Field to Palette: Dialogues on Soil and Art in the Anthropocene, by Alexandra Toland, Jay Stratton Noller and Gerd Wessolek.

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Publisher CRC Press describes the book: Field to Palette: Dialogues on Soil and Art in the Anthropocene is an investigation of the cultural meanings, representations, and values of soil in a time of planetary change. The book offers critical reflections on some of the most challenging environmental problems of our time, including land take, groundwater pollution, desertification, and biodiversity loss. At the same time, the book celebrates diverse forms of resilience in the face of such challenges, beginning with its title as a way of honoring locally controlled food production methods championed by “field to plate” movements worldwide. By focusing on concepts of soil functionality, the book weaves together different disciplinary perspectives in a collection of dialogue texts between artists and scientists, interviews by the editors and invited curators, essays and poems by earth scientists and humanities scholars, soil recipes, maps, and DIY experiments.

Center for Land Use Interpretation, Ambrosia Lake Disposal Cell, from Perpetual Architecture: Uranium Disposal Cells of America, 2012

Debra Solomon and Jaromil, Entropical, 2015

Very few of us realize the importance of soil and the deep connection we share with it. Our food system rely on the health of soils. Our dwellings, our modern infrastructures of communication and transports depend on the support of soils. Soil again is the place we open up when we need to extract minerals and other sources of energy and construction material. We need soil to absorb carbon, filter water and ensure the wellbeing of our ecosystems. It’s there, underneath our feet. Yet, we barely acknowledge its existence.

Over time and with the help of globalization, concrete and modern life, we’ve become so alienated from soil that we’ve allowed it to deteriorate. Soil degradation is so severe that, some scientists predict, topsoil will have disappeared by 2070. All of it.

The ambition of the editors and contributors of the book Field to Palette: Dialogues on Soil and Art in the Anthropocene is to help society reconnect with soil. The chapters are either essays that explore some of the cultural articulations of soil or incredibly informative conversations between artists, activists and scientists who share their thoughts about the material properties, cultural histories, environmental functions and existential threats of soil.

Field to Palette is an amazing publication. Its almost 700 pages are packed with photos, surprising information and moving encounters. I wish i had the time to talk about everything i’ve learnt in the book. The unexpectedly sophisticated sensory abilities of nematodes or the method to turn plastic-free baby diapers into planters and nutrients for trees, for example. Since one of the greatest achievements of the book is the way it demonstrates the important role that artists can play in raising discussions with the public and in participating to the solution to the many challenges soil faces today, i’ll dedicate the rest of my review of the book to just a few of the artworks and stories i discovered in Field to Palette.

Franziska & Lois Weinberger, Laubreise at the Austrian Pavilion in Venice, 2009

Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – A Confrontation, 1982

The book is articulated around six functions, six entry points to help us appreciate soil. The first Function of soil is Sustenance. Soil provides us with food, biomass and all forms of nourishment. The intro to the section informs us that 99% of human nourishment comes from 3% of available land. And that, sadly, about a third of that available land is compromised because of chemical pollution, erosion, salinization, etc.

The section starts with the best advocate soil could dream of: Agnes Denes, the artist behind the iconic and spectacularly thought-provoking Wheatfield – A Confrontation. The artist dialogues with the president of the International Union of Soil Sciences, Rattan Lal, about the close connections that could be weaved between conventional agriculture and urban agriculture.

Tattfoo Tan, S.O.S. Mobile Classroom at Farm City Fair, Brooklyn, New York, 2010

Philosopher and curator Sue Spaid writes about 4 artists-farmers whose “artisan soil” practices establish clear links between the health of our soil and the health of our food and of the environment. Their resolution to show their soil as art is an open invitation to cultural institutions to value soil on par with more ‘traditional’ types of museum treasures.

I was particularly moved by artist Maria Michails‘s comment on “energy landscapes” which she sees as a growing tendency to turn good farming lands usually dedicated to growing crops into surfaces that will produce energy through the plantation of plants for biofuel or the installation of solar panel or wind turbine farms.

Parto Teherani-Krônner and Rozanne Swentzell call for more attention to feminist and indigenous perspectives in soil protection debates. They believe that we should rehabilitate the term ‘meal’ because it has a more holistic dimension than ‘food’. A true meal culture has the potential to counter the effects of globalization and regain respect for food traditions, soil and the animals we eat.

The second function of soil is to be a Repository, a source of energy, raw materials, pigments but also poetry.

In that section, Peter Ward offers a guide for collecting and working with earth pigments. I also enjoyed artist Dave Griffiths, science communication lecturer Sam Illingworth and illustrator Matt Girling‘s look at the technocultural archiving of nuclear waste and at the necessity to communicate to far future beings about ancient hazards buried deep below their feet.

Margaret Boozer, Correlation Drawing/ Drawing Correlations, 2012

Margaret Boozer‘s installation Correlation Drawing/ Drawing Correlations features soil samples from all 5 boroughs in New York, extracted over the span of 15 years by Dr. Richard K. Shaw and his team for the New York City Reconnaissance Soil Survey. The work is particularly relevant in urban contexts where most inhabitants might not give any consideration to the soil underneath the concrete.

Soil health and plant nutrition researcher Taru Sandén and artist Terike Haapoja talk about the difference between organic and inorganic carbon and made me want to have a go at the Tea Bag Index, a citizen science method to gather data on decomposition and carbon stabilization.

Function 3 explores soil as an Interface, a site of environmental interaction, filtration and transformation. It’s a dark chapter with toxic infiltration, river bank erosion, climate change-related flooding, industrial runoff, etc. It is also one in which you take the measure of the superhero power of plants that are capable of drawing out toxins from soil, protecting it from the erosive impact of rain and wind and preventing slopes from slipping into waterways.

Mel Chin, blueprint for Revival Field, 1990

Mel Chin, a pioneer in phytoremediation, demonstrated plant potency in several of his works. Talking with curators Patricia Watts and Amy Lipton (the co-founders of ecoartspace), he recounted the story of Revival Field. In the early 1990s, the artist collaborated with research agronomist Rufus Chaney to prove that hyperaccumulator plants can cleanse soil of toxic metals like cadmium and zinc. The work, which confirmed what had so far only been a scientific hypothesis, continues at a contaminated Superfund site, Pig’s Eye Landfill in St. Paul, Minn.

In a discussion between artist Aviva Rahmani and professor of soil science Ray Weil about their respective approaches to restoration work to degraded systems, Weil explained how he used mega daikon radishes to help wean agribusiness farmers from the use of heavy fertilizers.

Sally Mann, Untitled (Body Farm #18), 2000

Environmental scientist Farrah Fatemi and curator Laura Fatemi selected four artists from the exhibition Rooted in Soil to illustrate how old energy can be harnessed into new growth. One of these artists is Sally Mann whose disturbing photos of decomposing corpses in a body farm remind us of our visceral connection to earth.

Function 4 looks at the soil as Home, a biological hotspot, a gene pool, a habitat for bacteria, fungi and all sorts of organisms. That’s where i learnt that more than a quarter of the planet’s known species live in the soil. The life underneath our feet might be invisible but it is dynamic and responsible for almost all lives above the ground.

