ElectroPutere AIR 2019
Craiova
Romania
From Male gaze to Machine Gaze
Curatorial essay by Mihaela Varzari
My choice to invite Beatrice Loft Schulz, the
artist duo UBERMORGEN together with Nye Thompson and their collaborator
ztheheng (the alias of Alexander Zenker), as artists in residence, stems from
my current research around issues related to cognitive capitalism and feminist
studies as possible avenues to engage with contemporary art production. In the
words of the media theorist Yuk Hui, ‘there is the need of turning technology
into a support for culture’[1], of moving away from following technology’s pursuit
towards perfection. This perfection, this nightmare of absolutism supported by
the rationality on which the liberal or neoliberal state is built, has been
also challenged by feminism, whose questions haunt ethics and re-write history.
As Julia Kristeva observed ‘For the two thousand and five hundred years that
ethics has existed, the feminine has been rejected from the sphere of ethics:
it is not a subject, at most it is an object, if only!’[2].
Both artistic visions coming from Loft Schulz
and Thompson & UBERMORGEN use technology as a filter, and while the former
situates herself in the wider post-internet cultural dimension, the latter have
been using the internet as a medium from its inception. Their research themes,
developed during the 30 days spent in Craiova and Bucharest, are quite
different, as well as their respective outcomes where the history of technology
includes both the weaving loom and the manufactured network of robots becoming
its own organism.
Loft Schulz’s practice brings to the fore an
existential dimension rooted in embodied feminism, which collides with her
interest in unpicking the contemporary psyche molded by rampant technological
development. She works across predominantly performance and text, as well as
sculptural assemblages and crafts, such as weaving. Many of her works have as
their starting point major historical female figures, such as Joan of Arc, or
the unearthing of marginalized ones, like Beatrice de Dia, one of the best
known of the Trobairitz during 11th to the 13th century in France. Her research
into the history of computer programming, beginning with the historically
neglected British mathematician Ada Lovelace in the first half of the 19th
Century, reveals her practice to be concerned with women’s discarded
contribution to technological development.
 |
Beatrice Loft Schulz, The Story of Joan of Arc, 2014.
Documentation of a performance for Rematerialising Feminism, ICA London.
Courtesy:
the artist
|
The more recent link between weaving and
coding informs her thinking on crafts while it has not been directly expressed.
Her textile-based piece Rain (2017) was made while looking at the
sky and trying to capture its constant movement. During the
residency, Beatrice gathered information on weaving techniques, visited
workshops across the country, which included traditional looms, had meetings
with conservationists and museum curators, and produced a small tapestry on a
miniature loom. As a consequence of this research, Beatrice will spend one year
weaving on a loom one single tapestry in her Glasgow studio. During this time,
which may be seen as an extended performance with no audience, the activity’s
monotony of this slow medium will allow Loft Schulz’s attention to fall upon
the changing of seasons, her growing older, her moods and how they may be
affected by working with certain colours.
Weaving, this quintessential folk tradition
developed in pre-history, asserts itself within contemporary art and technology
through Loft Schulz’s refusal to justify or argue for its significance to our contemporary
moment; it is a technology as significant as (if not more so) than the coding
languages of today. Weaving (which according to Sigmund Freud had been invented
by women alone) which surprisingly enough still continues to challenge the
traditional hierarchical boundaries between craft and fine art, and in Loft
Schulz’s practice is further tied to the developmental history of the internet.
This need for a reappraisal of technologies history by Loft Schulz not only
addresses the need to balance the history books to include significant but
neglected women, but moreover wants to overturn the existing historical
paradigm, forcing the art institutions to undergo internal and structural
changes. It is not enough to exhibit more women if the structures which
sidelined them in the first place are not themselves transformed.
 |
| Beatrice Loft Schulz, Rain, 2017, yarn on rug canvas. Courtesy: the artist |
Without taking away the complexity and the
various nuances of the long-standing practice of UBERMORGEN, I suggest as a
possible point of entry the aesthetics of the German hard rock band Rammstein.
It has been argued already that their tactic to undermine fascism from within
is through parodic re-enactment. They absorb the mannerism of the enemy,
adopting all the seductive trappings and symbols of state power, then
exaggerate them. During recent years UBERMORGEN's has turned towards the
Alternative-Right, ideologically linked to the current trend of nationalism,
anti-migration and anti-feminism in the West. The potent element of fear, the
binding agent for these irrational attitudes, has been further explored during
the residency, with the project UNINVITED, an ongoing collaboration with artist
Nye Thompson, an artist whose practice is concerned with the challenges posed
by Artificial Intelligence, global surveillance capitalism in relation to the
age of Big Data, or national borders and identity formation in the UK.
