Rec Lobe TV

Multimedia Installation, 2022

Rec Lobe TV is the third multimedia installation in a series of projects by the group Noncore Projector. It extends and refines the ideas we developed in Verbolect and Vec Tor Bel. The works pull publicly available data in real time to create ever-changing visual and sonic landscapes.

View of the gallery as you walk in

RLTV ran from July 2 - December 23, 2022 at the University of Wyoming Art Museum .

Rec Lobe TV maps the labyrinthine processes through which human experience is perceived and transformed - from observation through language - into a multi-sensory simulacrum that affects consequent behavior and beliefs. RLTV follows this chain reaction step-by-step, rendering the results visible, no matter how bizarre: from real-time accounts of local events and national news reporting, into the untethered time-space of the internet and AI intelligence.

View of the main projection showing a collage of overlayed videos

Like mapping a complex, multi-directional game of telephone, RLTV mirrors the process by which we come to believe what’s real in the world, as direct observation of a singular phenomenon mutates through law enforcement, media, AI, stochastic stimuli, and storytelling into eerily uncanny phenomena. Like Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22, “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn't mean they aren’t after you.”

View of the graph and main projections on adjacent walls

Press Release Excerpt

Bringing together real time events, collaged footage, global patterns of journalistic story-telling, chatbot AI, and appropriated human commentary, Rec Lobe TV portrays several ‘intelligences’ attempting to make sense of each other and the world at large. In ways both fascinating and terrifying, the slippages that perpetually dislodge any emergent logic send us down the rabbit hole. Each output (projection, graphs, media, web browsing) represents a specific method through which we, as human beings, attempt to understand the world via the media around us, and, simultaneously, how these same media cycles can confuse, obfuscate, and ultimately cause us to lose our senses of self. While there are parameters within which RLTV operates, our collective forfeits a significant degree of agency to the system we create, embracing the unpredictable at each step, as the moment-to-moment outcome cannot be anticipated. Simultaneously humanistic and technological, Rec LobeTV advances our investigation of the uncanny entities that shape our lives.

Four printed graphs of varying complexity -- overlaying geometric shapes and colors
Four printed graphs of varying complexity. The graph prints at the end of each sequence.
View from the corner of the gallery showing all of the elements: the printer, police scanner, diagram, and two projections
View from the corner of the gallery showing all of the elements: the printer, police scanner, diagram, and two projections
A closeup of the police scanner table showing the scanner and a laptop running software that transcribes the scanner feed
The police scanner kicks off the conversation. Its transcriptions are used to search for news headlines.
A visitor watching the main projection with the graph in the background
The conversation is graphed based on the sentiment analysis of each response.
A visitor watching the main projection
Videos are found on YouTube relating to the current conversation. They are overlayed on each other with effects relating to the emotional content of the responses.
Two visitors watching the main projection, now just a small circle
A roving eye attempts to find meaning in the absurdity.