Any, More?

Press Release for Any, More?

An exhibition of new works from Thomas Greig and Lewis Henderson at Limbo Limbo, December 2017.

In the blink of an eye, everything in front of them had congealed into a single, amorphous entity. The market table in front of them, a thin tin-like sheet with a neatly trimmed edge, was suddenly home to a living monster. An assemblage of rusty scythes and trowels, busted GameCubes and pirate DVDs. The creature oozed a toxic mixture of copper bile and pink gouache, wriggling in the pan like an octopus waiting to be gutted. The longer they stared at this unnamed beast, the harder it became to discern its grim anatomy; its synthetic carcass writhing around an emaciated spine like an ouroboros – locked into a perpetual state of self-digestion.

Soon ten jellied eels began melting their way through the beast’s diaphragm. Currents of electricity throbbed from their bodies in a nauseating ripple, infusing the monster’s entrails with a carnivorous energy. Gnawed optical wires sparked with luminescence, muddied family-postcards acquired a lenticular movement, a set of mangled golf clubs spasmed like BigDog on ice. The pallid eels slowly receded again, weaving through the monster’s innards like a bobbet worm through soil. The oily and taut belly of the market-trader protruded from under a stained white vest, dripping with an obnoxious liquid. And as their leer reached upward, they were confronted with further unspeakable horror.

Where there would have usually sat a human face, was simply a blank rind of pale flesh. Its only visible details the stretch marks that pulled the oval mass of skin back in on itself. The stretch marks too had a sort of wicked energy to them: they rubbed and grazed against one another, as if itching a sore rash. The crowd had now grown to an insurmountable number, entering a frenzy. The swarm soon resembled a furious live chat: a rapid succession of bodies spontaneously emerging at its head, with those at the bottom sunk beneath its weight and crushed. Their eyes were all catatonic. As the sun set behind the stall a peculiar yellow gloom engulfed the sprawling market. Traders began shuffling endlessly between one another. Tables vanished and appeared, each home to a preying mass of bloodshot retinas.

The street’s cartography stretched from 1:1 to infinity. As the fabric of the air ripped and tore, the wild oscillations of a black and white substance enmeshed in their own molecular activity was revealed. Entangled and disjointed, the limbs of the crowd now levitated at least a foot from the ground. They pulsed like a jellyfish. The intensity of their stare had begun to seize control of the monster, a coordinated and collective gesture of the audience-body could cause the monster to lurch from one direction to another. The squirming face of the market trader convulsing inward like a black hole. Spasming, he coughed forth a nugget of fresh mucous, green with bubonic shades. It slumped on the table, whining and helpless.

With a click of ⌘F3 the scene shot back into the distance, joined by seven other variable wormholes: a pdf of his personal artist portfolio; several unfinished TextEdit docs coloured with turquoise and yellow highlights; a pirate copy of The Gagosian’s The Show Is Over catalogue. With a second click he was launched forward at incredible speed. Everything around him submerged into a deep crimson red. In an instant, nothing else had become intelligible, just limitless and pure colour. Hesitant for a moment, his finger gravitated in its former position. But soon the feeling was simply overwhelming. Staring into his glowing screen, he fell into it, like you would a fever, or a daydream.

Thomson & Craighead

Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead are an artistic duo that have worked across an entire generation of societal shifts in response to developments in technology and science. Working across a variety of mediums – sculpture, video, installation, sound – they have been present at many of the conceptual cornerstones of contemporary art: from 1970s structuralist film-making, to early pioneers in the net.art phenomenon, their work now occupies a conceptual place of its own, interrogating the myriad effects of contemporary technology on our understanding of the world.

Over the last decade, Thomson and Craighead’s practice has increasingly focused on human biology, the rise of the internet and the information age. Their earlier works, such as Browser Archaeology – a playable rendition of Atari’s Breakout, which locks you into a Netscape 4 browser page until you successfully fight your way out – or Trigger Happy (1998) – a Space Invaders gallery installation, where the alien hoard takes the form of text from Roland Barthes’ influential ‘Death of the Author’ – were wholly baptized in the vernacular of early internet art – focusing heavily on the medium itself and its virtual possibilities. But over the last decade their practice has quickly revolutionised in tandem with its technological muses, deconstructing and reassembling to capture its accelerating potential.

Browser Archeology (1998) 

Their first shift came in the wake of the 2001 dot-com crash and the rising significance of data analytics in both computing and automation – it was in the same year that the META Group published their original and formative research paper on the emerging challenges posed by increasing and diversifying data loads. In 2003 they created the piece Weather Gauge, a live-data installation that simultaneously monitored weather statistics in 105 countries; and in 2004, Decorative Newsfeed, an animated live-news wheel that curves and twirls around its screen, raising questions on the mutability of information and the importance of its medium. These artworks signalled a shift from Thomson and Craighead’s origins in net.art to more subtle concerns with the rise of data-based information technologies and the deepening roots of digitization.

The same experimentation present in Gauge and Newsfeed continued into some of their later works, with both Belief (2012) and A Short Film about War (2009) utilising images and content exclusively sourced from the worldwide web to create fractured and warping narratives on contemporary issues through the image banks of Flickr and YouTube. In both cases, the visual content is mirrored by a tautological logging apparatus: in the case of Belief, a compass directing the viewer to the content’s global origins, and in War, a primitive blog-source text log runs parallel. These analogous media forms serve to ‘explore and reveal the way in which information changes as it is gathered, edited and then mediated through networked communications technologies or broadcast media, and how that changes and distorts meaning’.

Weather Gauge (2003) 

Belief (2012)

A Short Film about War (2009) 

In the last five years Thomson and Craighead have continued to push their practice to incorporate new and pertinent developments in human knowledge and experimentation. Their Corruption (2014) series, a subtle and self-effacing aesthetic mediation on historical Modernism and contemporary techno-virology, recodifies an instance of file corruption as a moment of visceral digital beauty. Using lenticular printing, each portrait consists of several frames of the corrupting virus which animates and playbacks as the viewer moves around the artwork, emphasising the nature of looking and perception in our formation of reality.

Their most exciting recent works, however, are Stutterer (2014) and Temporary Index (2016), both exhibited alongside Corruption in their solo-show last year at the Carroll Fletcher Gallery in London. The latter work takes a minimal form: a rustling and anxious set of numerical columns uncomfortably poised 90 degrees off centre. Accompanying the large screen is a small table, topped with an open booklet detailing 9 nuclear waste storage facilities that correspond to the crumbling numerical towers in front of the reader. Each digital clock represents a countdown until these sites of inhumed nuclear waste become safe again for humans, ranging from its soonest at forty years, to sites uninhabitable for over one million years.