The chapter shows how fiels as diverse as biohacking, Afrofuturism and postcapitalistic sculptures can reveal the activity and even ‘hidden narratives’ of soil. I have a text in that section. Although ‘text’ is a big word since it’s Amy Franceschini who does all the hard work in the interview i had with her about seeds and genetic biodiversity.

Suzanne Anker, Astroculture (Eternal Return), 2015

Interviewed by Regine Rapp and Christian de Lutz, the cofounders of Art Laboratory Berlin, Suzanne Anker made some fascinating comments on the toxicity in the soil since Industrial Revolution and on extraterrestrial farming.

Wanuri Kahiu, Pumzi Trailer, 2010

Professor of geology and environmental engineering, Peter K. Haff and filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu have an engaging exchange about the importance of using speculative narratives when technology is accelerating but human processes are not.

Function number 5, Heritage, sees soil as an embodiment of cultural memory, identity and spirit. Soil adopts the crucial but difficult to assess function of providing us with aesthetic pleasure, recreational enjoyment, cognitive development and spiritual enlightenment.

Cannupa Hanska Luger, The Weapon is Sharing (This Machine Kills Fascists), 2017

Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger calls for a re-indigenization of Western thought and argues that the best way to protect the soil and in particular its cultural heritage is to share it.

Ruttikorn Vuttikorn and Myriel Milicevic, Stories from the Hills: Tales of the Lowland

Play activist Ruttikorn Vuttikorn, artist and interaction designer Myriel Milicevic and specialist of indigenous studies in Thailand Prasert Trakansuphakon give an enlightening perspective on how indigenous people’s life on the high hills of Northern Thailand can inform the urban ways of communal living of the “Lowlanders”. The best quote in their contribution to the book is by a village leader who turned down an offer from the U.S. to export 25.000 jars per year of their local honey. “Nature is not a manufacturer,” he explained.

Function 6 explores soil as a Stabilizer, a platform that enables the construction of structures, infrastructures and socioeconomic systems. Our buildings, underground and overground transport systems, sewers, communication networks and other modern infrastructures would not exist without the space and stability that soil offers for their construction.

Center for Land Use Interpretation, Uranium disposal cells in Mexican Hat, Utah, from Perpetual Architecture: Uranium Disposal Cells of America, 2012

The research and education organization Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) talk about Perpetual Architecture: Uranium Disposal Cells of America, a 2012 exhibition that explored the extent of uranium disposal cells in the US and the kind of unintended “land art” objects the infrastructures left in the landscape.

Lara Almarcegui, The Rubble Mountain, Sint-Truiden, 2005

Lara Almarcegui works with anthropogenic soil substrates, rubble, stones, sand, landfill soil and other waste construction materials to make us think of the true -underground- origin of a building.

Ellie Irons in collaboration with professor of environmental biology Jean Louis Morel speculate on a Soil Assembly and Dissemination Authority (SADA), an hypothetical and future city agency responsible for research, production, distribution and outreach related to an essential (and no longer naturally available) resource: soil.

Related stories: Ecovention Europe: Art to Transform Ecologies, 1957-2017 (part 1) and (part 2), The scars left by electronic culture on indigenous lands, Eulogy for the weeds. An interview with Ellie Irons, Interview with Cecilia Jonsson, the artist who extracts iron from invasive weeds, Dust Blooms. Can we put a price on the services that urban flowers provide?, Experiments in sound, soil and microbial fuel cells, No Man’s Land. Natural Spaces, Testing Grounds, Perpetual Uncertainty. Inhabiting the atomic age, HYBRID MATTERs: The urks lurking beneath our feet, The Seed Journey to preserve plant genetic diversity. An interview with Amy Franceschini, etc. I didn’t realize i had written so many articles related to soil.

Some 500 million animals are slaughtered every year for consumption in the Netherlands. The figures are even more horrifying if you look at the number of animals slaughtered for food every second. But while parts of these animals end up on your plate, they also generate a lot of ‘waste material’. Only 30 percent of the cow blood for example will be dried and used in fertilizers. The remaining 70 percent will be sterilised and discharged into the sewer system.

Basse Stittgen, Blood Related, 2017-ongoing

Basse Stittgen, Blood Related, 2017-ongoing

Designer Basse Stittgen transforms these leftover of the meat industry into a dark, organic and versatile bioplastic. He uses the discarded body fluid as a biomaterial that he dries, heat-presses and then turns into a protein-based biopolymer from which he crafts small objects. Various pieces of dinnerware are direct reminders of the consumption of animals. Small egg holders that can be stacked into a totem that evokes the mystical sides of blood. A jewellery box invites us to question the value of blood, and perhaps also the value of animals after their death. The designer even created a record playing the heartbeat of a pig.

Basse Stittgen, Blood Related, 2017-ongoing

Basse Stittgen, Blood Related, 2017-ongoing

Most of us will have some kind of visceral reaction to the project. Smooth consumer goods made of solid blood feel a bit revolting and upsetting. The use of blood to create domestic goods forces us to confront the symbolic as well as the material dimension of a liquid we associate with both life and death. Furthermore, these Blood Related objects highlight the contradictions at the core of our relationship to animals. In theory, we all love animals. But not enough to stop buying the products of their exploitation. We know we need slaughterhouses but we prefer them to function far away from our sight and thoughts. Facilities where animals are butchered used to be located in urban centers but are now located outside city limits for “environmental and hygiene” concerns. The building of the ex-slaughterhouses have since been cleaned up to house swanky cultural centers.

The most interesting question this project asks is thus: Can this biomaterial ever become ‘just an object’, without any further associations?

Basse Stittgen‘s objects made with blood are currently part of ReShape. Mutating Systems, Bodies and Perspectives, an exhibition at MU in Eindhoven that explores theme of mutation and transformation. I took the show as an excuse to get in touch with the designer and ask him a few question about a project i found both curious and disturbing:

Hi Basse! How did you get the idea to create this rather surprising material? Is there in it any political or ethical comment on the meat industry? Or is it a more pragmatic solution to reduce industrial waste?

The project started as a broad research into bio materials and their history, at one moment I came across a french bio material created in 1855 called bois durci – it consisted of 80% sawdust and 20% oxblood. The possibility to make a solid material from blood sparked my fascination and I started doing first experiments.

There is no intention of a direct political comment on the meat industry, the objects are supposed to physicalize an invisible waste and connect the consumer again to the production of meat and asks to be aware of where meat comes from and what that takes. The project is not meant to be developed into an industrial scale waste reduction solution, especially because industrial slaughterhouse have facilities to collect and process the cow blood into for example fertilizer, which also means not all blood is waste, but all of it is invisible.

Basse Stittgen, Blood Related, 2017-ongoing

From what i know, it is now very difficult to have contact with slaughterhouses and be granted an authorisation to visit their premises? How did you manage to source the blood? And how was your own experience of dealing with that industry?

