The Extractor
4-Channel Interactive Audio, Video installation / 2021
Dimension Variable
Exhibited at Untitled Space, Shanghai, China
The Extractor is a 4-Channel interactive audiovisual installation exploring the existential crisis in the age of deep surveillance. In 2020, Elon Musk's NeuraLink has presented with their brain-machine interface, which is installed flush on the skull. The little electronic piece, according to Musk, can read brain activity, and even predict the body movement corresponding to the micro electro-currents of the brain. The surveillance device has reached deep under skin level, which signifies another step further to exhausting data from the body. Rather than being about persons, the surveillance technologies and data structures are of the body, giving rise to a new ontology of the body as information by breaking the body into flows to feed the assemblage over the reconstitution of the body with such flows. Such kind of existence by the representation of data is annihilating the metaphysical existence of individuals.
The Extractor sonifies and visualises the brainwave activity of the audience to allow direct conversation between the digital repersentation and the individual under surveillance. By entering the sea of data extracted from ourselves, we are facing an emergent question in the era of Dataism: do we still have ineffable existences which transcends bodily presence?
The Extractor sonifies and visualises the brainwave activity of the audience to allow direct conversation between the digital repersentation and the individual under surveillance. By entering the sea of data extracted from ourselves, we are facing an emergent question in the era of Dataism: do we still have ineffable existences which transcends bodily presence?