Feeding Consciousness takes inspiration from the fabled tower of Babel, when a united and ambitious people having attempted to reach for the stars, were confounded by God, their previously common language made incoherent, forcing them to scatter across the globe.
Babel has long stood as a symbol of the dangers of man's hubris, and the tale is no less poignant today. Harris has adopted this concept as a structure upon which to apply notions of modern-day communication and technology, exploring the idea as a metaphor for the way in which we have come to so casually consume news and information.
The towering structure of Feeding Consciousness depicts images from trending stories, momentarily appearing to try and dominate over all others. The tower's appearance is consequently in a continual state of flux, always changing, never the same from one moment to the next as the popularity of the latest story waxes and wanes. The tower is continually being built and rebuilt, never repeating its earlier evolutions. Just as we are all under a constant assault of new information, we are also continually rebuilding our own understanding of the new digitally enhanced world.
The artwork captures the collective consciousness of today's populace and lends a visual interpretation to the incessant flow of digital media, of endless unfiltered communications. The art of communication is also the art of filtering. Feeding Consciousness imposes no judgement or filter on what the world deems of interest at any moment. Headlines may not be the most important, merely the most popular; they are the weapons in the endless battle for media domination. Unfiltered trending topics are visualised upon the imagined structure, feeding its perpetual spiralling growth. The emergence of new stories temporarily disrupts the harmony of the architecture and spreads their influence, disseminating virus-like across the unending structure.
This is the first real-time data-fed artwork created by Harris and is his visual commentary on the chaotic system of public discourse perpetuated today by our modern decentralised connector of cultures: the artwork is fed with the freshest trending stories supplied by the internet.
Just as the biblical tower of Babel was described centuries ago to perpetually reach for the power of divinity, today our digital stream of consciousness never falters on its relentless ascent to dominate the powerful discourse of news and media. It’s an unending battle for media domination: as news cycles move on, so do the visual depictions on the facades of the artwork. But the growth will never stop, for when the furore of one story dies down there is inevitably another ready to take its place.