CAN'T FIT MY GENES
Glass, rods and perforated sheets of aluminum and steel, squid ink, food colorant, cured silicone, film tape, found photographs, plaster and tape are the materials the show uses to question the nature of an artwork under networked information systems. Working through a media archaeology of the cloud, it situates itself on the misfit between materiality and information, substrate and code, following the logic of the graft.
Photographs of landscapes, found in a discarded collection of train-related material and shot from inside a train wagon, sit behind layers of perforated aluminum and glass. Alongside the automobile, the train was the earliest technology to enable panoramic perception - producing a version of the landscape as screen. Behind the perforated metal, borrowing its logic from primitive binary code technologies (Jacquards’ loom cards, Hollerinths’ census cards or the conductors’ ticket punch) and its function from ventilation mechanisms used in computers and data centers for temperature regulation, the image breaks into a pixel-like grid: sampled, aliased, a chromatic value per cell, turning landscape into code, seen with-and-for a machine. A photograph of a hobby maquette of a train station is taped to a plaster cast of a discarded floral wallpaper. The image is a copy of a copy: a home, pictured within a pastoral scene, reveals itself to be a model and a node, collapsing interior and exterior, private and public, real and virtual into one another. Held together by tape as evidence, the work stages a paranoia born of total surveillance : as the trainman watches the rails, the cameraman shoots the model and the network watches the hub.
A tripod of aluminum and steel rods holds a hollow glass cast of a face, smeared with squid ink, bound at its base by copper wire —part dummy, part classical anthropomorphic sculpture and part diverted optical instrument. Glass, the historical medium of transparency, storage and transmission and the material of the photographic plate, the lens, the vitrine and the optical fibre, gives the head its material logic : where portraiture once located interiority in the head, here it becomes only a holding capacity: interiority presupposes opacity, which, under networked information regimes, gives way to complete transparency, with memory exteriorized in technical supports, relocated to the cloud.
The cloud, and networks, operate on a logic of “pure” replication and lossless fidelity, against a logic of reproduction, always tied up in origin myths and the nuclear family. The two glass belly replicas bring up the belly as the - female – body part that is the original site of reproduction (as well as the gendered body of the original ‘computer’, female workers working in manually debugging systems) to discuss those two logics and variations in holding: One rests on blue silicone casts of CDs and film reels; the other, in a corner, holds a food-coloring syrup feed. The syrup belly stays open, its navel a cut supply line now open to the air, with fermentation contingent on its surroundings, opening up towards a futurity of sympoiesis / making-with, collectively, without a clear authoring agent – and, holding the second organic agent in the exhibition (the other one beign squid ink), staging a line of flight from within the system it is embedded in, with air being an active, messy material agent rather than an abstraction. The other bellys’ navel looks towards the past : its navel becomes the site of a machinic spindle: the point of origin is here repurposed as a playback mechanism, plugged into obsolete media that become, in tissue-friendly silicone, prosthetic, ghostly extensions of the body.
CAN'T FIT MY GENES
Glass, rods and perforated sheets of aluminum and steel, squid ink, food colorant, cured silicone, film tape, found photographs, plaster and tape are the materials the show uses to question the nature of an artwork under networked information systems. Working through a media archaeology of the cloud, it situates itself on the misfit between materiality and information, substrate and code, following the logic of the graft.
Photographs of landscapes, found in a discarded collection of train-related material and shot from inside a train wagon, sit behind layers of perforated aluminum and glass. Alongside the automobile, the train was the earliest technology to enable panoramic perception - producing a version of the landscape as screen. Behind the perforated metal, borrowing its logic from primitive binary code technologies (Jacquards’ loom cards, Hollerinths’ census cards or the conductors’ ticket punch) and its function from ventilation mechanisms used in computers and data centers for temperature regulation, the image breaks into a pixel-like grid: sampled, aliased, a chromatic value per cell, turning landscape into code, seen with-and-for a machine. A photograph of a hobby maquette of a train station is taped to a plaster cast of a discarded floral wallpaper. The image is a copy of a copy: a home, pictured within a pastoral scene, reveals itself to be a model and a node, collapsing interior and exterior, private and public, real and virtual into one another. Held together by tape as evidence, the work stages a paranoia born of total surveillance : as the trainman watches the rails, the cameraman shoots the model and the network watches the hub.
A tripod of aluminum and steel rods holds a hollow glass cast of a face, smeared with squid ink, bound at its base by copper wire —part dummy, part classical anthropomorphic sculpture and part diverted optical instrument. Glass, the historical medium of transparency, storage and transmission and the material of the photographic plate, the lens, the vitrine and the optical fibre, gives the head its material logic : where portraiture once located interiority in the head, here it becomes only a holding capacity: interiority presupposes opacity, which, under networked information regimes, gives way to complete transparency, with memory exteriorized in technical supports, relocated to the cloud.
The cloud, and networks, operate on a logic of “pure” replication and lossless fidelity, against a logic of reproduction, always tied up in origin myths and the nuclear family. The two glass belly replicas bring up the belly as the - female – body part that is the original site of reproduction (as well as the gendered body of the original ‘computer’, female workers working in manually debugging systems) to discuss those two logics and variations in holding: One rests on blue silicone casts of CDs and film reels; the other, in a corner, holds a food-coloring syrup feed. The syrup belly stays open, its navel a cut supply line now open to the air, with fermentation contingent on its surroundings, opening up towards a futurity of sympoiesis / making-with, collectively, without a clear authoring agent – and, holding the second organic agent in the exhibition (the other one beign squid ink), staging a line of flight from within the system it is embedded in, with air being an active, messy material agent rather than an abstraction. The other bellys’ navel looks towards the past : its navel becomes the site of a machinic spindle: the point of origin is here repurposed as a playback mechanism, plugged into obsolete media that become, in tissue-friendly silicone, prosthetic, ghostly extensions of the body.