Preservation of a species

To put it simply, humans are going extinct. I identify the source of the problem as an imperceptible societal trend to eliminate the experience that authenticates us as a living species: failure. We've unanimously designated its unattainable opposite as the standard of success: perfection. This quality is a requisite of our accelerated culture, the achievement manifested in an exponentially growing inventory of artifacts that are "faster, sleeker, better." And humans are becoming some of them. In the search for ever-increasing modes of efficiency and precision, humans have adapted their posture to the rigidity of architecture and adopted proliferate technological mediators as prosthetics. The overwhelming pressure to occupy a flawless state of being is a symptom of society, generated by the ego and aggravated by our continual exposure to environments that boast aesthetic and functional attributes exceeding our own. In a competitive fashion, we've subjected ourselves to a mechanical and agitated lifestyle that demands instantaneous reaction, shaping us into receivers and transmitters that function at impeccable and unsustainable speeds. My artistic practice is a critical investigation of human behavior as it is informed and manipulated by the prescriptive streamlined circumstances we've constructed and similarly inhabit in our digitally saturated culture. Instinctual impulses and organic chaos are suppressed in the automatic and regulated state incited by our technoutopian environments. I use performance to explore three general interfaces that I've located as antagonistic towards natural human behavior: architecture, technology and codes of regulation. Primarily employing myself as a subject, I design situations in which I contend with the three aforementioned interfaces, and subsequently have developed a catalogue of responses that strive to mitigate the external forces governing human behavior.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Witt, Sarah (Sarah Elizabeth)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Joan Jonas.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/68417

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/68417