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.

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

How to Maximise your Aesthetic Capital

Over the years art has taken many forms. Paintings, videos, performances, even a dinner party. These changes have often reflected the emergence of new technologies and larger transformations in social relations. Yet, even as the art market stands at a staggering $50 billion every year, and collaborations between brands and artists has never been more prolific, there is something about the business world that has always seemed antithetical to what we think of as art.The rise of Post-Fordist societies and the resulting shifts in economic infrastructures — most recently the shift into ‘platform capitalism’ and the gig-economy — has led to a new style of business to emerge. Uber, TaskRabbit, Deliveroo, AirBnB. The rise of start-up companies has changed the landscape of capitalism; our relationship between buying and selling products has ostensibly undergone a dramatic ‘democratisation’ — now anyone can simply sign-up, create a profile and start selling.Unfortunately, these models rely upon a structural shift in the economy to increasingly precarious forms of labour and an even deeper rooting of the monopolies that control the flow of goods and services. It’s slick brand-centrism and polished Photoshop aesthetics obfuscates the eroding boundaries between public and private, culture and commerce, work and paralysis.

Briefly introduced by Marx in Capital, and further elaborated upon by political theorists Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, our current era of ‘real subsumption’ has led us to a situation where:

Everything in life must now be seen as a kind of labor: we are still working, even when we consume, and even when we are asleep. Affects and feelings, linguistic abilities, modes of cooperation, forms of know-how and of explicit knowledge, expressions of desire: all these are appropriated and turned into sources of surplus value.[1]

Unlike avant-gardism of the last half-century, which pitted the worlds of subjectivity, aesthetics and social life as antagonist to, and ‘outside’, of capital, our current generation of artists are grappling with the reality that every molecule of life is now produced, defined and parasitized by structures of capitalism. Our bodies, our labour, our emotions and our thoughts. All have been ruthlessly captured and instrumentalised by the territorialising powers of capital.

In this context, it begs the question, where left is there for artists to take their refuge? Is it not, perhaps, in the innovative world of capitalism itself? Why not make Art, a Start-up?

DullTech™, created by its CEO, artist Constant Dullaart, is a crowd-sourced hardware start-up producing a media-player that makes it easy to install single and multi-channel video installations. The idea came about after Dullaart started a 2012 residency in Shenzhen, “The Silicone Valley of Hardware”, and wanted to observe the working conditions of Chinese labourers. To do this, the idea of DullTech was created as a foot in the door. However, after international interest from artists about the (fake) product, Dullaart decided to actually go ahead with making it. (It is important to note here, that whilst his motivation was expose illegal working conditions, the company eventually responsible for producing the DullTech media-player was RealTek, which currently has no history of workplace violations.) 

DullTech media-player

What the sleek branding, polished corporate aesthetics and cute, clip-art style animations of the start-up’s Kickstarter video highlighted — when incongruously, yet quite subtly pitted against footage of the Chinese factories, their workers, the Shenzhen smog and its e-waste — was the deep relationship between creatives, digital production, and myriad forms of modern-day slavery; in many cases hopelessly dependent, and at their worst, actively complicit. Perhaps even more perversely, it showed that in order to critique and render transparent the processes of global labour flows, human rights abuses and staggering ecological harm that go into making something like, say, a media-player, you first have to enter into its own systems of production.

But what about distribution, rather than production? What if the question were about what to do with what we already have, rather than things we need?

New Eelam is an artwork-start-up launched at the 9th Berlin Biennale last year by artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas. Envisioned as a neological ‘post-capitalist’ alternative to the demands of the housing market, New Eelam acts as a ‘platform’ for a world-wide, socialist housing coop; amalgamating a crypto-communistic disavowal of private-property with the contemporary globalised ‘sharing-economy’, it uses new technological infrastructures to broaden the horizon for socialist alternatives to the onslaught of capitalist globalisation. For a flat-rate subscription charge (your rent), subscribers will live and move between New Eelam’s global portfolio of chic urban properties — expanded through both a closed-loop system of reinvestment and speculative real estate ventures taken on by the company. 

New Eelam, Installation views, 11th Gwangju Biennale

Whilst the actual administrative policy of the company remains somewhat shallow — questions such as how will you administer & enforce the length of time anyone can stay at one property, or where the great majority of people whose lifestyle regularly flirts between London, Berlin and Los Angeles will come from, remain wholly unanswered — the project does hint toward the growing possibility of technology to reconfigure ideas of citizenship, housing and property ownership in a time when “capitalism accelerates its way out of its own sustainability.”

Now, whilst many artists who have taken the if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them mantra to its more puerile and exhibitionist depths have been rightfully critiqued by more established forms of leftist commentary, it seems that there is definitely something worth exploring in these more speculative absorptions of capitalist infrastructure, and what they could present as future options in a post-capitalist society: one in which the ‘Entrepreneur in Residence’ moniker takes on a wildly different flavour.

