Guillame Savy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cloud or Haze: metaphysical optics as applied to the meteorology of online data

Plato’s cave, the Sufi concept of Noor, the cover artwork on a famous Pink Floyd album, and the recent holographic theory of an implicate order to the universe: these analogies from the physics of optics have been used to illuminate a metaphysical view of the cosmos. I propose a succinct and illustrated historical overview of these analogies and the concepts they describe, elaborating a typology and classifying the analogies in four categories: prismatic, white anti-prismatic, black anti-prismatic and non-prismatic. Each of these categories is associated with distinct spiritual, ideological and political manifestations. I then apply that typology to recent developments in the online world, in particular the massive collection of user-submitted genetic data by companies like 23andme and of personal online metadata accumulated by organizations like the NSA. In considering public response to these events – notably, on one hand, by artists and, on the other, by conspiracy theorists –I propose ‘haze’ opposed to cloud as an appropriate word and model to describe these phenomena and their historical black anti-prismatic kin.

Guillaume Savy is a visual artist, working mostly with video and photography, and an aspiring writer. He was born in Paris in 1988, grew up between France and Malaysia, studied architecture and photography and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Guillaume has also been working in close collaboration as a photographer and cinematographer for the musician/performance artist Mandek Penha and the Church of Sarrean Alignment. He is most interested in the tension between collective identities and individualism. His research is involved with art and writing that deals with a broad variety of themes: in particular, national, religious and cultural myth-creation, propaganda and surveillance, and the figure of the outsider.