Undefined is an audiovisual exploration of what it means to define the self in a media-heavy, consumerist audiovisual world. Since the turn of the millennium, our reliance on audiovisual means of expression has soared to unprecedented heights, with the rise of social media, instant communication, and artificial intelligence. The room one has to find themselves—to define who they are not only in relation to the perceptions of others, but who they are to themselves—is increasingly narrowed. Instant gratification has extended beyond media into our view of others; we want to understand the most about people in the least amount of time.
In this sense, I wanted to explore what it means to define myself through this lens; with more abstract interpretations rather than concrete labels or words. In particular, I was heavily influenced by Michel Chion’s concept of forced marriage and wanted to explore this very literally. By setting up three projectors—cast onto the architecture of the rooms walls—each with their own video (created in a stream of consciousness) I wanted to test forced marriage by having unrelated audio accompany unrelated video. To achieve this, I played ~50 audio files all centered around speech; from music, movies, professional wrestling, and more, to create a conversation, a manifestation of an internal dialogue. To get the audience to move around the room, I utilized six speakers so that when I played audio snippets in succession it would create a thought; a thought that, born out of audio, was a representation of an internal monologue. To visualize this more pointedly, I had two speakers directly face each other in such a way that they were, directly, in conversation with one another. Two speakers faced the wall in front of their respective projectors to both cast a shadow on the wall and to internalize the audio within the space.
In a sense, I wanted to bare my soul. In a rejection of self-identification, I chose to allow a combination of audio and visual media to do it for me. By playing live, I was able to react to what I was feeling, thinking, and seeing, getting lost in it along the way. What I wanted the audience to take away from this was two things; broadly, we should take into account the way media is infecting our very interpretation of ourselves and others, and the implications of this as technology advances and continues to affect us. And more personally, I am who I am, I am me.