Corruption (2014) & Temporary Index (2016)

The former, Stutterer, shunts their sombre, minimal tone into a schizophrenic overload. Once again faced with an abstract trail of alphanumerical code, pitched in a silent, B&W projection, this time the audience is also faced with a hypnotic fusillade of broadcast media clips that chime in succession with the slowly unravelling cipher. A ‘poetry machine’, using the letters T, C, G and A – representative of the coded human genome and its four nucleotide bases – in correlation with a self-assembling collection of 500 clips from broadcast media in the 13 years it took the Human Genome Project to complete it (1990-2003). If the piece were allowed to play out its full 3.2 billion letters, it would run continuously for over sixty years.

Shuttering between images of the decade – from the 9/11 attacks to Thatcher at the despatch box, Mandela’s release from prison and the US & British invasion of Baghdad – the strobing clips give a stark portrait of the recent socio-political developments that have sistered our rapid advances in both molecular biology and computer technologies. It re-establishes the often neutral, and atomised narrative of technological innovation with its often-darker political framework. It asks important questions, such as to what extent are our rapid industrial and technological advances a result of aggressive imperialist policies abroad? Or to what degree are those very developments transforming and disguising new forms of political power and suppression?

This eponymous conceptual provocation, that technology and politics are ‘stuttered’, unaligned with the teleological boulevards of their great Enlightenment muses, chaotically provoking, attacking and engendering one another across time and space, marks a radical break from the insidious nature of our collective unconscious: that the progression of technology and politics are a deterministic and naturally flowing progression of ideas, research and science.

The truth, is that knowledge and power and never inextricable. Just as physiognomy in the 18th century was the medico-scientific manifestation of institutionalised racism, recent developments in biological and zoological research could rather be used to give birth to an army of inexhaustible cyborgian soldiers. Understanding and being critical of these points at which technology, science and power interact is of vital importance to us in a world increasingly defined by an obfuscated material reality. And one which, even at the moments when we see it clearest, is becoming weirder and weirder.

Spotlight: Femke Herregraven

How much of capitalism can we see from the moon?



When you think of the financial market – insurance, banking, stocks, hedge-funds – you’re likely to conjure images of Wall Street, the City, Hong Kong. Men in pin-striped suits with Versace cufflinks striding down sterilized boulevards and chain-smoking Menthol Superkings in pseudo-public parks, all encased in a labyrinth of glass, steel and Starbucks. You think of the monolithic skyscrapers, of the All Bar Ones and the bottles of Moet. A world that wholly exists inside the parameters of a single square mile, or even just one street. And when you talk of the financial market, it is simply impossible to escape our established nautical lexicon: Flows and ripples of capital; investor liquidity and market equilibrium; dark pools, channels and floating assets. The market has frozen, evaporated. The trickle down effect. 

The immense scale and complexity of the contemporary web of global financial trade, geopolitics and information-technology networks, reduced to a single image or a single metaphor. During this gross consolidation a vast material reality is concealed. These representations curtail and obfuscate an entire economic and political infrastructure that exists hidden in scattered warehouses across northeast China, on the banksides of the Columbia River and across the vast plains of the Icelandic countryside. Finance as ‘hyperobject’: an entity with both global omnipresence and –potence hiding almost entirely beyond human comprehension. 

Working at the intersections of these incommensurable Leviathans, Dutch artist Femke Herregraven has devoted her artistic practice to re-materialising the invisible contours of our contemporary landscapes of financial power. Coming from a background in design, Herregraven has gone on to produce art which stems from an ongoing research project into finding the secret places that capital and data hide – or are hidden. Taking the official form of a printed book in 2011, her still-ongoing project, Geographies of Avoidance, is a quest for the bare realities of tax avoidance through global financial distribution.

After taking up an artist’s residency in Amsterdam’s financial sector, Zuidas, Herregraven became quickly aware of the distinct lack of financial activity that taking place around her. Upon asking her facilitators if there was a list of companies that operated in the building/street, she was met with the reply, ‘No such list exists, and if it did, we wouldn’t give it to you.’ Forced to accumulate the data herself, Herregraven delved into the neighbouring Chamber of Commerce registers and produced a geographical index of the whole of Zuidas. 

Each index in Geographies of Avoidance represents a single address in the district. Some addresses, as shown, have one or two operational businesses and companies registered, some have ten or twenty. And some have a few thousand.

 

 

Geographies of Avoidance, 2011 

In some cases, however, whoever it is rerouting their capital through the Netherlands via these mailbox companies has lost even the faintest sign of discretion. Company titles flow down the page from Alpha 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. To Bravo, Foxtrot 10, V. O. F and Euro Zinger III. Alongside these facetious scripts of nominally-legitimate companies are info-graphics on tax treaties, ‘geopolitical sandwiches’ and BRIC false investments. All painting a rather deft, abstract and fastidious multitude of surreptitious financial smoke-screening. Stark evidence of the seedy and prosaic reality behind filtering your US corporate-capital through an Amsterdam-based radical vegan egg-painting charity called Alpha Yankee Doodle.

Following up from this project came a wish to cognitively map this process of tax avoidance for the everyday subject. Herregraven’s 2013 work, an online video-game called Taxodus, gave the player a chance to embody their favourite multi-national, using live statistics, tax treaties and national tax policies to circumvent their capital across the globe in a game to save as much profit as possible. This online-game, as well as later projects like Liquid Citizenship (2015) – a similar project where you are given an arbitrary national identity and net-worth, and proceed to – using real time statistics – browse your various options of buying citizenship across the globe, and where not possible, your ulterior, shadier options – are both novel attempts by Herregraven to meet the calls of thinkers such as Nick Srnicek, as he outlines the revolutionary necessity of “a navigational medium for making intelligible the dynamics of global capitalism.”[1]

Taxodus, 2013 

Liquid Citizenship, 2015 

More recently, however, Herregraven’s work has become more speculative. In both Malleable Regress (2016) and her ongoing project, Sprawling Swamps (2016 -), Herregraven visualises a fictional scenario, where the interstitial cracks of contemporary legislative and financial borders – ice sheets, waves, swamps, shorelines that drift from one place to another – are populated by futuristic, amphibian microplatforms – Test Den, Swamp of Forked Tongues, Bootleg Tribunal for Nonhumans, Empty Cache; Alpha 1, 2, 3, 4. Platforms established strategically in order to wire-up an ‘optimal high-speed planetary-scale trading infrastructure.’