Her presence within the residency as a guest
of UBERMORGEN and by extension of the residency programme, goes back to her
project BACKDOORED (2016-2017) based on a vast archive of screenshots obtained
though compromised surveillance online cameras. This project, aimed at tackling
the issue of complicity in relation to data privacy, also sets the scene for
her partnership with UBERMORGEN, which began in 2018. UNINVITED was conceived
as a horror film for machines and it featured its first iteration at Wei-Ling
Gallery in Malaysia during 2019. It was further developed during the residency
with the help of engineers from Bucharest and the final film is expected to
complete in 2022, with planned installations in London and Craiova during 2020.
 |
| Nye Thompson and UBERMORGEN, UNINVITED, 2019. Exhibition view- Paralogical Machines, Wei-Ling Gallery, Kuala Lumpur. Courtesy: the artists |
The installation is comprised of a robot
running on a dolly, equipped with movement sensors and a projector showing
images from an archive of surveillance footage; frequently lo-fi
representations of a mixture of domestic, private and public spheres. They
evoke the sense of the uncanny, described by Freud as familiar and alien at the
same time, just like the sight of a corpse, or indeed a robot. The sound and
the editing style of the video, reminiscent of lower end of B movies, adds an
eerie and charged backdrop to his unsettling drama. The taxonomy employed for
classifying the images seeks to mimic that of an algorithm-based selection
process, which brings to the fore a hot subject; how to understand and
represent categorization in the 3rd millennium through the lens of accumulated data.
The robot was initially designed
to react to a human audience, though after having heard of the existence of
unused, underground spaces in the House of the People, also known as
Ceaușescu’s Palace in Bucharest, the artists reconsidered human participation.
The team are considering an online broadcast, which would exclude any actual
live audience members interacting with the robot and its sensors, thus allowing
the machines to become, according to the artists, ‘the performers, audience,
content providers and commentators’. Machines spying on other machines
contribute to generating Big Data, this insatiable, ever-growing monster with
its own spiralling logic; which no-one knows how to deal with yet. Horror takes
place right now, it’s called the reduction of the individual to set of data
sold for profit. It seems to me, that within today’s accelerated humanity,
where we are mere minds mined for data, and governed by cyber-spying, the fear
of machines taking over humans is being replaced by humans becoming more like
machines.
The project UNINVITED channels fear, a
feeling equally captured by the horror films, as well as by political
propaganda, through a restrained, cold and unsentimental aesthetic specific to
net.art. Taking my lead from Gilbert Simondon, this project brings human
experiences into the realm of machine-aesthetics, where the emphasis is on the
functional and operational in order to challenge the human-machine dichotomy.
More recent discussions within the team have been focusing on the possibility
of having more than one robot connected through the cloud, as well as
considering the whole project as one single organism through the animal-machine
relationship. The folklore element is present in this project through its
relationship to horror film genre, founded in the oral tradition of sharing and
passing on tales and legends and it could provide a different entry point into
unpicking UNINVITED.
 |
| Nye Thompson and UBERMORGEN. UNINVITED Organism Schematic (Network View), 2019. Courtesy: the artists |
Both projects propose critical
stances to technological development seen through pathologies ushered in by the
rapid development of the internet, by addressing the feminization of the
workspace, the materiality of the medium of weaving and its relationship to
feminism, surveillance capitalism and machine aesthetics. Both projects react
to the local context. Loft Schulz embraced manual weaving as a medium, inspired
by the Romanian folklore, which is still present in this late industrialized
country, whilst UBERMORGEN and Thompson reacted to the deserted underground
spaces which once belonged to a dictator. The latter’s involvement with folk tradition emerges more obliquely through an
appropriation of the aesthetics of the horror film genre, itself arguably a
hyperbolisation of oral tradition.
My own critical inquiry takes me down the
path of engaging with artistic practices, which keep away from simply
renouncing modern technology as intrinsically bad and the other dogmatically
endorsing it. UNINVITED present a dystopian version of technology, which if not
managed well may prove that there is nothing intelligent about artificial
intelligence. Loft Schulz is more redemptive, but this optimism requires
a total restructuring, radical in its essence, which when placed alongside
UBERMORGEN and Thompson’s work could be perhaps read as science fiction itself
– she is describing a reality that has not yet come into being UNINVITED’s
brand of science fiction is posited as our reality, thus the creeping horror of
it all. Nevertheless, neither project neatly wraps up the questions they
pose. The lack of human audience in both works adds to the multiple
interpretations to be further explored.
This AIR edition based on exploration and
production only, offered the artists the opportunity to re-think or develop
some of their working themes, or earlier projects, and engage with the local
histories and the social and cultural landscape of Romania. The two projects
almost diametrically opposed and pointing into different directions, one to a
neglected past, one to a dystopian future, makes me wonder about the
teleological directions of the contemporary moment in art and the
elusiveness of anticipating new directions.
[1] Hui, Y.(2016). On the Existence of Digital Objects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[2] Kristeva, J. (1987c). Tales of Love. New York, New York:
Columbia University Press.
***
This cultural
project is co-financed by NCFA (National Cultural Fund Administration) of
Romania and Club Electroputere. The project does not necessarily represent the
position of the NCFA and it is not responsible for the content of the project
or the manner in which the results of the project may be used. These are
entirely the responsibility of the funding recipient.
