Year: 2024
Material: Four channel screens, Artificial Intelligence, Camera, Computer vision
-After creating this piece, we explored the concept of unconscious friction further. We synthesized these thoughts through the medium of an academic paper:
-Our talk about the paper:
-Excerpts from the paper:
Trial 1.4 reframes friction as latent interactivity, already underway, yet unrecognized. By embedding its engagement in a subconscious behavior and withholding immediate feedback, the work produces a form of unconscious friction, where the viewer unknowingly triggers a system they do not realize exists. Only later, if at all, does the realization emerge: a moment of epistemic rupture in which perception catches up to interaction.
The artwork's medium is not a fixed material channel, but a transformation of cognitive state.
The medium is the seamlessness of perception, interrupted by cognitive discovery. By reconfiguring the medium as the viewer's state of attention, Trial 1.4 proposes a speculative form of media: one not built on material affordances but on the shaping of awareness.
It shifts the critical target away from the artifact, and toward the phenomenological infrastructure of interaction. In doing so, it suggests that the deepest media today may be cognitive architectures, assemblages of design, perception, and expectation that condition how subjects come to know systems, and know themselves within them.
This triadic formation-initiator, system, observer—materializes a structural asymmetry in which perception is entangled with position.
The one who acts cannot see, the one who sees cannot act, and the system binds them through an invisible transaction. Here, the work enacts a microcosm of broader technological conditions, where unconscious behavior becomes computationally productive for audiences elsewhere, be they algorithmic, human, or institutional...
By encoding this distributed logic into its aesthetic structure, the work challenges the ideal of the unified viewer or singular insight. It proposes instead that interactivity is a relational medium that emerges from entangled systems of attention, constraint, and access. What is seen depends on where one stands, who one stands with, and what remains unseen between them.