Jacob Kassay
IT
13th May – 18th June 2023
How might we distinguish between what we experience and what we know? Various kinds of reproductive measurement –lumen, voltage, frames per second, cycles per second, pixels per inch, pounds per square inch– act to segment the continuous nature of sensory input we manage as corporeal subjects, dividing it into calculable increments. Each proportional to its counterparts. When these forms of measurement come into contact with one another however, certain disjunctures are created. Conceived of as hermetic agents, exerting a totalising influence over the domains they are assigned to govern, their interactions can be cacophonously non-relational. Or, on rarer occasions, unnervingly synchronised with one another.
The often limited ability of these metrics to speak to one another creates points of friction. But these are also points of opportunity, as it is in the interstices formed between them that we might apprehend similar incompatibilities between the organic and the machinic. To situate yourself at a moment when one procedural logic comes into contact with another, so as to observe the effects, is to occupy a particular kind of extra-dimensional space. A blind spot of sorts, it is there that the unblinkingly monocular characteristic of technology –its surveillant capacity– becomes unmoored from the partial, and profoundly subjective operations through which our own sensorium permits us to navigate space.
This moment of slippage constitutes a terrain, both psychological and phenomenal, one in which these competing notions: viewpoints formed from both within and outwith ourselves, temporarily detach. For just long enough to be apprehended.
Jacob Kassay (b.1984, Buffalo, NY ) lives and works in New York.
Photography: Patrick Jameson