In her work Malleable Regress, Herregraven has crafted a series of 10 polyurethane-rubber tiles from this digital world, each carrying its own microplatform brand indentity. These moulds are taken from the strange appearance of across UK and EU shores over the last few years, of Tjipetir gutta-percha tiles: slabs of tree-gum made on Indonesian plantations in the late 19th century for the production of the worlds first telegraph cables – the same veins of trade and communication that dominate and structure contemporary finance (it is no coincidence that imperial colonies are the major breeding ground for tax havens). This eerie embodiment fills the objects with the ghosts of failed infrastructures and collapsed worlds, pushing our imagination to the next shift-change in speculative finance. A change with which the majority of us aren’t likely to even witness.


http://femkeherregraven.net/

Look here for Herregraven’s TEDxVaduz talk on her project Geographies of Avoidance.

[1] Nick Srnicek, ‘Accelerationism – ‘Epistemic, Economic, Political’ in Speculative Aesthetics, ed. Robin Macaky et al. (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014): 53.

The Unlimited Dream Company

Press Release for The Unlimited Dream Company

A group show co-organised by Charlie Mills, Ralph Hunter-Menzies and The Hannah Barry Gallery.

Featuring the works of Richard J. Butler, Stevie Dix, Oliver Dook, Angelique Heidler, Lewis Henderson, Ralph Hunter-Menzies, George Rouy and Rosie Grace Ward


“You can lean against us, we’re quite real.”


Taking its cue from J. G. Ballard’s novel of the same name, The Unlimited Dream Company is an exhibition of eight artists, each of whom interrogates a seductive edge of contemporary life. Together their works produce a theatre of sorts, a stage on which converge forces complicated by the thin line that exists between their reality and artificial construction: fantasy, illusion and desire.

Written in 1979, Ballard’s novel follows the protagonist Blake as he explores an exotic universe of salacious orchids, raucous parrots and gesticulating film sets. Emerging from the ruins of an aeroplane crash in the suburb of Thames at Shepperton, Blake’s narrative becomes increasingly suspicious as a gaggle of peculiar characters fight for his attention. Before long Blake’s existence is little other than an anxious daydream – lost in this absurd world, unsure of the reality of his own identity.

The eight artists presented in the show mirror this lack of stabilising narrative. Vanishing tombstones, curious monkeys and bloodied scythes, the exhibition similarly turns our attention to the vexed nature of desire. Affects become a source of craving, colours a form of neuromarketing, the surreal little more than a brand. At times humorous and at others apocalyptic, the exhibition shares with the world of Ballard’s protagonist a fascination with the cabalistic nature of the popular unconscious.

After notions of pastiche and irony have worn thin and epistemological deadlocks have been cast under renewed scrutiny, it seems the worlds of images and matter so essential to these works have acquired a new, active vibrancy. These artists are not united by a common thematic score, nor by a mode of expression. Considered together their works do not represent any collective identity. Rather, encountered here they produce a wormhole, multi-headed and polyvocal. A jigsaw, profuse with the fractured dreams of a generation and emitting an unearthly vibration – shuddering from past to future, optimism to despair, connectivity to isolation.

Punctuating the dark pool of libido that swarmed under society’s belly, Ballard was able to reveal the repressed, the silenced – the desires that bubbled up and squirted through fissures in the social fabric. Now though, the repressed has come to be the admired, the scandalous a pious commodity. Replacing high-rises, hollywood motifs and autoerotica, is the viscous complexion of Seaworld’s whale instructor, the bloodied sheets of a disfigured Tweety, and the nostalgic smog of a misshapen swan… The Unlimited Dream Company is a world of anxiety and ecstasy. One captured trembling, snared between the two.

Fiction: Pool

He sits at the edge of the pool, immersed to the knee in cold, transparent water. The glazed-cream tiles are hard and rub against his tailbone, making it uncomfortable, but a pulsing warm current surrounds his feet from a grilled vent inlaid into the pool’s side-basin, and he enjoys slowly pedalling his feet in its warmth. His arms are angled back, elbows jutting towards the toddler-pool, his body acute to the magnolia ceramic floor. The pool’s filter, pump and heating systems are hung in industrial-type concertina tubes just below the tall ceiling, and his head is cocked back staring up at them: all interlaced and flowing like roots through soil. A drip of water suspends off his ear-lobe, hanging in silence, mesmerizingly so. His chest and abdomen are protracted, the inner nibs of his chest’s rib cage protruding into his porcelain-skin like knuckles back-to-back. The taste of salty perspiration and chlorine mixing in his lips.

In the pool, there’s this guy. Couldn’t be more than thirteen years old, black, and with the body of sumo-wrestler. He’s moving perpendicular to the rest of the swimmers, periodically nose-diving under the red and white toggles that designate this mornings’ AM lane swim, much to the annoyance of the Hexton Healthy Living and Leisure Sports Centre morning-swim patrons. Every morning these patrons steam up and down the short blue arteries of the pool, flexing their bald, jellied limbs and showing off their latest gear: swimsuits, swimcaps, nose-clips, watches, finger-paddles drag-suits etcetera. The boy is wearing two bright-orange armbands, both with the text FLOAT printed in thick black capitals along the side. They’re flailing around wildly, slapping and squelching on the waters’ surface, a forcefield of spritzing water emerging. A deranged form of front-crawl that looks more like treading water on speed. They disappear occasionally under the water to push air bubbles out of the boy’s Hawaiian trunks. This lad, who couldn’t be younger than eleven years old, has fingers that look like Twinkies, and he has those weird rinds of meaty flesh at the base of his neck. Even the boys eyes, magnified under the transparent plastic of his goggles, look fat and bulging; like they’re ready to burst. Occasionally it is not apparent whether the boy is in fact swimming or simply trying not to drown. The morning-swim and steam-room routine is to many a coveted ritual. A pre-work custom for the white-collar workers of the Plaza. Where before they spend eight-hours a day aggregating rail fiscal reports or analysing annual insurance statistics, or at best, developing market-brands for 3-D printed air-freshener dispensers, they can submerge themselves in an ostensibly personally motivated regime of health and fitness and psychic well-being, length after length, steam after steam.