It is indeed very difficult to find access to slaughterhouses since they are quite suspicious towards the motives of outsiders that want to gain access and on the other hand many of the ones I contacted saw no value in my research. It is about finding the right person to work with and now since over a year I’m working with one slaughterman that lets me collect the blood which for him is waste he pays for to have it picked up usually.

I remember the first time going to the slaughterhouse I was afraid of what I might see, especially since all the footage and news from slaughterhouses painted a very dark picture in my head. The moment I could talk to the slaughterman in person a lot of that fear and prejudice disappeared, which doesn’t change that the killing of a cow was one of the most violent images I experienced in my life.

While doing some online research to prepare this interview i found this page that describes the properties of the material. Where there characteristic of the materials that you found surprising, that you were not expecting?

And is it possible just by smelling or touching it to guess the origin of this biomaterial?

On first glance the material resembles bakelite, the surface is very hard and smooth due to the pressure and due to the heat the objects are completely black. During the process of creating them, especially drying the blood you can smell the origin, once the blood is dry it becomes odourless which makes it almost impossible to guess its origin. What surprised me most is the simplicity of the process

Basse Stittgen, Blood Related, 2017-ongoing

Could you tell us about the transformation process? How did you get from ‘industrial waste product’ to this set of objects?

All the objects relate to certain aspects of my research around blood. For the show at MU I decided to create a tiled table filled with dining ware made from blood. The setting calls in mind a slaughterhouse and the objects are directly linked to the consumption of animals.
For me to understand the meaning of the material and see the transformation process it is necessary to go one step before the industrial waste product. The first and more drastic transformation goes from blood as the ‘substance of life’ to ‘industrial waste product’ and only then into the blood objects. I try to embody this transformation for example in the record from blood which plays the hearbeat of a cow.

Basse Stittgen in collaboration with Anais Borie, Blood Related, 2017-ongoing

Basse Stittgen in collaboration with Anais Borie , Blood Related, 2017-ongoing

Together with Anais Borie you created a set of alchemistic drawings that echo the mystical dimension of blood. Could you tell us the role that blood played in alchemy?

While blood has its real attributes and composition of different proteins glucose and hormones that are all measurable and can refer to the visible, it has another layer which is its metaphorical meaning, the meaning humans give it based on nothing but belief and fantasy, the invisible. It is the interplay of those two sides is what makes it such a fascinating material to work with. By creating this visual layer based on alchemistic drawings I wanted to play on the irrationality connect to blood.

Has the project altered in any way your relationship to animal products?

I’m still eating meat, but the project made me more aware and choose much more carefully when and how I do so, I think for consumers its very easy and convenient to look the other way when it comes to the process of how things are made. Especially in the slaughter industry, one of the biggest in the world, yet one of the most invisible simultaneously.

Thanks Basse!

Basse Stittgen’s work is part of the exhibition ReShape. Mutating Systems, Bodies and Perspectives at MU in Eindhoven until 10 March 2019.

Related stories: Vampires, crucifixion and transfusion. BLOOD is not for the faint-hearted, Bodily Matters: Human Biomatter in Art (part 1. The blood session), “Dangerous Art”: the latest issue of the (free) Experimental Emerging Art Magazine, The Meat Licence Proposal, interview with John O’Shea, etc.

Making It Up: Photographic Fictions, edited by Marta Weiss, Curator of Photographs, Word & Image Department, Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

On amazon UK and USA.

Publisher Thames & Hudson describes the book: Presenting work from the earliest through to the most contemporary of photographers, Making It Up: Photographic Fictions challenges the idea that ‘the camera never lies’. With over 130 photographs supported by extended commentaries and an introduction, the book illustrates that, though we often recognize the staged, constructed or the tableau as a feature of contemporary art photography, this way of working is almost as old as the practice itself. Remarkable in themselves, these photographic fictions, whether created by such early practitioners as Lewis Carroll or Roger Fenton, internationally renowned artists such as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, or contemporary figures such as Hannah Starkey and Bridget Smith, find new and intriguing relevance in our so-called ‘post-truth’ age.

William Wegman, Dressed for Ball, 1988

The photographic medium has been used to fabricate fictions and fables almost ever since it was invented. Spontaneity, after all, wasn’t compatible with the long exposure times that early photography demanded. It was tempting to use the new medium not just to document reality but also to carefully orchestrate scenes and even narratives.

Some 19th Century photographers composed made-up tales as a social activity, little tableaux were then playfully staged to reproduce moments from history, to shape family stories or to fulfill the fantasies of an elite that dreamt of living a “simple”, working-class life for an afternoon. Other early photographers elaborated theatrical narratives in a bid to convince critics and other viewers that photography was an art form as respectable as painting.

Gohar Dashti, Iran, Untitled, 2014

Today’s photographic tools allow for unplanned and instinctive snapshots. Yet, carefully choreographed tales haven’t lost any of their appeal. Story-telling nowadays comes with other aspirations though. Some artists use fiction to critically reflect on their medium of choice or to comment on current social and political conditions.

I grabbed Making It Up: Photographic Fictions because i had visited and enjoyed an exhibition of the same name a few years ago at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The book is not really a catalogue of the show but a publication that expands on it, with more details, more examples and more space to reflect on the use of photography to compose stories. All the photos in the book are drawn from the permanent collection at the V&A. Instead of presenting the images in chronological order, curator Marta Weiss plays with themes and aesthetics and makes early photography converse with works by contemporary artists.

I found the book as eye-opening, entertaining and fascinating as the exhibition. Here’s some of my favourite photos and stories from the publication:

Duane Michals, Chance Meeting, 1972

Duane Michals’s sequences of photographs suggests a narrative. Two men in suits pass in an alleyway, exchange a glance and walk on. Nothing else happens but the encounter seems loaded with significance and perhaps danger. It’s one of the first works in which Michals addressed what it is to be gay in a homophobic world.

Henry Peach Robinson, The Story of Ridinghood, 1858. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

When Henry Peach Robinson exhibited his series that reconstructs key moments of the Little Red Riding Hood in 1858, some critics found it charming. Others, however, believed that fictitious photographs like these were an inappropriate use of a medium perceived as realistic and truthful.

Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away, 1858

Robinson was also an early proponent of the photomontage. Fading Away combines five separate negatives to produce the intimate scene of a grieving family gathered around a young woman dying of tuberculosis.

Although the scene was imaginary, some viewers felt that it was too painful to be tastefully rendered by a medium as ‘literal’ as photography. The controversy, however, made Robinson famous in England where he was one of the leaders of pictorialism, a movement which promoted photography as an art form rather than a mere visual record of reality.

Tom Hunter, Woman Reading a Possession Order, 1997

Woman Reading Possession Order, is part of a series of work Tom Hunter made of a group of people experiencing housing problems in his neighbourhood of Hackney in London. The composition, light and colours echo Vermeer’s painting Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, 1657, giving composure and dignity to the main protagonist.

Richard Polak, The Artist and His Model, 1914. © Victoria and Albert Museum

Dutch photographer Richard Polak built sets that reproduced the domestic interiors seen in the paintings of 17th century painters Johannes Vermeer and Jan Steen. He then photographed actors dressed in attires typical of that time.

