‘Eternal Eidolons’ by Scott Jones
MA Visual Communication (Experimental Communication) (2020-2022)
Royal College of Art, London, UK
Key supervisors: Luke Pendrell & Ben Branagan
SCAN COMPLETE.
VOICE DUPLICATED.
DATA SILOED.
EIDOLON
1. An idealized person or thing, 2. A spectre or phantom.
Eidolons*
Lo, you or me, woman, man
A state, known or unknown
We have solid wealth, strength, beauty build
But really build eidolons
–
Of every human life the units gathered, posted
Not a thought, emotion, deed left out
The whole, large or small summ’d, added up,
In its eidolon
–
Unfix’d yet fix’d,
Ever shall be, ever have been and are,
Sweeping the present to the infinite future,
Eidolons, eidolons, eidolons.
–
And hidden in plain sight
Immortal avatars emerge
And there, constructed in our absence,
Wait our eternal eidolons.
* Text adapted for Ai from the poem by Walt Whitman with an additional final verse written by myself.
Performed by an AI voice generated by Descript, using my own voice as source material.
Background audio generated by Melobytes (AI generated music ) and Photosounder.
The use of this text illustrates humanity’s and the individual's obsession with creating shrines to itself, legacies, curated histories. The addition of the final verse illustrates the automated development of our own eidolons that we blindly construct, oblivious to its form
With every networked interaction we construct our immortal post-organic avatars. Beings built using artefacts from our online experiences, running autonomously in the cloud. The afterlife? A hi-res heaven? A background task?
My voice, my appearance, a mannerism, my likes, my dislikes, my reactions, all tracked and recorded ready for my resurrection.
Save me
Scott Jones / MA Visual Communication / Royal College of Art / 2020-2022
Scott Jones is a designer exploring how visual communication can liberate critical thinking. His interests are focused around glitch and error, discovering ways design can expose the subjugation of knowledge, alliance, responsibility and agency inherent in our invisible online interactions.
post-organic, post-human, replica, afterlife, data, digital, persona, avatar, immortal, automated, legacy