The patrons of this leisure-centre are very annoyed at this young, porcine boy. His seal-like nose-dives produce mini-tidal waves that ripple across the pool, and it is ambiguous sometimes as to whether the spuming bubbles to his rear as indeed a product of his trunk’s enclosed air pockets, or in fact sign of a more unsavoury and thus nauseating process. It is the seventh time in the last two weeks that this boy has interrupted their attempts at fitness and health and psychic well-being. If the uncoordinated efforts of this young Fijian kid continues to disrupt their AM slot at HHLLSC, these patrons will all but be forced to move centre. However, being equidistant between the SE Pheltz burbs and the Plaza, and its extremely convenient placing right opposite North Hexton Station, which has a divergent link-up rail to each quadrant of the Plaza, this centre is pragmatically sound, and any detour taken to a similar centre that would too house a 50m pool and steam/sauna room, would require both time and effort. The most annoying thing about this kid is his factious looking grin. Completely and utterly one-hundred-and-ten-percent unaware of his own behaviour. It’s infuriating. This huge wide mouth, grinning. Like he’s taking the piss; drooling out of the corners of his pink lips. Smiling from cheek to cheek, daydreaming that one cinematic shot from the Marks & Spencer’s Christmas ad: the one where they pour chocolate sauce all over their Christmas Black Forest Gateau while the overtly sexual female narrator whispers its soft, spongey texture to you. There’s nothing more infuriating to the patrons of HHLLSC than the glib playfulness and merriment of this overweight child. He’s always alone when he’s in the pool.

She’s swimming breast-stroke in the lane directly in front of him, away from him, in the medium lane. She’s wearing a mulberry-toned Adidas swimsuit, with three pink strips either side that curve over her chest and hips. She has small breasts but you can still see her nipples through the Nylon fabric. And although he finds it weirdly perverse and cliché to look at her nipples, he still does. Her hair is auburn brown, more like a light mahogany, gliding the surface like a bride’s dress, and her skin is cherry tanned. Her swimsuit compliments her skin with a kind of exotic oaky plum colour set. Her movements in the water are frictionless. Even her tucks and spins resemble some kind of smooth under-water ballet. She comes here before she goes to school at the Hexton College of Contemporary Fine Arts and Craft down the road, and he comes to see her swim. She’s wearing forest-green nail varnish with a hint of teal. Her eyebrows are thin and symmetrical, plucked to perfection. There’s no one else in her lane and the ripples of her strokes are still visible behind her. The kid has made his way well over to the fast lanes by now – the pool-house slowly filling with pernicious stares and bitter inner-monologues – and she seems almost blissful, alone, in the lane in front of him.

They are friends of course, He and She. But whether anything more than just friends, both of them are still unsure. She comes here before she goes to school because it’s convenient and free way for her to acquire some fitness and health and relaxation, and he comes here for the same reasons too, he tells her. He too is a student at the HCCFAC but is the kinda person who prefers online video-gaming and Red Planet pizza to bike-rides and smoothies. She knows this anyway, I mean, she’s very well aware that he’s not waking up at 7AM each morning and getting the bus to Hexton for a quick dash of cardiovascular exercise and psychic well-being, he gets his psychic well-being in the centrefold pages of GQ magazine five days a week. They meet at 7:30AM each weekday morning, eat breakfast – she eats muesli with honey whilst he eats a cup of Tetley and three fags – and hop on the 324 to Plaza Street M, alighting at North Hexton Station and walking under the dim-lit and graffiti-ridden underpass to the leisure centre stood opposite. They have lived together for six months since leaving their halls of residence – an old refurbished psychiatric hospital just down the road from HCCFAC. They now live in a small ex-social house down by Lenox House Housing Estate in Lenox, the ceilings barely higher than your head and the walls paper-thin. They live with two others, both male, and they have unspoken feelings for each other (He and She that is). The pool-house is flourescently lit.

The young boy is wreaking havoc to the right hand side of the pool, in the fast lanes, where the majority of the morning-swim-ritualists stroke up and down. His left armband has got caught on one of the red toggles and water is being thrust every which way as he tries to escape. His neck rinds writhing up and down like an accordion, the occasional gasp breaking his excited whooping. A lady who’d been sitting reading on the mezzanine creaks her neck forward over the railing to look down. There’s no lifeguard in the hall just an empty lifeguard chair. It’s unclear whether this kid needs help anyway, or whether this is just part of his wisecracking performance piece. It clear that the wannabe-professional swimmers amongst the fast-laners favour the latter. Butterball[i] then launches his inflated armband, which surrounds an already inflated looking upper-arm, away from the toggle, its back-ping almost K.O.ing a poor, old retiree named Mildred in the medium lane behind him. Unawares, his grin left unfazed and immaculate, he continues his war path for the top lane, eyeballed by every-single Speedo-sporting fast-lane-aficionado in the place.

He’s shifted his arms forward and is now lent over his chest pondering his latest tattoo – a hollow Moline crucifix administered DIY by his good friend with a blunt HB pencil and sewing needle three nights prior. The ends of the arms are bifurcated and curved back, originally a heraldic form found in the coat of arms of Molyneux and the House of Brogile, but appropriated here with little sense of genealogy or founding. More of an aesthetic judgement than anything else. He wonders what the patrons will think of it, indeed what anyone would think of it. But not in a regretful or worried manner, simply a curious one. He has several other tattoos, mostly stick-n-poke, crudely administered by his associates during times of mild intoxication and boredom. He has a lean build, almost muscular but tip-toeing towards thin. Hands that are dainty and feminine with one silver signet-ring inlaid with onyx on his right pinkie, a gift from Her. Yesterday night he bleached the back of his hair peroxide and now his head looks like a reverse-light bulb. He’s originally from Truro, Cornwall, but spent the last few years before moving down to the great Philly in Sheffield, Yorkshire. As a result his accent is a deformed hybrid: swathes of old English queen’s tongue mixed with a twangy lack of /a:/ pronunciation – pronouncing cast more lie kasst – and assimilating SE argot like wah’gwan and ‘nang’ into his daily lexicon.

