Lauren Moffatt: Local Binaries, solo residency within the residential programme Dogs Are Barking, Caravans Are Passing Through (2020)
+ workshop in the field of virtual reality and 3D design
3.-14.3.2020
MMSU / Krešimirova 26c, 51000 Rijeka

Lauren Moffatt – solo residency within the residential programme Dogs Are Barking, Caravans Are Passing Through (2020) – workshop in the field of virtual reality and 3D design based on the production of new artwork Local Binaries.

Lauren Moffat was in Rijeka on her residential stay from 3 until 14 March 2020.

The tagline of the residency was a well-known verse from Miroslav Krleža’s poem Night in the Country: Dogs are barking, caravans are passing through. So in her application, Lauren wrote that the verse makes her think about how individuals may become colonised by fear and how it may be possible to create an inhabitable, discoverable cartography of this fear. She decided to do exactly that — the “cartography of the  fear” scene, by using computer vision techniques that are applied in mapping physical environments into commercial and socio-political territories. “In other words, the same technologies that drive my fear and anxiety about the zoning and stratification of the planet into increasingly disparate groups of privileged and less privileged organisms”, she wrote.

Lauren provisionally titled her piece Local Binaries, referring to Local Binary Patterns used in object recognition frameworks implemented in applications such as facial profiling. Lauren explains: “Algorithms based on binary pattern recognition analyse the darkness or lightness of pixels compared to their neighbours, allotting a binary value of 1 or 0 to each in order to identify common features, such as the corner of a mouth or the ear of a cat. Examples of binary pattern applications include the People’s Republic of China’s mass surveillance and profiling project, or the reconstruction algorithms used to create the 3D models of landmasses for Google Maps”.

Her project Local Binaries proposes a VR environment created as a site-specific mixed reality experience. Here, the experience of anxiety is composed into an allegorical landscape, using the steep terraced cliffs around the city of Rijeka at night as the setting. On empty roads and pathways of virtual Rijeka we see strange shapes partly concealed in the darkness. Slowly the shapes of these figures emerge as they draw closer, so we see they are benevolent humans, and if we allow them close enough we hear they have voices. Each figure is voicing a specific fear: fears of being watched, of being profiled, of being judged, of being followed, of being objectified, of making mistakes and of doing nothing. Using a teleportation system, the visitor in the VR environment is able to jump from place to place in the landscape, discovering ever more figures and hearing their confessions.

Interview with the resident: https://mmsu.hr/clanci/risk-change-residency-meet-lauren-moffatt/