[June 22-25] It’s Coming a Storm: an installation by Kevin Roark Jr.

It’s Coming a Storm uses a projected virtual simulation to explore the relationship between the attention received by other people and our perception of their worth. The online attention received by certain public figures is measured in real time and quantified in the 3D space by warping and re-shaping the bodies of digital avatars representing each person. A generative composition, sculptures, and a related viewer-produced collective simulation supplement the central projection.
06/22/17 – Opening Reception + short talk 7 pm
06/23/17 – 06/25/17 – Open to public 12-5pm 

Harvestworks, 596 Broadway #602, New York NY 10012

Phone – 212-431-1130

Subway: F/M/D/B Broadway/Lafayette, R to Prince, #6 to Bleecker

The image overtaking the object; the re-financialization of financial products; software eating the world; reality tv; gamification of a routine. The simulation of a thing poisons the thing until it becomes the thing itself—world as simulacrum of world. This is pervasive, only growing with the increasing abstraction of every part of our lives. Per media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, “a map has replaced the territory.” And we are overwhelmed by the map.

This arcane world map necessitates the use of symbols and models that stand in for webs of cause and effect.

For people, our common signifier is attention. Without an ability to accurately assess the qualification or value of people we do not personally know, we rely on a combination of fame and celebrity, media coverage, Internet popularity, and localized notions of reputation and buzz to informally quantify a person’s gross receipt of attention into a measure of their merit. The flawed oversimplification of this model is that notoriety is actually correlated with its deservedness; that “press is success.” We’ve heard the book is good but we don’t have time to read it. Media businesses worked to popularize this model decades ago, cultivating a national desire for attention and celebrity that would catalyze their ability to control the perceived value of people for profit, at the cost of exploiting our innate need for love/care/attention from others. Our desire for attention is constant, but the rise of self-focused Internet platforms shifted the landscape and now every online person competes alongside advertisements and traditional celebrities for attention from friends and strangers. Any individual now has the opportunity to achieve at least a modicum of fame; to receive more relative attention and thus accrue more value. Living among flawed models has taught us that success within a simulated system requires optimizing for numbers themselves, rather than the underlying things they represent. Where attention and praise once followed the production of value, attention itself now produces the value; thus born the influencer, the reality tv star, the troll. The symbol has become so universal, the simulation so real, that the “Attention Economy” has become the economy.

Many of us engage in self-simulation to participate in this unfolding economy, presenting idealized versions of ourselves in virtual spaces. We understand that fully gaming the system is the clear path to “winning,” that saying and doing anything that leads to more attention, irrespective of truth, increases perceived value. High-achieving participants cultivate attention until the artificial value it begets is self-sustaining, cyclically generating more; the symbol becomes the data. The mutation of populism seen throughout the past year, particularly the rise of Donald Trump and related outsiders like Steve Bannon and Alex Jones (who thrive on the attention-summing combination of praise and disapproval), signifies the raw value we assign to notoriety. With real power now in the hands of once-comical attention-gamers, we might call what has emerged “Attention Politics,” a new more terrifying sibling of the Attention Economy where we apply the incorrect popularity-reflects-worth model even when choosing our society’s leaders. Policy and behavior fade away as people in power realize they can maintain it hand-in-hand with our attention.

It’s Coming, a Storm investigates the engineering of attention by creating a simulation of its own, using virtual avatars to symbolically embody a number of successful attention-gamers. Data from online social media and news organizations is used to track and geometrically quantify the amount of attention that each individual is receiving in real time. New dopaminergic slivers of attention grow and deform otherwise motionless 3D bodies. The avatars’ faces twist and grin with pleasure, and they accumulate Attention Coins in piles. Virtual idols and shrines are constructed from incoming images. Sounds produced in collaboration with Thomas Martinez play and reverberate as new information filters in, generating a soundtrack controlled by the dynamic entanglement of attention sources. Over time, the size and shape of each person reflects their total obtained attention since the start of the simulation—the best players physically expand throughout the space. The literal manifestation of attention-gathering in each person’s body facilitates a crystalline view of their ability to maintain power through relevance, and into the connectedness of our perception of success in the map and success in the territory.
The simulation is supplemented by various sculptures, and a separate projected collective attention container in which viewers contribute their own online activity. After opening at Harvestworks on June 22nd, the digital simulations will continue to live and change online once the show closes. 
BIO 
Kevin Roark Jr is an artist and programmer living in New York City. He was born in 1993 in Louisiana and lived near the Honey Island Swamp. He uses combinations of virtual space, video, software, text, sound, and images to deal with repetitive emotions/themes of simulation, replication, desire, disgust, and restraint.  Roark has collaborated under the names Carmichael Payamps and Mister Shane, and has recently made visual work for the composer David Bird and various other musicians. He has led programming workshops at POWRPLNT and DCTV, and presented work with Babycastles, DIS Magazine, The Rutgers Digital Studies Center, Postcrypt Gallery, and Gaudeamus Muziekweek.
“[The Rock and The Rock] completely overwhelmed me… the strangest experimental dating simulator I’ve ever played.” – Kill Screen
“Once was is now adrift of a pace that’s akin to overload. Prepare for the atmosphere of abyss.” – Tiny Mix Tapes
“[Shane’s] Tweet Heaven is a strange, expansive space… this is self-love on a whole new level.” – Artspace
Collaborators:
Thomas Martinez will collaborate on sound.
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