Poor old dear Mildred is now hoiking her wrinkly old jaundiced-self up onto the magnolia ceramic, her elbows about to give in under the weight, in a fixed although rather sedate temper. There’s a tall guy, the body of a Conger eel: long, annular and his skin a nuanced grey. He’s wearing black speedo pants and a black speedo swim-cap. He’s revolving his arms like bungee-cords clockwise-then-anti-clockwise, slapping his wrists against his hips at full-circle in a sort of trance-state. Upon hearing a forlorn whimper to his left from the fragile OAP clinging to the edge of the pool, half scrabbled onto the shiny cream tiles – normally shed use the pool steps but after receiving a nearly knockout punch from the red toggle lane divider she’s precariously attempting to clamber the pool’s concave perimeter up front – he extends a long, tube-like arm towards her, hand spread eagle in offered relief. The young boy still splashing and frolicking. The lady on the mezzanine is back immersed in her book. Mildred is hauled up out of the water, her dentures a bit loose and every tissue sagging; her hair is electric-shock white and her eyes heavily bloodshot from the chlorine. The eel man turns his attention to the boy with a malign scope. The other lungbusters follow suit: the eel man is kind of their unofficially elected head, with his gelatine like limbs and 24second 50m freestyle. They’ve all stopped swimming now, they-re just treading-water and eyeballing this flat blubber, occasionally raising their incisored eyebrows to glance over at Mildred and check her footing.

She’s still swimming, unvexed and tranquil. He’s still checking out his wonky tattoo, and the lady on the mezzanine has now disappeared. The kid, otherwise known as Ayoyo Tomasi, twelve years old and avid Pokemon Go'er, has also stopped swimming – if you can call it that – as if his somewhat crazed behaviour is still dependent on the likewise activities of those around him; as if their stationary demeanour suddenly thwacks the kid with a cataplectic anxiety wave, rendering him motionless. It’s unclear whether the boy is aware of their discontent or is simply disgruntled by their sudden ceasing of movement. He’s liked her for about four months now. He doesn’t know whether she likes him; she knows that he likes her. All of a sudden the boy is crying, his face has curled up into a closed fist without eyes. The eel man steadies Mildred whose knees are permanently crooked forward like an early Neanderthal, and gears his thumb and forefinger like a pincer toward the crying boy.

‘Look kid, enough’s enough.’

The pool-house is silent but for the kid’s groaning and the industrial-type filter, pump and heating systems that chug and whir overhead. The annular man’s voice is firm and derisory.

She reaches the other side of the pool and her legs fold forward until her body floats congruent to the pool’s edge. Drips of water run down her cheeks and back into the pool. She turns, her eyes on fire. He can see her slender legs slowly paddling under the water, hypnotic. Eye lids fluttering upward until they meet his. The pool-house is completely silent. He can no longer feel the pain of his tailbone against the tiles. Everything in his periphery is a blur. She pulls herself back up against the pool-side and giggles. He smiles and slides himself forward, falling into the water like you would a deep sleep.

[i] Butterball, Gloob, Slab, Lardturb, Fat Gallon, Blubber Boy, Hippopotamouth, The Whole Nine Tones, are but some of the nicknames that the strenuously over-weight and unbelievably blithe youngster has acquired via and amongst the patrons in his short time wreaking havoc at the HHLLSC AM slots.

UK Cultural Policy - Labour

Last year the Conservative Party launched their first ever Cultural White Paper. This comes as the second ever to be published by the government, 51 years after Labour’s Jeenie Lee launched her original National Policy for the Arts back in 1965.

Detailed in a remarkably concise 18 pages, Lee had set the agenda for a publicly-funded, expanding national Arts policy – one that promoted larger regional funding and wider participation across different socio-economic classes. In the following years after Lee’s White Paper, Harold Wilson’s Labour government increased public funding in the Arts by 30%, leading to a golden age in British cultural production.

Unfortunately, the last 40 years of UK Cultural Policy has left much of Lee’s manifesto still to be desired.

Beginning with Edward Heath’s government of 1970, the Arts have come under consistent attack from the Conservative Party. Indeed, it was his government that was responsible for the Art’s first major funding cuts since the end of the Second World War, and in 1974 there came the imposition of mandatory entry fees to all national museums and galleries, ‘in order to decrease dependency on the state’ – a piece of legislation championed and ultimately enacted under the then Secretary of State for Education, Margret Thatcher.

This trend has persisted throughout Conservative policy until the present day.

Firstly, it was Thatcher that systematically under-funded the Arts throughout the 80s, overseeing a radical restructuring of Arts funding from the state to corporate sponsorship. Her immediate cut of 4.8% to the Arts Council was felt across the nation, with substantial museum and gallery closures.

Even those who sought an independent and creative resolution to the problems of the decade were persecuted. The Telecommunications act of 1984 – an original and still-controversial bill in the development of contemporary data-surveillance – gave new powers to the state to enter properties and detain pirate radio broadcasting equipment – a media form very popular with under-represented voices in Britain during the 1980s.

The massive reorientation of arts organisations to a culture of entrepreneurship, managerialism and corporatism left figures such as the then director of the National Theatre, Peter Hall, lambasted for the cheek of even mentioning a sincere concern over under-funding in the Arts. Whilst brands such as Andrew Lloyd Weber and the emergence of popular British musicals such as Cats, The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables were celebrated for ushering in a new era of cultural profitability.

The succeeding Labour governments came as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, in real-terms the Arts saw a substantial increase of 35% of its state funding, translating to £186.6 million in 1998–1999 to £452.9 million in 2009–2010. Culture Secretary Chris Smith re-introduced free admittance to national museums, increasing attendance by 30 million and a further 30% surge in attendance from those of lower socio-economic backgrounds.

Unfortunately, whilst amazing flagship projects were being completed across the country, such as the opening of Tate Modern, the Lowry in Salford or the Sage-Baltic in Gateshead, many criticised New Labour for solidifying and promoting several tendencies within UK cultural policy – the increasing role of corporate sponsorship; the running of cultural institutions like private businesses; and the shift from cultural to economic and social qualifications – that were originally instigated by Thatcher in the previous decade and continue into contemporary Conservative austerity politics.


This current wave of cuts, beginning with the 2010 coalition, have hit the Arts hard. Over 35% cuts to grant-in-aid funding, with 1 in 5 regional museums at least part-closed in 2015 alone; the Conservative’s ’Ten Point Philanthropy Plan’ hardly a convincing antidote to the problem.



