installed structure in which the viewer sees three-dimensional images of a woman and a man, analyzed from all angles by panoptic observation, and deconstructed into pixelated grids of pure information. Their individual selves, and their relationship, are thereby reified: rendered into numeric values, abstractly modeled, and dis-integrated, as their lives are transformed at a granular level by an omniscience that cannot be contested. Will the private self endure and be renewed, or is it just a ghost in this machine?
RENDER, Weekends from July 11
Maximus Clarke
Maximus Clarke – AROUND THE CLOCK
Maximus Clarke
Maximus Clarke, ABSTRACT CONCRETE