Law C Alsobrook III
PhD candidate at the Planetary Collegium, CAiiA Hub, School of Art & Media, University of Plymouth
Assistant Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University,Qatar
Auxiliary Reality Cabinet of Curiosity (2015)
Our world and the relations we construct within it is an increasingly mediated experience. Attendant to this mediation, we will soon embark upon voyages of discovery that take us to realms previously unimaginable. The ARC2 (Auxiliary
Reality Cabinet of Curiosity) attempts to illustrate these alternate narrative paradigms that reflect a new engagement with nature, a nature defined and supplemented by innovative technologies and novel means of production. Like the
wunderkammer begun by curious collectors of the Renaissance, to the natural treasuries amassed by early natural scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries, ARC2 is a Noachian assemblage that seeks to interrogate the interstitial spaces
that exist between the realms of consciousness and dreams. These supernumerary dimensions exist, at a quantum level, as well as within the electronic construct of cyberspace, that consensual hallucinatory field that runs seemingly parallel to our own quotidian world.
The exotic flora and fauna that populate these domains is of our own design as well as one of invention. Indeed, the landscapes contained within these dimensions comprise the augmented and virtual terrains of the digital, to say nothing of the supernal and the nanoscopics of our physical world. The question
becomes: somewhere, within these confines, does human consciousness emerge as the narrative agent for understanding and comprehension, or does narrative emerge as an attempt by human consciousness to understand and comprehend?
ARC2 partakes of the dialectic and the dialogic, especially in regards to time and the varieties and vagaries of time present in spaces seemingly familiar, yet not. These augmented and virtual realms suggest alternate timelines, and by virtue
of this, they delineate new realities that encompass narrative realms, and thus alternate forms of consciousness. ARC2 endeavors to explore, catalogue and examine the potentiality of these new spacetimes as vicarial continuums for being
and existence.
info: www.i-node.org