Under Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party our cultural budget will rise to meet the European average of 0.6% GDP, restoring the £42.8 million cut to Arts Council Funding that has been implemented since 2010. An immediate moratorium on privatisation of Museums, Galleries & Libraries will protect the centres of our communities from further attack, keeping them in public ownership. And a £160 million boost to public education funding through an Arts Pupil Premium, a policy aimed at – as Corbyn himself explains – making sure “all school pupils have the chance to learn an instrument, take part in drama and dance, and have regular access to a theatre, gallery or museum in their local area.” A set of policies easily paid for from the reverse of George Osborne’s 2016 Capital Gains Tax cut, which will raise £670 million for the government.

Whilst there was no mention of the popularly debated issue concerning STEAM – adding arts to the government’s focus on science, technology, engineering and maths – a broad set of policies including a new cross-departmental cabinet committee on Arts and Creative Industries, a commitment to devolved cultural budgets and great local influence on funding, and a National Library policy to enforce local authorities to provide comprehensive library & digital services, all provide hope for that under a new Labour government the Arts in Britain will undergo a great rejuvenation, the likes of which are long overdue and thoroughly deserved.

Review: Zhongguo 2185

Throughout the 1990s experiments in Afrofuturism were at the forefront of aesthetic innovation. Melding the new social, psychic and philosophical desires of technoculture and science fiction with the ongoing concerns of the African diaspora, the eclectic movement produced some of the decade’s most exciting works: Butler’s Xenogenesis, Tricky’s Maxinquaye, Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun.

Over the last decade or so, as the world’s global power structure shifts and morphs, we have seen a proliferation of new ethno-futurisms find their way into the cultural matrix. The artificial cosmologies of Lawrence Lek eponymous Sinofuturism. The speculative post-oil eschatologies of Sophia Al Maria’s ‘Gulf-Futurism’. Or the rewiring of New Mexican Santos in the decolonialised altars of Marion Martinez’s Chicanafuturism.

Zhongguo 2185, an exhibition of ten young Chinese artists at Sadie Coles – all born after the Cultural Revolution’s end in ’76 – follows in a similar vein. Using Science Fiction as the lens through which to address shifts in the cultural temporalities of China, curator Victor Wang aims to deconstruct uniform aesthetic tropes of Chinese contemporaneity – ones that deploy a reductionist fetishisation of a kitsch, over-populated smog-state, full of technophilic video-game nuts, gambling addicts and suicide nets.

Installation view, Zhongguo 2185 at Sadie Coles

However, contrary to Lek’s articulation, that Sinofuturism is to be found in the knowing affirmation of both Orientalist and domestic false narratives which pit China in an oxymoronic discourse of both exoticism and boredom, heroism and monotony, archaism and the future, Wang’s intention is a more nuanced and heterogeneous display of contemporary Chinese art practice. Bringing together site-specific installations, video, sculpture and painting, Wang looks to address how the accelerating aspects of Chinese life are affecting their different relations to past, present and future.

Taking its title from the still-unpublished online sci-fi novel of Liu Cixin – in which, among many, Mao Zedong’s virtually-resurrected cryogenic brain attempts a cybernetic populist insurgency against the new democratically-elected female leader of China – the exhibition engages with similar themes of ‘gerontocracy, the impact of digital information and the Internet on society, and the complicated relationships between tradition and ‘progress’, gender equality and post-humanism.’

Upon entering the exhibition, you are immediately confronted by the overwhelming pneumatic air-head of Lu Yang’s digitally-rendered personal avatar. The screaming abstract head is complimented with several video streams documenting the cranium-come-kite as it inflates and soars above a vast landing-strip, and an animated vision of Yang’s slow medico-somatic disintegration into early ornamentalised interment.

Lu Yang, Power of Will – final shooting (2016)

Coupled with the recognisable pop-cult nightmares of Tianzhuo Chen, whose opulent subaquatic catacomb houses the decaying corpse of his video’s lecherous prince, Yang employs the most readily identifiable aesthetic recourses to the accelerating condition of a globalised, consumer-based China. One where the rising geopolitical power of East Asia meets new economic and social models of information technology and the speculative futures of artificial intelligence.

Yet, beyond the formal aesthetic tropes that have become so associative with the posthuman rhetoric of young artists now faced with a vertiginous descent into a world of 3D modelling, quantum computing and bio-hacking, the exhibition does well not to present China as a technological runaway alien (as is often done in the contemporary market). And its focus on a more personal, anxiety-inducing mood does well to differentiate from the homogeny of current Chinese artists such as Ai Weiwei or Zhang Dali.

Tianzhuo Chen, Scapegoat (2014)

Indeed, Xu Qu’s monumental prayer beads hang limply to the left-hand side of the room – created using the carcasses of disused police surveillance cameras, their meditative and devout function is replaced by an evocative, silent noose. Behind which lies Chen Zhe’s stark diaristic commentary of China’s issues with mental health, depression and self-harm. At points this work feels almost voyeuristic, with its subtle nods to the aesthetic forms these distressing images often take when circulated online, but it is nonetheless powerful and arresting.

Site-specific installations from Nabuqi, Zhang Ruyi and Yu Ji question China’s current socio-economic shift to marketization and the problems it poses for the nation’s architecture, ecology and industry. Xu Zhen’s telling phantasmagoria, XUZHEN Supermarket (2007/2017) – housed downstairs in the Sadie Coles shop space – invites the audience to purchase from a continually-restocked supermarket of authentic, yet entirely empty Chinese consumer products. ‘Available for purchase, if not for consumption’, this work signals a clear manifestation of the all-encompassing and historically-cleansing power of global capitalism.

Installation view, Zhongguo 2185 at Sadie Coles

Whilst at points lacking some conceptual coherency, the China on show in this exhibition is one un-Otherised. The typical pitfalls of techno-Orientalism that are prevalent in the West’s conception of post-Maoist China are replaced by a mutual concern over the new challenges and anxieties we all face under the current global system: surveillance, isolation, beauty and freedom. The show does well to articulate how these fears and hopes are equally felt by our Chinese counterparts, and elucidating the specific cultural challenges they face as a nation.

Biometrics, Phenotypes and Hong Kong Cleanup

“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”

Written in 1975, Foucault’s seminal work Discipline and Punishment was a vivid genealogy of the emergence of newer, more insidious forms of power. His eminent analysis of the Panopticon, its mechanisation and emergent ideology are as relevant today as they were forty years ago. Over the last few years we have been seeing an unprecedented level of surveillance and data-harvesting enacted on civilians at the hands of both private companies and the state — their agendas and operations not always mutually exclusive. The revelations engendered by Edward Snowden’s dissent in 2013 have been followed by story after story of developments in surveillance-based technologies and the scale of their implementation in our daily, routine existence. These interferences haven taken the form of ‘convenient’ personalised marketing adverts and much darker forms of psychological profiling and voter modelling — as was seen with the case of AggregrateIQ and Cambridge Analytics in the recent US election and EU referendum.

