South
Eleanor Dare, PhD Student
South: A Psychometric Text
Adventure, is an artist’s book and a set of software programs designed to
explore and establish new relationships between readers and narrative. This
work may be described as emanating from traditions of interactive narrative
that are not considered part of the main-stream of literature, such as
self-help books, star sign and dream interpretations, and populist
psychometrics. These forms could also be described as tailor-made or interest
matching texts, in which the sense of the text having an intimate understanding
and insight into its readers is essential. The South egg is an interim object,
halfway between a book and a computer. The South software generates
subject-specific material that can be loaded into it. The egg can then be taken
to a specific location (the South Bank) and its instructions followed. The
formation of dynamic relationships between readers and texts has been one of
the central goals of my practice; as such, a large amount of my theoretical
research has focused upon ideas relating to subjectivity and by extension to
issues of epistemology and agency. While these theories have been central to my
philosophical understanding of the field, I have also had to invent strategies
that are effective in real-world situations and in relation to the real world
materials and conditions of my practice. As a result South is built around a
series of autonomous agents who perform analytical and interpretive tasks. My
commitment to a reflexive practice emphasises the exploration of the proxy and
in many ways subjective role these agents play on my behalf. Consequently the
agents are both structural tools and unorthodox protagonists within this work.
The limitations inherent in these agents, and the asymmetries of understanding
between them and human readers, are framed as creative resources. This is not
to define my materials as limiting or determining of my outcomes (or indeed to
reduce the outcome of my practice to a particular set of skills in relation to
those materials) but to describe a form of knowledge generation that is not
easily separable from the contingency and materiality of my practice.