Mare confusi
In Seminar VII – The ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan claims: “Art itself is always based on the central emptiness of the impossible and the real thing.” During the desperate quest for meaning and knowledge, confusion has never leave, or perhaps it will be the final answer. However, it’s the vain attempt to go against destiny/determinism that emerges das Erhabene (sublime), although it might lead to even more confusion.
My embryonic idea of such characteristic mainly comes from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which the director himself described:
"Solaris had been about people lost in the cosmos and obliged, whether they like it or not, to acquire and master one more piece of knowledge."
Setting aside the philosophical discussion of mind drawn forth from illusory personality, the whole story happened over the orbit of planet Solaris, an extra-terrestrial “pure being” that existed for no meaning or reason, where all scientific experiments to observe the object failed. As the plot went on, it was revealed that the whole planet was an organic physical structure, with its own metabolism and mechanism, and capable of goal-oriented activities. At the end of the film, it was shown that even the protagonist’s mental world was an illusion generated by Solaris. Staring from exploring the truth, one will only be filled with more questions and endless confusion – and that’s what the point is: “fiction is as strong as "reality" and that imagination is the only foundation on which "reality" is based”.
To create such a creature that brings confusion or emptiness, it must abandon most observable human attributes, however with a thinking pattern that can be partially understood. For the appearance, I would prefer random moving textures. For the interactivities, I propose a combination of (a) motion (b) sound generator and the uncertain part: voice or script? However, I wonder if such direct presentation would undermine the sense of “confusion”. Afterall, it’s just a proto-prototype…
How will it feel like to communicate with a “Boltzmann Brain”? Will it blur the boundaries between reality and hallucination? Let the endless confusion speak.