However, as many theorists have noted, even Foucault’s notion of a disciplinary society has been rapidly outmoded. As Paul Preciado states, “The body no longer inhabits disciplinary spaces but is inhabited by them. The biomolecular and organic structure of the body is the last hiding place of these biopolitical systems of control.”[1] In particular to surveillance technologies, the face has long been a historical tool for the taxonomisation and oppression of different peoples; from race, to psychiatry, to criminality, the face has been the object from which to identify and shackle certain physical appearances to pre-determined psychological traits, degeneracies and social corruptions. As Deleuze would go as far as to say, “The despot-god has never hidden his face, far from it: he makes himself one, or even several.” [2]

An example of Francois Galton’s 19th century criminal physiognomies.

Today, the face has not escaped this oppressive history. The evolution of facial recognition systems in recent years has come at the forefront of anti-terror legislation and rhetoric, the latest in a long line of attacks of civil liberties in the name of security and defence; and all across the world it seems, from the Zapatistas to Anonymous, and from black bloc to Pussy Riot, movements are emerging that reject the face as a political tool — as the former declares, “In order for them to see us, we covered our faces; so that they would call us by name, we gave up our names; we bet the present to have a future; and to live . . . we died.”

Artists throughout the years have approached the issue of the face in different ways, from Arthur Elsenaar’s electro-facial choreographies, to the British-Jamaican collective Mongrel’s ethno-racialized composite portraits. Yet the recent developments in biometric pattern recognition has inspired a new wave of artistic responses to the contemporary political and technological problems that they bring.

Tony Oursler is one of these artists. With an oeuvre that is teeming with uncanny images of xeno-physiognomies, spliced and hybridized with screens, alien pigments and modulated voice tones, Oursler presents human identity through the alienating lens of the biometric systems themselves. His portraits are an unsettling account of the inhumanness of these modes of representation, and the troubling effects they have on modern psychology. His anonymous magnified cyborgs drone of ‘natural selection’ and ‘normative association’, they murmur of being hacked, short-circuited, recoded, and warn that “now you’re only a clown for the machine.” His smaller, diluted abstracts focus heavier on their biometric nodes and latticework, pushing the dehumanising effects of these technologies to the extreme. In an interesting work as part of his 2015 solo-show, template/variant/friend/stranger, one projection infinitely shuffles between 150 algorithmically produced Eigen model-faces, beautifully displaying the sinister uncanniness of these nonhuman projections.

Installation view of template/variant/friend/stranger by Tony Oursler.

Similarly, the work of Heather Dewey-Hagborg explores the possibility of artificially producing — or reproducing — the human face. Her works are based on current genomic research and forensic DNA phenotyping. In both her projects Strangers Visions (2012–13) and Probably Chelsea(2017), Hagborg uses a process of molecular photofitting to algorithmically produce the suspected facial images of people’s DNA. Her project Stranger Visions, as well as producing a facial reconstruction of the DNA she harvested from chewed gum, loose strands of hair and cigarette butts, also detailed a list of personal attributes to the individual, using “statistical predictions about what these individuals looked and acted like, what kind of health conditions they had, and even what their last names were.”

Her later work, Probably Chelsea, uses the DNA of Chelsea Manning to produce thirty radically different facial probabilities, which seem to traverse both race, ethnicity and gender, drawing attention to the ‘molecular solidarity’ we all share, and the impossibility of prescribing to a notion of biologically inscribed identities, especially in an age soon to engage in far more common forms of genetic surveillance, such as the somewhat comical Hong Kong Cleanup’s ‘Face of Litter’ campaign in 2015.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Probably Chelsea (2017)

One project that has become symbolic of queer and anti-biometric protest, however, is artist-theorist Zach Blas’ iconic Facial Weaponisation Suite (2011–14). Using aggregated data from different facial sets, including queer men (a riposte to several scientific studies conducted in 2007 which claimed to be able to correctly infer sexual orientation from facial images), non-white participants and surveys looking at both anti-veil legislation in France and security technologies at the US-Mexico border control, Blas uses 3D modelling software to creative ‘collective’ masks that evade facial recognition systems. The amorphous masks lack any recognisable human features, and politically resound with the formerly mentioned movements that reject the face and the current forms of identitarian political representation that it subtly -and not so subtly- enforces. The strikingly aesthetic objects make poignant the interlaced nature of visibility and power, technological surveillance and mass protest, biometrics and defacement. Combined, these three artists force us to consider again the insidious nature technology and power, but also new possibilities of collective dissent. They question how best to face — or not to face — the future of our high-tech societies of control.

Zach Blas, Facial Weaponisation Suite (2011–14)

[1] Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
(New York: The Feminist Press, 2013): 79.

[2] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005): 115.

Becoming-Other, Becoming-Slime

In a competition to best optimise Tokyo’s railway network, pitted against a vast team of Japanese experts from the fields of engineering and design, who would you choose to help win the project?

I choose a piece of mould.

Physarum poluycephalum to be precise. This single-celled collective organism — or slime mould — given its favoured environment — dark, wet and concealed from light, with plenty of bacteria and fungal spores to munch on — will ooze and promulgate its dendritic body in a garish, toxic yellow. And whilst possessing absolutely no brain, nervous system or any means of centralised regulatory function, displays a resounding capacity for intelligent behaviour.

The worming blob of cytoplasm grows and extends as individual spores merge from their molecular to molar aggregate through an unpredictable and entirely environmental set of sensory-feedback loops. Through some sense of extracellular spatial-intelligence — “a kind of living hard drive”[1] — individual amoebas are directed toward one another and synergise into an amorphous, unicellular whole. It then engulfs bacteria and other microbiotic prey into its cell membrane and secrets enzymes to digest them.

Physarum, whilst having been previously lumped into the fungal taxonomical camp, has now been classified as a Protist, a special place reserved for those biological anomalies that are at the “odds and ends of the natural world [and] don’t fit in with the rest of our taxonomic grouping system.”[2] Arriving on the Earth a good billion years ago, this slime is perhaps the most resilient and hardy of terrestrial species, coagulating into a hardened sclerotium under adverse environmental factors, or else deploying an army of haploid spores, both of which under more favourable, moist conditions will deliquesce back to its active, plasmodium vitality. In other words… its immortal.