[1] Steven Shaviro, “Necessary Inefficiency in times of Real Subsumption,’ in e-flux, 46. http://www.e-flux.com/issues/46-june-2013/

An Experiment in the Sonic Aesthetics of Data

For us now time has all but disappeared. We are a generation and a world for whom time exists in the form of an imperceptible code; an infinite matrix of pre-sliced microbytes, manifested in a vivid acidity of light and data. Our contemporary sublime oscillates from nanobytes to fibre-optics, from the molecular to the cosmic. Glitches and convulsions stretch and pierce its fabric, corrupted .jpegs arriving in an endless alphanumerical code. The circulation and flows of information that coarse their way through the world’s silicon veins have produced not only a new ecology of signs, but a radically transfigured textuality.

The dehumanising nature of this post-phenomenological world — a frenzy of electrical signals, subatomic waves and quantum particles; of bleeps, blips and drones — has left many reduced to the anxieties and paranoia of a fully-fledged 21st century technological alienation. It is in this context that one of Japan’s leading electronic-music composers and visual artists, Ryoji Ikeda, is demonstrating his unique conceptual and aesthetic drive, executed with a high-tech and mathematical precision.

Ikeda’s oeuvre has weaved between science, art, mathematics, music and more. Back in 1993 he became involved with Dump Type, an experimental Japanese theatre collective. Coming from a rather more pragmatist background in Microeconomics, this association radically accelerated Ikeda’s artistic sensibility as he produced mesmerising sound work for their provocative performances, a series of projects which became embryonic of what he would later pursue in his solo work.

After immersing himself further as a DJ in the Japanese techno scene of the 90s and fully acquainting himself with the new affects and aesthetic states that advances in technology were engendering, Ikeda went on to create album after album of daring, complex and challenging music: his 2001 release Matrix, a fragile and elegant ambient work which vacillates from the intensities of zero to infinity, was composed entirely of singular, pure sinewaves. At the same time producing large-scale artworks such as Spectra(2000), an immense declaration of the sublimity of light and sound that has toured the world, morphing and recontextualising itself in every site-specific location. It’s installation at Terminal 5, JFK International was as if it had been snake-charmed from Kubrick’s hypnotic unconscious itself.

“The installation offers visitors a special phenomenon. It is nearly invisible due to its intense brightness and inaudible due to its ultra-frequencies. Visitors can barely recognise the dimensions of the space, as if they were blind in a whiteout state. As they pass through the corridor, subtle oscillation patterns occur around their ears, caused by their own movements interfering with the sounds. The sound is subtle and minimal, yet the experience of the sound in the installation is active and dynamic.”

 

Ryoji Ikeda’s Spectra installed at Terminal 5, JFK International (2004)

This September Ikeda will be performing a live rendering of his 2008 album Test Pattern – from which this disclaimer is taken:

“Caution! This CD contains specific waveform, impulse and burst data that perform a response test for loudspeakers and headphones. High volume listening of the last track may cause damage to equipment and eardrums.”

– at the Old Selfridges Hotel in London. In association with the Barbican Ikeda will perform one of his notorious audiovisual experiments into the materiality and aesthetics of data, information and contemporary technology; an alien composition of machinic pulses and sonic modulations, at times barely audible, punctuated by electronic resonances and bursts of white noise, encased within a ceaseless black and white strobe of gltiching data. The deeply synchronised work is a pyscho-aural investigation into the larger effects of information-technologies and Big Data in our contemporary understanding of both reality and subjectivity, and is best avoided if your sensory-receptor threshold is located anywhere beneath the absolute human maxim.

 

Ikeda performing is album Test Pattern in 2008.

Created through an intricate and complex process, Ikeda uses a ‘cross platform conversion system’ to transform various media sources — textual, auditory, visual — into a raw barcode, which is then further deconstructed into mathematical data and computer binary-code, to be reappropriated back into dataphonic audio content; a catalogue of disparate frequencies and intensities, emptied of their original content and meaning, reconstituted in a sublime sonic mosaic. Works like Test Pattern explore a spectrum of extreme affective states, from the muted and deft loneliness of a single sinewave traversing our neurosomatic registers, to the nauseating artillery of piercing white noise, occasionally gliding into the faintest lacings of sculpted techno melodies.

The music, or ‘non-music’, is simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic. It transports us into the eerie, imperceptible substratum of the contemporary infosphere. One populated by “frozen embryos, expert systems, digital machines, sensor-equipped robots, hybrid corn, data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales fitted with radar sounding devices, gene synthesizers [and] audience analysers”, and brings it to life with the same fierce energy that propels the cataclysmic world of protons, electrons and neurons that is subsides in. Ikeda reconfigures the work’s own hyper-decontextualisation, repurposing the void of raw data into a daring articulation of life beyond human perception. It is a manifesto for survival in a world slowly drowning itself in anti-mnemonic ecstasy.