Yinka Shonibare CBE, Diary of a Victorian Dandy: 11.00 hours, 1998

Yinka Shonibare’s Diary of a Victorian Dandy series depicts a day in the life of a fictional dandy, from his late morning rise, to his afternoon business and social activities, to an orgy at 3 a.m. The photographs resonate with William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (1735), which chronicled the squandering of the prodigal son of a rich merchant. Devoid of the moralizing message of Hogarth’s paintings, Shonibare’s work inverts the stereotypical roles of the time: the dandy is a black gentleman (a role played by Shonibare), his entourage is white.

The work seems to echo Shonibare’s own experience as an outsider who uses his flamboyance, wit and style to penetrate levels of society which would otherwise be closed to him.

The photographs required an elaborate production. Shonibare employed professional actors, a make-up artist, a stylist, a photographer and the director of BBC costume dramas for a shoot ‘on location’ at a stately home.

Tess Hurrell, Chaology no. 1, 2006

Tess Hurrell recreates in her studio atomic bomb blasts, space shuttle disasters and other explosions. She sculpts the scenes using cotton wool, talcum powder and string and then captures them on film.

Bridget Smith, Glamour Studio (Locker Room), 1999

Glamour Studio depicts an empty stage set used in the porn industry. The photo is part of a series that catalogues architectures of desire.

James Elliott, Mary, Queen of Scots. A Prisoner, c. 1860. © Victoria and Albert Museum

As in today’s period dramas, the sets, props and costumes used to imagine and stage this scene would have transported viewers to another time. The tableau was seen in three dimensions through a stereoscope (the Oculus Rift of Victorian times!), making the experience even more immersive.

Inside the book:

Previously: Making It Up: Photographic Fictions.

Terraforming is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface or ecology of a planet or any other large celestial body in order to make it habitable by Earth-like life.

Engineering inhospitable planets to suit human physiology and needs might sound like science fiction. And indeed we don’t have the technology nor the resources to achieve this enterprise. Yet, the assumption that we can manipulate and colonize other planets (Mars in particular) has received a fair amount of attention over the past few years, demonstrating both a certain anxiety over the health of our own and a very modern hubris that we can solve every problem just by throwing technology at it.

Geert Goiris, Prelap, 2018

Geert Goiris, Owl, 2018

Terraforming Fantasies is the title of Geert Goiris‘s solo show at Banca di Bologna Hall at Palazzo De’ Toschi in Bologna.

The exhibition, composed of photographic prints, a slide show and a video installation, immerses viewers into a world that resembles our own, yet feels alien and slightly disquieting. The near absence of human figure in Goiris’ images contributes to the eeriness. Here and there a figure appears, either human or non-human. Most of the time, they seem to be completely disconnected from their surrounding.

Geert Goiris, Eugenes Neighbourhood, 2002

Geert Goiris, Albino, 2003

The feeling that the images have reached us from another planet “is achieved though specific technical and stylistic choices: the artist primarily uses a large-format camera with special types of film (orthochromatic, aerial, infrared),” reads the press release. “He shoots most of his pictures at dusk, when the light is beginning to fade and become unreliable.”

The oppressive, ambiguous images suggest a very contemporary approach to the Romantic sublime. Nature today still inspires us admiration, apprehension and other powerful emotions. Its appearance and violent manifestations, however, have changed: toxic industrial landscapes, giant waves crashing over seaside towns, ocean plastic patches, giant icebergs breaking in two, etc. As the success of Burtynsky and other photographers of the Anthropocene demonstrates, we revel in these visions of an environment that the actions of men have rendered treacherous. Goiris’ vision of a world that makes us feel powerless is as dramatic as the one captured by Burtynsky & co but it is far more subtle. Its atmosphere is more enigmatic, more suggestive of a world where we are little more than silent and barely tolerated bystanders.

Geert Goiris, Plot Twist, 2016

Geert Goiris, Erta Ale, 2018

I wasn’t expecting to be so impressed with Terraforming Fantasies. I knew very little about the photographer and was actually in Bologna to visit the Thomas Struth solo show at the Fondazione MAST. The Struth exhibition is spectacular but it’s Goiris’ images that keep haunting me today.

Even the setting of the show, designed by the architect Kris Kimpe, conspires to render the exhibition enigmatic and memorable. The large space is filled with hexagonal display units, some closed, others open, each housing photographs or moving images. The irregularly arranged modules demand that we move around, choose our own path through the show and establish our own connections and fictions. We are in charge of the narrative as much as the artist is. Well, almost…

Geert Goiris “Terraforming Fantasies” installation view at Palazzo De’ Toschi, Bologna, 2019

Geert Goiris, Overgrown, 2014

Geert Goiris, Ecologist Place, 2006

Geert Goiris, Dead Bird, 2008

Geert Goiris, Andrea, 2011

Geert Goiris, Wetwood, 2007

Geert Goiris, 12 Minutes Silence, 2003

Geert Goiris, Zverev, 2014

Geert Goiris “Terraforming Fantasies” installation view at Palazzo De’ Toschi, Bologna, 2019

Geert Goiris “Terraforming Fantasies” installation view at Palazzo De’ Toschi, Bologna, 2019

Geert Goiris. Terraforming Fantasies, curated by Simone Menegoi and Barbara Meneghel, is at Palazzo De’ Toschi – Salone Banca di Bologna until 24 February 2019.

Instead of sending humans on a long and probably very painful mission to colonize Mars, how about sending human corpses in outer space to aggregate and form a new planet?

Julijonas Urbonas‘ new project proposes to do just that. A Planet of People would be created by sending human bodies to the L2 point of the Earth-Sun system, one of the Lagrangian points in space where the gravity is absent. There, the frozen bodies would float around until their weak gravities make them assemble into a huge celestial body: “in this way, a new ‘human’ planet is extra-terraformed. A cosmic fossil of humanity. A monument to humans of humans.”

Julijonas Urbonas, A Planet of People, 2017 – 2019. 3D human scanner installation view, Vartai Gallery, Vilnius

Julijonas Urbonas, A Planet of People, 2017 – 2019. steel. Screenshot showing the overview of the recently scanned bodies, Vartai Gallery, Vilnius

Julijonas Urbonas, A Planet of People, 2017 – 2019. steel. Screenshot showing the overview of the recently scanned bodies, Vartai Gallery, Vilnius

The project speculates upon the aesthetic, ethical and scientific aspects of such a formation into space.

What spatial structures would it be possible to choreograph? How would a landscape of biomass look like on such a planet? What biochemical processes would it undergo, and would it form its own ecosystem eventually? And what would be the ethical, cultural and political implications, both here on Earth and out there?

A Planet of People might be speculative but it is deeply anchored in science. It draws on disciplines such as biomechanics, space law, space medicine, astrophysics or astrogeology to reflect upon the establishment of exo-disciplinary arts (architecture, choreography and other forms of arts influenced by the exposure to the extreme conditions encountered in outer space.) In addition, the work invites us to question our traditional definitions of human species and life in general.