For a few months or so back in the early 2000s, nature and technology columnists were captivated by the work of Japanese researcher Toshiyuki Nakagaki. Along with his team of microbiologists, Nakagaki placed some Poluycephaluminside a labyrinthine structure with some crumbs of oatmeal at different ends. Almost intuitively, and with a precision and speed that most humans would doubtful replicate, the slime mould managed to established the shortest and most efficient tubular network possible from one piece of food to the other, it’s tendrils of protoplasm slithering into dead ends and back out of them, hunting for its meal.

In a second experiment, with the grains placed in the approximate location of Tokyo and its neighbouring 36 towns, the rhizomatic slime produced a cartography remarkably similar to the existing railway network. One which, it has been remarked, unaffected by political biases, could actually be more efficient, cost less, and be more fault-tolerant that the current one. Indeed, the logistical genius of this mould has been extended in similar experiments to road networks in both the United Kingdom and the Iberian Peninsula. 

Even more bizarrely, the mould has shown signs of memory. In a controlled environment, Physarum has been proven to anticipate and react to set-interval environmental changes, and has also been shown to exhibit a rudimentary form of learning called ‘habituation’: upon encountering a bitter but harmless substance in its path to a food source, whilst originally met with hesitation, the slime mould would eventually begin to pour over the substance with increasing determination, forgetting and re-learning this information with different time-frames of exposure. More recently, it has even been used to control robot facial expressions. 

Learning without a brain, storing without a memory, cognition without a thought.

For the last few years, Finnish artist Jenna Setula has spent her time observing and researching this curious specimen. As for all of its primitivism, this alluring slime poses lots of interesting questions for both biological and computational science — the current development of ‘soft robotics’ — robots that function through ‘genetic’ algorithms, adapting and learning through real-time feedback-loops — have been greatly inspired by these decentralised organisms (in fact, a research group based in Japan actually named one of their soft-bodied robots, ‘Slimey’). And it is generally thought that the combination of variable, morphological feedback-systems, coupled with Big Data information-technologies, will be the foreseeable future of artificial intelligence. 

Now, whilst it is quite easy to jump to the recognisable An/Com political considerations of an organism, that through a decentralised, lateral and rhizomatic ‘network’ of nuclei within the aggregate whole, exhibits extraordinary capacities for long-term species perpetuation, meticulous and efficient energy consumption (with further complex nutrition equilibration), and predictive ecological planning. It is important to remember, however, that the current impasses of neoliberal co-optation have led to a jettisoning of such naïve proclamations of messianic technological and deterritorialized affirmation.

Faced with the endless swamp of digital content, the bottom-up structures of ‘hip’ corporations that function through a horizontal ‘collaboration’ of semi-autonomous agents — all responsible and determined to optimise their own intellectual and affective labour — and the increasing hyper-connectivity of life — where the unemployed are told to upload their CV to LinkedIn for better business opportunities, and through which “new geopolitical forms parasitize the traditional geometries of state sovereignty”[3] – it is no wonder that these examples of micro-biology lack a certain political poignancy.

Fortunately, I don’t think that is the point the Sutela is trying to make. 

Her ongoing series on the life-form is centred around the working title Orgs — Organisation, Organism, Orgasm — and hosts an array of petri-dishes, yellow slime, performances and technological charts. One of its latest iterations, taking place last year at the Future Gallery in Berlin, was her work Orbs (2016). Housed in the gallery’s dark and murky basement, three transparent orbs were lit up with infrared tubes, illuminating the tenebrous maze of glass conduits that Setula’s Physarum crawled through. Each orb contained its own individual design, from a 3D model of an early 20th century Japanese charcoal drawing — a supposed map of the limits of anthropocentric knowledge, made by a royal naturalist who collected slime moulds — to an example of blockchain technology and a Holocratic organisational chart.


Even more recently, at the Centre Pompidou last spring, Sutela inhaled some of the slime mould before conducting a peformative reading, as if the organism were hacking and programming her speech itself — a ‘becoming-slime’. In reference to her titular semiotics, she explained the words’ connotative links: “Orgasms may induce a brief loss or weakening of consciousness, la petite mort. According to Professor Nakagaki, by focusing on the level of unconsciousness, we may find clues to the similarities between the information processing of humans and other forms of organic and synthetic life. […] Artificial intelligence has been trapped on the level of consciousness for too long.”

  

Now, while this may seem like a rather vogue techno-lusting for non-human cognition, I would suggest that Sutela’s sensibility is a little closer to that of Rachel Pimm’s in her 2015 performance at the Chisenhale Gallery, London. In that performance, Pimm, using similar semiotic playfulness, explored the taxonomical etymology of the worm, through an assemblage of agencies from entropic subterranean annelids, to architectures of cerebral activity: “Vermin? Worm. Or Verm? Vermi? Vermis — the Latin worm, the ancient, original worm, or the cerebral neural worm-shaped pathways that carries the sense of what one’s own body is, alongside and in relation to, and touching neighbouring things. Like a direct wormhole to stuff, to other matter.”

Similar to Pimm, Sutela is bringing attention to the other-worldliness of the assemblages and systems of knowledge that humans are always-already enmeshed within. Recent developments in materialist posthuman philosophies have called attention to the myriad ways in which autopoietic, intensive assemblages of species and nonhuman actants co-constitute life. For example, it has been proven that Omega-3 fatty acids help improve human moods, combats stress and depression, and increase female libido. That gut bacteria influence infant brain development, viruses make up about 5% of the human genome, and that quantum mechanics is responsible for a robin’s navigational systems, photosynthesis and all the world’s enzyme systems.

Amongst all of this, the world simply gets weirder and weirder, and the interplay of forces that shape it — human, bacterial, geological, divine — converge and unravel, full of relentless production and bottomless entropy. The ecology of species, bodies and affects, of computers and algorithms, all radically inter-connected and co-dependant. For all of our cosmic dreams of life beyond this earth, perhaps we should start by considering all things alien, right beneath our noses.


[1] Jamie Sutcliffe, ‘Jenna Sutela: Nam-Gut,’ Art Monthly 408 (2017): 31

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19846365

[3] https://frieze.com/article/other-minds