artwork

The Symbol Grounding Problem

Details

• Artist: Paul B. Davis
• Year: 2009
• Medium: Single channel video with sound
• Url: http://www.beigerecords.com/paul/defineyourterms/symbol.html

Description

From http://www.beigerecords.com/paul/defineyourterms

A longer description here, as some people find this piece quite gross. The idea for the piece came from a time that I was eating and shitting at once, I'm not sure why. My partner at the time was on the phone to her father, who when told what I was doing, asked what it felt like. My response was "it feels like I'm really processing".

The Symbol Grounding Problem is then based on a relationship between physical and informational processes, which has become more cogent thanks to recent philosophical ideas about the nature of information and our place in the digital ontology called Philosophy of Information. The text started collaboratively with a philosopher, and I then made an action that asks the viewer to apply the universal ideas in the text towards the most banal act of real life. POI holds that as our digital technologies become completely integrated with human Being and we begin to live inside models of ourselves which are more "intelligent" than we are, information that creates this environment becomes the defining characteristic of Existence. Hence any object regardless of its material construction can be viewed as an "informational entity" and ontologically our view of it must change.

Also I feel that my action (eating a bacon sandwich while shitting in a perspex box), while completely ordinary in an art historical context, would lend itself to internet re-interpretations that would distort my original intention too much if it was presented in it's entire duration. I'm therefore only providing a still from the video.