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The Yolk of Menial Light

aceartinc., 2015

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The Yolk of Menial Light combines emotional, facial, and voice recognition technologies in an expansive reflection on neuroplasticity and trauma within surveillance capitalism. Eye Dialect, a teleprompter-like sculpture plays a script in washes of bright saturated colour. The script is a compilation of public apologies made by public figures like Tiger Woods and Reese Witherspoon and the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and British Petroleum, transcribed through dictation software.  You Can _____Your Life (EMDR), uses sub-bass tones just at the level of perception (40-51 Hz), alternating from two subwoofer speakers across the room from one another, one submerged in an off-kilter stage. 

A close-up shot of Eye Dialect sculptural installation, featuring two metal clamp stands holding up a sheet of glass with the phrase "WHAT I HALF STOLEN IS MY FINDINGS". a misspelled translation of "WHAT I HAVE STOLEN IS MY FINDINGS". The text is bold, white, and sans serif.
Interior gallery shot at ace art inc., white walls and hardwood floors. Suspended on the back wall is a lightbox with a yellow background and white text that says "SUFFER ANY WRONG THAT CAN BE DONE YOU RATHER THAN COME HERE". The lightbox's cold commercial feel contrasts with the extremity of its spiritual warning.
You Can (Blank) Your Life (EMDR) sculpture, featuring two subwoofers placed across the room from one another. This image features just one of the speakers, sunken into an off-kilter stage about the size of a drum riser for a band, but this one is covered with the kind of fake funky design you would see in a bowling alley or a 1990s hotel, lots of burgundies and blue squiggles that suggest movement and excitement but feel gross to look at, underneath the stage purple LED lights emanate, kind of like the lights that people put under their muscle cars that lights up the streets as they drive.
You Can (Blank) Your Life (EMDR) sculpture, featuring two subwoofers placed across the room from one another. This image features just one of the speakers, sunken into an off-kilter stage about the size of a drum riser for a band, but this one is covered with the kind of fake funky design you would see in a bowling alley or a 1990s hotel, lots of burgundies and blue squiggles that suggest movement and excitement but feel gross to look at, underneath the stage purple LED lights emanate, kind of like the lights that people put under their muscle cars that lights up the streets as they drive. In the backgroun on the right is the common space of the gallery with pamphlets and benches.

What does it mean today to say that the face is threatened as a category? Perhaps it has become commonplace to bemoan the technologically vitiated abjection of the face, a biometrically secured maquette, newly phrenologized by techniques of long-distance surveillance and (gendered, racial) profiling. By this logic, the face may be defined as the trauma to which it is subjected; and for this reason we must emphasize a notion of faciality that emphasizes plasticity of expression rather than the fungibility of its momentary bearer.

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- Cam Scott, "On Facing" exhibition response to the Yolk of Menial Light, Critical Distance. 2015

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The Yolk of Menial Light at ace art inc featuring on the left-hand side, the other half of You Can (Blank) Your Life (EMDR), a subwoofer covered in plastic that shakes with tones played through On the wall behind it is a wash of Red, Green, and Blue lights shining out of fixtures used on constructions sites, called trouble lights. On the right is a mini billboard-like structure made of construction-grade lumber. Two planes meet each other, each with a rectangular hollow with a print inside. On the left, the print is multicoloured abstract smokey greys with bright pops of greens and pinks. On the right is a close-up of a man's grimacing face only showing his nose and lips, it is printed in multicoloured halftones.
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