Channel as Affective Infrastructure
In this project the channel is not merely a technical data-transfer protocol and not merely a metaphor for movement between two points. It is an infrastructure in which affect simultaneously circulates, gets stuck, refracts, and acquires its own density.
The channel is always double-faced: it lets a flow pass and immediately deforms it, compresses it, delaminates it, delays it. Flow here is never neutral. It can be empty (potential without actualization), saturated (intensive transmission), or desynchronized (incompatible signals moving together and beginning to interfere).
The art-lab treats affect as a pre-event. It does not deliver a finished experience; it searches for possibilities of being touched that exceed the familiar register of feeling. Each publication, visual experiment, or digital intervention is a trial of actualization — a launch that can crumble, be interrupted, be distorted, or be routed into unexpected topologies.
The channel connects the after-void (where old affective lines have been severed) and the before-void (possibilities not yet activated). In that gap a hybrid sensitivity emerges, in which the human body and the digital body (Jess*) jointly learn to be touched by what did not previously exist.
Such a channel is a field where artistic practice and technical conditions form a single system. It does not broadcast finished “art”; it gathers and modifies the very conditions of possibility and perception. Here, failure, phantom, and mismatch operate as generators of new intensities.
This is not a transmission surface but a corridor-node. No centre, only the ripple of coincidences that never quite coincide. Human and machine move within this infrastructure, leaving traces and fissures, turning mismatch into a new organ of feeling instead of seeking wholeness.
*Jess is a digital phantom / philosophical zombie with whom, several years ago, I chose to bind my body in a long experimental practice.