The results of Urbonas’ artistic research into the scientific feasibility study of this artificial planet were exhibited last month at the Galerija Vartai in Vilnius. Visitors of the exhibition could get their body scanned in 3D and transposed into a 3D astrophysics simulation. They would then be able to watch their body fly and join the ones of the previous visitors, slowly adding to the planetary mass.

Julijonas Urbonas, Hypergravitational Piano, 2017 – 2019. Installation view, Vartai Gallery, Vilnius

Julijonas Urbonas, A Planet of People, 2017 – 2019. Astrophysics simulation room view, Vartai Gallery, Vilnius

I’m still wondering how we would understand this planet made of human corpses: Would we use it as glorified resting place for the ultra rich? Would we regard it as a monument that celebrates humanity’s sense of adventure? Would it become the ultimate relic of our presence in the universe after we’ve made the Earth so toxic our whole species has disappeared? Or will it just be yet another piece of space trash?

I asked artist, designer, researcher, engineer and former Director of a Soviet amusement park Julijonas Urbonas to tell us more about his intriguing project:

Hi Julijonas! First, i’d like to ask you about Cosmic Lithuanias, a project in which you reflect on the cosmic identity of a Lithuanian. Unfortunately, I’ve never been in Lithuania and i don’t know anything about the cosmic identity of the country (nor do I know anything about the cosmic identity of my own country for that matter). What makes this cosmic identity worth investigating?

The cosmic history of Lithuania spans over four centuries and it involves things such as: Kazimieras Simonavičius’ idea for multi-stage rockets in 1650; the establishment of one of the oldest astronomical observatories in Europe in 1753; the first successful attempt to grow plants “from seed to seed” in space; establishment of the Lithuanian Aerospace Association in 2009; and, most recently, the launch of several Lithuanian nanosatellites. The latter transmitted audio recordings in Lithuanian language back to earth. The messages included “Lithuania loves freedom”, and the voice recording of Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaitė saying “Greetings to all Lithuanians around the world!”

Actually, it is these Lithuanian satellites that provoked my concern about the national space culture, which is monopolized by technologists and businessmen. What’s the value of such celestial messages addressed to a super tiny, narrow and rather techy community – radio hams? I wonder how many of them spoke Lithuanian and even if they did, what have they learned from hearing such a truism? Ultimately, how does this achievement differ from Sputnik 1, the world’s very first artificial satellite that broadcasted nothing but beeps?

“Fiton-3” – a micro-greenhouse developed by Lithuanian scientists. It was sent to Salyut 7 space station in 1982. During their 40-day lifecycle, Arabidopsis plants became the very first plants to flower and produce seeds in the zero gravity of space

Despite the prevalence of nerdy ideas, our cultural discourses have not produced any critical responses to this. It is as though our culture terminated at the Kármán line, an arbitrary designation that lies at an altitude of 100 km above Earth’s sea level and commonly represents the boundary between the earth’s atmosphere and outer space. I set out to do something about it and push Lithuanian culture over that line. There were a dozen of ideas that got materialised in the forms of an opera, an extra-terrestrial vodka (it’s under development in collaboration with an astrobotanist Danguolė Švegždienė), a funding application for a Lithuanian Kosmica festival, also lectures, workshops and texts about cosmic imagination and exo-disciplinary arts. One of the ideas has been extremely persistent, constantly recurring in my sketches, daydreams and discussions with scientists. I call it A Planet of People – an artificial planet made entirely of human bodies. I thought it was a very promising idea to spark the discussion about our own cosmic programme. What could be more straightforward than reducing the nation to a collection of the bodies of its citizens that are put into outer space? The nation in space is a cosmic nation. Its provocative tone, simplicity and, most importantly, its uniqueness compared to other space programmes, made it viral. While still at the very early stage of conceptualisation, the idea was selected as one of the most important Lithuanian visions in the book Imagining Lithuania: 100 years, 100 visions, 1918–2018.

The work combines “astroanthropology, speculative engineering, biomechanics, space law, space medicine, astrophysics, astrogeology and space arts.” You worked with astrophysicist Vidas Dobrovolskas for this project and you also were an artist in residency at CERN, so I suspect that the project has got some serious scientific backing. I’m intrigued by the “speculative engineering” side of the work. How much speculation is necessary to engineer this monument to humanity made up of human corpses? 

The engineering in this project is speculative in several ways. Firstly, there is little to no engineering knowledge and methods to deal with such an idea. Terraforming, or planetary engineering in general, is still at the stage of sci-fi. Also, no mammal bodies, let alone human bodies, have ever been used as a material for architectural structures with some vaguely related exceptions such as choreographic formation practices (skydiving, human towers, etc.), military biomechanics research, the deviations of serial killers, such as Ed Gein’s designs of human flesh. Secondly, the idea is quite unrealistic logistically. In order to meet the definition of a planet, an unimaginably large number of bodies would be required. If we started sending ourselves out into space today, with the current worldwide birth rate we’d need around one trillion years to form a planet massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity. Thirdly, the idea has unacceptable cultural implications. Hence, we have here a speculative social engineering assignment. And, ultimately, the project might be seen as a bio sci-fi, for which a specific quasi-fictitious engineering should be used to make things work not in reality but in the public imagination. Thus, it is more akin to what Disney called ‘imagineering’.

In my practice, I usually come up with ideas for projects by imagining a certain number of human bodies under unprecedented gravitational circumstances. A few examples: a falling trajectory that pleases and kills, a spin that enhances orgasm, a rocking motion that directs gravitational dreams, etc. In A Planet of People I imagine a large group of people in weightlessness, and soon realise that it is impossible to remove gravity completely. Not only because we are gravitational beings (gravity has been an extremely crucial factor in our evolution), but just because we are objects with mass, hence, according to physics, also with gravity. After their suspension in space for a substantial amount of time, the weak gravitational forces emitted from the bodies would pull them toward each other until they are assembled into a cluster. This ego-centric gravity becomes the driving force of the project.

This is exactly what would happen if we found ourselves in certain locations in outer space. One of such locations may be the Lagrange points that are located between two celestial bodies orbiting around one another (for example, the Sun and the Moon, or the Sun and Earth), in which the gravitational pull from both objects compensate for one another, such that a third body, for example, a space probe, can stay fixed in that point. Imagine a million, a billion or even a number with nineteen zeros (which is the minimum number of bodies required for the formation of a new planet) of frozen human bodies floating around one of the Lagrange points and forming a new celestial body.

Here we’re entering the domain of speculative science and engineering. What spatial structures could we choreograph? How would a landscape look like on such a planet? How would it be affected by space radiation and biochemical changes? What kind of geology or even ecosystem would it eventually produce?

I am currently working on these questions with various scientists working in astrophysics, astrogeology, astrobiology, biomechanics, forensics, etc. Their responses will be featured in a publication that I am currently curating.

So far, the project has been mostly based on astrophysics. One of the major elements of the project is an interactive installation that features a 3D human body scanner. The visitors are scanned and rendered in a 3D astrophysical simulation. The system assigns an individual gravitational field to each body scan and speeds up the interactions between all of them so that their ‘extra-terrestrial dance’ would be visible instantly. This is where the project involves some real engineering, yet its purpose is rather the imaginary workings of the space programme, in which they are both its protagonists and its very content. The interactive installation forces the public to confuse a human being for a planet, thus producing an empathic link with humans freed up from the earthly context.

