Technology helps us do what we cannot. In this case, technology shall help me feel again. This work presents and resolves both the nullity of emotions in the state of melancholia and language as fundamental to reality. Aphantasia, which comes from the Greek word phantasia ‘imagination; appearance’ and the prefix ‘a-’ meaning- ‘without’, is the inability to voluntarily call images to the mind’s eye. Experience, past or future, is hence built upon language.

To exist is to experience. The state of melancholy is not simply sadness or the far-end of a mood spectrum, but the nullity of everything. The rare intensities of love and anguish so fleeting. When one loses the faculty to feel, existence simply becomes the anticipation for death. The work is built on both of these human conditions and presents both the struggle and solution to this variation of the human experience.

The work uses the innate human tendency to interpret or comprehend as its main methodology; to seek meaning in what is inherently meaningless and to draw relations to what is familiar. A random string of generated text might remind someone of a loved one, or a moment in the past. This perceived meaning creates an emotional response.

This project is a response to the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick from 1968. p5.js code can be viewed here

Installation, p5.js code
One Night Only LASALLE 2021