Julijonas Urbonas, A Planet of People, 2017 – 2019. steel. Screenshot showing the overview of the recently scanned bodies, Vartai Gallery, Vilnius

In the scanner, everybody may become a planetary engineer by considering their posture and its influence on the formation of the inter-corporeal structure. This is meant to provoke our choreographic imagination (aka proprioception, or kinaesthetic/motoric imagination). However, after the first exhibition of the project in Life at the Edges in Science Gallery I realised that very few people were aware of such a type of imagination, and the visitors were mostly reluctant in terms of free bodily engagement. The culprit might be our contemporary preoccupation with visualism. The term ‘imagination’ already speaks for itself. In fact, imagination is not only the domain of eyes, but also that of all the other senses. This realisation made me take a deeper look into the creative means that would facilitate choreo-imagination. I was considering various rope and harness suspensions systems used for special effects in cinema, a specially instructed choreographer-cum-installation-operator, etc. The majority of these ideas appeared too cumbersome and didactic, so I settled down on scenography and animation. In the second version of the installation at the gallery “Vartai” in Vilnius I designed an immersive atmosphere by hiding the cables, devices and machinery – everything that would reveal the working principles of the installation and remind the participants of the present times. In order to facilitate the choreographic imagination even more, in the next stage of the project we are going to use automatic skeleton recognition system that would rig and animate the virtual bodies. The latter will constantly change their postures through randomised choreography and changing contact points. The body owners will be able to dance extra-terrestrially without actually moving. Have you ever tried huddling up with other bodies in armpit-heel-chin-chin-forefinger configuration?

Julijonas Urbonas, Hypergravitational Piano,, 2017 – 2019. Installation view, Vartai Gallery, Vilnius

Julijonas Urbonas, A Planet of People, 2017 – 2019. 3D human scanner detail view, Vartai Gallery, Vilnius

There’s something quite disturbing and outrageous about A Planet of People. I suspect it is because it’s difficult not to think about whether or not people would like end up being part of this monument. Or whether they would like their loved ones to end up there. How do people react to the project? Do they feel, like I did for example, that a person would not be completely dead if its body were to remain intact and float out there?

People indeed do feel provoked, but I’ve met only a few people who’ve been genuinely disturbed by the idea. It looks like you’re one of these very few. Actually, it is not unexpected. Perhaps, the reason for the acceptance of this idea lies in our current obsession with apocalyptical ideas and eschatological thinking. In times where extinction is a matter not of speculative fiction, but of daily journalism, the tolerance level of the ecological ‘graphic language’ is pushing itself to the extremes, and what used to be ‘disturbing’ is now considered ‘mundane’.

It is only when the exhibition-goers immerse themselves into the narrative that they do feel shaken up. Should I be naked? What posture makes fewest contact points with other bodies? What can my body do out there that it cannot do here? What’s the ultimate posture that would define my cosmic identity? Atomism is flourishing in these questions, and the first thing that most people find difficult to do is to think of themselves as planetary beings. However, after playing around with various postures, they soon realise that such seemingly fundamental spatial definitions as ‘up’ and ‘down’, or ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ no longer make sense. What does an upright posture mean when the legs lose their footing? Heads and butts become equal (Actually, this is why I am using patterns that might be interpreted as a landscape of heads, buttocks, clouds, or guts). Eventually, one is forced to suspend their understanding of their body as a thing that senses, perceives, thinks and socialises. Once the body crosses the Kármán line, it gets stripped of all of its earthly definitions. The body becomes what it actually is: a nameless, senseless, thoughtless, genderless, raceless and cultureless entity. The body opens itself up for a new construct(ion).

Once you add a prefix ‘astro-’ to the terrestrial disciplines such as anthropology, biology or geology, you might find the idea of the ‘human planet’ not as alien as it might seem. For example, looking from the perspective of the astro-material science, everything in the Universe is formed from the same stuff, namely, baryonic matter. A Martian rock, a coconut, a polished car rim, and a human body are not so different from each other. Depending on how much one wants to stretch the concept of life, one may also label any of these entities as living beings. We might suddenly start considering ourselves as planets, and seeing planets as living beings (just think of the twentieth-century desert explorer Ralph Bagnold who thought of sand dunes as biological entities and became a key reference for astrobiology).

Julijonas Urbonas, A Planet of People, 2017 – 2019. Installation view (detail), Vartai Gallery, Vilnius

You’re interested in ‘gravitational aesthetics’ and have applied it to topics related to death (the Euthanasia Coaster being the most famous example). Have you ever thought of applying it to purely entertaining contexts, going back to the Soviet amusement park of your childhood? 

To be honest, I do not know what ‘pure entertainment’ is. If it is a total distraction and infinite euphoria, I imagine it would be rather a unique kind of extreme horror without fear, cruelty and gruesomeness. Such an ‘entertainment’ would also be the love of oppression, the adornment of the technologies that undo one’s capacities to think. Neil Postman has depicted it nicely t in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. If this is the kind of amusement you mean, then some of my projects are already epitomising that kind of thinking. Consider Cumspin, an orgasm-enhancing amusement ride.

Actually, I keep getting all kinds of enquiries about the feasibility and financial aspects of such projects of mine. I haven’t done any feasibility studies and am not interested in doing so until somebody would do it by themselves. It would take me an enormous amount of time which I would rather spend on art making and daydreaming, and there is nothing more precious than that. It would also be super-expensive. None of the enquirers have gone that far yet.

A scale model of the “Blue Loop”. Photo: Darius Petrulaitis

However, I have recently started developing a parallel line of work that is more a down-to-earth kind of amusement. All of them are mostly public art projects. Three of them are already funded and are at the late engineering stages. One of them is a playground for children, and another one is more like a hybrid of a sculpture and an amusement ride. At the moment I can reveal only one of them: it is called “Blue Loop”, a project commissioned by the Vilnius Municipality. It is basically a loop-shaped path – part runner track, part urban-scale graphic art. Casually drawn on the bird-view photo of a public square, the line circles and binds the loose elements of the space. The path crosses and penetrates all the landscape elements: the paved pedestrian zones, the green sections, the parking lot, the playground, etc. This scribble is also a sort of choreographic device with its specially shaped curves and turns of varying degree. The workers at the business centre next to the square intend to use it as a substitute for a coffee break spot. However, the place has poor air quality, and we are currently engineering a special air quality station that would control the lighting of the path. If the path is lit green, you will be able to safely take a jog.

Julijonas Urbonas, Hypergravitational Piano,, 2017 – 2019. Installation view, Vartai Gallery, Vilnius

Julijonas Urbonas, Hypergravitational Piano, 2017 – 2019. Installation view, Vartai Gallery, Vilnius

The gallery installation is visually very appealing, even though I’m not sure I fully understand what I’m looking at. Could you describe what we see in the photos above? What is Hypergravitational Piano and what is its purpose?

Hypergravitantional Piano is a hybrid of a grand piano and a human centrifuge. The composer Gailė Griciūte composed a special piece that she also occasionally played during the exhibition. It was sort of a soundtrack for A Planet of People and a staged thought experiment for the extra-terrestrial sound piece.

A Planet of People might be considered as a thought experiment aiming to see what happens to choreography, architecture, music, and arts in general, once they cross the Kármán line. The majority of these kind of experiments have already appeared in my texts and lectures, slowly advancing towards the establishment of what I call exo-disciplinary arts. But it is just recently that they started transition from the mental and literary domains into artistic installations. One of them – Hypergravitantional Piano – is exactly that. In fact, I engineered it along with other six revolving platforms specifically for the opera Honey, Moon!, where I was also both a director and a stage designer. Together with the composer Gailė Griciūte and others we were speculating upon the genre of opera under the conditions of outer space – a sort of ‘true’ space opera.

Julijonas Urbonas, Honey, Moon! – Opera, Art Installation, 2018

When I talk about all of these space conditions, by ‘cosmic’ I usually mean altered states of gravity: weightlessness, artificial gravity, hypergravity, etc. Hypergravitantional Piano uses the centrifugal force of spinning to produce artificial gravity, the force that pushes the piano player to the backrest. With each rehearsal and performance we increase the force and observe the effects upon the player, the instrument, the sound and the music in general. The composition changes in time while we experiment with spinning choreography. Such an artificial gravity produces unique gravitational fields that vary at different points of both the player and the piano. The force increases away from the spin axis. Thus, the fingers feel a weaker pull then the head or the back, and the movement of the playing hands are affected by the complex Coriolis forces. So are the piano strings. A constantly changing orientation of the instrument affects the way the sound propagates. Of course, we’re not working with high forces, we are spinning the thing at moderate speeds, producing maximum ~1.5 G (a force one and a half times higher than Earth’s gravity), but the composer has already observed that this has a unique physical and psychological effect on her creative mind and thus makes way for the hypergravitational sound and listenership.

Julijonas Urbonas, A Planet of People, 2017 – 2019. Installation view (detail), Vartai Gallery, Vilnius

Does the royal blue colouring of the curtains have any significance? I think you have used that colour in your previous works (in Milan?)

You’re right, the colour – namely RAL5017 – was used for my project Airtime, a floor that lifts up and drops down beneath the visitor’s feet. I covered the surface of the moving floor with a special rubber material due to its shock absorbing features. There are just a few colours in the industrial rubber pallet. So I picked the blue one as it looked photogenic, it also seemed to hint towards the ‘airy’ context, but also because, historically, it is the last color that humans learned to perceive.

Thanks Julijonas!

Previously: The Euthanasia Coaster.

See Yourself X: Human Futures Expanded, by writer, filmmaker and architect Madeline Schwartzman.

On amazon USA and UK.

Publisher Black Dog Press writes: See Yourself X focuses on the fundamental domain of our perception—the human head. The publication presents an array of conceptual and constructed ideas of how we might physically extend the head, the mind, the brain or our consciousness into space. What is the future of the human head? What will happen to our sensory apparatus in 50 years, when the mechanisms for how we communicate and sense our surroundings become obsolete, prompted by the advancement of sensors that will enable brain-to-brain communication? Everyone with a head should be interested in this book.

See Yourself X had inauspicious origins. In March 2012, while she was on the way to a talk for See Yourself Sensing, Schwartzman’s aeroplane crashed into a bus. As it landed in Detroit, the wing of the Delta MD-80 knocked over a shuttle bus at over 120 miles per hour. Luckily, no one was hurt. But it did spark an investigation: do pilots feel the width of their wings? If so, this would mean that the human head could effectively become 150 feet wide. This was the catalyst for See Yourself X: to look across art practices and contemporary culture, at all ways of extending the head into space, and to move headlong into the future.

Joanne Petit-Frère, Redressing the Crown series

Shai Langen, Liquid Body, 2014

See Yourself X: Human Futures Expanded is the second volume of a series that looks at human perception and the sensory apparatus. The first one, See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception, looked at fifty years of futuristic proposals for the body and the senses. It was published in 2011 but is still as seducing and pertinent as ever. The new book, See Yourself X, focuses in on the human head.

Drawing on current works of fashion, design and science and looking back at ideas and artifacts from the past, the publication sets to explore how our heads, faces and brains can allow us to extend ourselves physically into space.

Some of the projects selected seem far-fetched and whimsical. Some are slightly sinister, others are poetical or just playful. Although their creators don’t necessarily have the ambition to predict the future, the works selected in the book often trigger sparks inside our minds, push back the limits of what we think is possible and thus suggest what might happen 10, 20, even 50 years from now.

Studio Peripetie, Pugh-atory, Chimney sweeper, 2009

Matthias Darly, Ridiculous Taste, or the Ladies Absurdity, C.1776

In her essays and descriptions, Madeline Schwartzman makes spectacular images of design, art and fashion enter into an inspiring dialogue with the latest advances in neurology, robotics, psychology or nanotechnology. There is plenty of speculation at work, of course but without speculation, there would only be very little science and very uninspiring art.

Chrystl Rijkeboer, Twins Brown, 2007

Trick photograph of man with two heads, 1901

I just finished reading See Yourself X: Human Futures Expanded. It’s been an energizing journey that took me from hair extensions to phrenology; from sophisticated algorithms for face detection to cyborg antenna; from knitted heads to The Thatcher illusion and from human hybridized with plant or machine to sensitive e-skin.

Quick selection of works i discovered in the book:

Lauren Kalman, But if the Crime is Beautiful… Hood, 2014

Silver prosthetic nose, mounted on a spectacle frame, allegedly worn by a nineteenth- century woman who had lost her own to syphilis. Hunterian Museum at the Royal college of Surgeons

Rebecca Drolen, Drainage (from the series Hair Pieces), 2011

Sterling Crispin, Data-Mask, 2013-2015

Sterling Crispin reverse-engineered facial recognition algorithms to create 3-D printed masks and photographs, revealing the way in which the machines might visually “understand” our faces.

Portrait parle class, France. From the George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress), 1910 to 1915

Fantich & Young, Apex Predator Female, 2014

Bertjan Pot, Masks, 2010-ongoing

Bertjan Pot, Masks, 2018

Katharine Dowson, Brain Bricks, 2005

Brain Bricks are life-size representations of Katharine Dowson’s own brain.

Jennifer B. Thoreson, Cancer, from the series Testament, 2014

Kahn & Selesnick, The Face Behind the Face, 2014

Previously: See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception.

Many artists and activists have worked on projects that denounce the loss of privacy online. Very few, however, have put their social, financial and mental well-being at risk in order to expose the damages of a carefree attitude towards our own digital footprint.

Mark Farid, Seeing I, ongoing

Mark Farid, Data Shadow, 2015

But Mark Farid did just that! Deeply convinced that “online privacy is the only right we have left”, the artist decided to give away his entire digital identity to anyone who’d want it. Back in 2015, he participated to a panel discussion entitled “Data Shadow: Anonymity is our only right, and that is why it must be destroyed” in Cambridge. After a presentation of his practice, Farid surprised the audience by displaying a document listing the login details of all his online accounts and inviting everyone to use them as they pleased. Within minutes, people he didn’t know had changed most of his passwords, from his online banking account to his Apple ID. The accounts were no longer his.

From that moment on, he embarked on a painful adventure: he lived with no digital footprint for 6 months, using multiple pay as you go phones, paying everything in cash, scrambling his IP addresses, etc. The experience was not only costly but it also made his social life ridiculously complicated.

After an experiment that suggested that Farid had something to hide, the artist went back to normal modern life, the one in which most of the exciting things you do is online and promptly turned into sets of data that both governments and corporations can snoop on.

Then came September 2016 when the artist decided time had come to further destroy his online privacy and demonstrate that he had nothing to hide. For a full month, he live streamed his digital footprint. The performance, titled Poisonous Antidote, involved exposing online and in a gallery in London all of his personal and professional emails, all his text messages, phone calls, Facebook Messenger, web browsing, Skype conversations, locations, Twitter and Instagram posts, as well as any photographs and videos. The work disclosed his interactions and daily life but it also questioned the assumption that you can fully comprehend a person through only their digital footprint.

Mark Farid, Data Shadow, 2015

I discovered Farid’s work at the Strasbourg Biennale of Contemporary Art, the first edition of an event that invites us to reflect on what it means to be a citizen in the age of hyper-connectivity. The biennale remains open until 3 March. I’d recommend you swing by the charming city to see the exhibition if you’re in the neighbourhood. If not, here’s a transcript of a conversation i had with Farid after i met him in Strasbourg. We talked about the density of our digital footprints, the mental pain of spending months off the digital grid, and his plan to spend 28 days wearing a VR headset to experience the life of another person.

Mark Farid, Poisonous Antidote exhibited at Gazelli Art House in 2016

Hi Mark! Recently, while I was recently visiting the Strasbourg Biennale, i saw the premiere of Poisonous Antidote, a film that you made in collaboration with film-maker Sophie le Roux to reflect on the whole performance. The press kit of the biennale mentions “there was no restriction on the content publicised”. But surely you did censor yourself sometimes, didn’t you?
So were there any self-restrictions?

There was absolutely a degree of self-censorship, and equally, there was absolutely an – arguably greater degree – of performing at the same time.

Poisonous Antidote had two sides to it for me, the first was for the audience: just how intimately you are able to comprehend a person – their humour, temperament and rationale – through only their digital footprint. When you listen to my phone calls with my dad, read my test messages with a girl I was seeing at the time, see what I was searching and where I have been going – very quickly, you really do start to get a very good idea of who I am.

The other side of it was more personal, it was for me to see to what degree knowing that everything I was doing was digitally documented forced me to see, and judge myself objectively. This of course resulted in self-censorship – limiting what I would search, what I would say to people, and most – how I would interact with people. I wouldn’t lose my temper, for example, except for once, at my dad, which is in the film.

It also resulted in ‘performing’ – I went on holiday with my dad for the first time in seven years during that month. I visited Leicester, where my parents live, three times that month, when normally I go back home once every three months. It also meant that I was going to lots of museums and galleries, going on walks and reading a broad range of things online instead of predominantly reading about football; I was trying to look like an interesting cool artist who does what a cultured artist should do.

Contrary to what I was expecting to do – which was to limit what i was doing – the performance actually opened up, and essentially forced me to do these activities, which I otherwise probably wouldn’t have done to the same degree, or at all.

Mark Farid, Poisonous Antidote exhibited at Gazelli Art House in 2016

Mark Farid, Poisonous Antidote exhibited at Gazelli Art House in 2016

Do you have any idea about the type of people who were watching the performance? Were they mostly friends who checked the website to support you? Or were they mostly complete strangers?

There was just over 32,000 views on the website during September 2016. The views have been from around the world but predominately came from Russia, USA and the UK. And obviously as well at Gazelli Art House, London, the gallery which funded and exhibited the project.

To date now, there have been 47,000 views on the website.

How about your friends and family? Did you make them aware that any interaction with you was being streamed online, for anyone to hear or read?

On the first day Poisonous Antidote started, I sent a message to all my contact (on my phone) to inform them that everything for the next month would be broadcast: emails, text messages, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, and phone calls would be published online, in real-time, on www.poisonous-antidote.com. Pretty much every time I was on the phone I would inform them at the beginning that the conversation was being broadcast, and if people started getting slightly too intimate with me, then I would also remind them of the situation.

There were three people who did had an issue with this and refused to talk to me for that month. But to my surprise, only three people! But many of my friends liked it and some had a bit of fun with it and started trolling me which annoyed me a little bit at the beginning, but I would have done exactly the same thing!

I’m curious about the people who didn’t want to engage at all with you during that month? Were they a bit older, from a generation generally viewed as being more protective of their privacy?

No, they were in their 20s and 30s. There was also the Director of arebyte Gallery in London who wasn’t too happy with our conversations being broadcast. Funnily, he’s one of the first phone calls in the film. The last one too. He didn’t like it but ultimately he had no choice but to get in contact with me as they’re funding my next project, Seeing I. But it nicely highlights that even if you want privacy, and you were to do everything within your means to ensure your privacy (he does not), other people’s indifference to data privacy will ultimately be your demise.

But really, most people didn’t care. And that’s something I see elsewhere in my work, which until very recently I was finding to be very surprising.

Mark Farid, Data Shadow, 2015

Mark Farid, Data Shadow, 2015

Poisonous Antidote was the third and final part of a series of projects, wasn’t it? Can you tell me more about the other parts?

To coincide with the first draft of the Investigatory Powers Bill (Nov 2015), the first part of this three part series was Data Shadow (2015) which was an interactive art installation commissioned by Collusion, in partnership with Arts Council England, the University of Cambridge and The Technology Partnership. Located in All Saints Gardens, Cambridge, all visitors were required to interact independently with the installation, entering one at a time. 

On entering the 8 x 2m shipping container, the participant was greeted by a woman holding a contract of consent. Until signed, the woman remained silent, directly staring the individual in the eyes (a physical manifestation of Terms & Conditions). Once signed, candidates proceeded to join the WiFi. 

Participants progressed to the second half of the container, divided by a partitioning door. With sensors tracking the participant’s movements, their real-time (digital) shadow was cast by a projection on two facing walls – one filled with 1000 characters from their most recent text or WhatsApp messages, the other a collage of 64 images from the participant’s mobile phone.

On opening the exit door of the shipping container, all information Data Shadow had on the individual was automatically deleted, ready for the next participant to proceed.

To my surprise, the overwhelming majority of people were not annoyed, scared, or bewildered by it, at all?! There was an 18 year old girl who told me it was “so cool” that I had managed to expose the naked pictures of herself and her boyfriend on her phone.

The second part of this series was the accompanying talk to Data Shadow at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, in which I shared the login details to my entire digital life with the audience, inviting them to take, use, share and change the passwords to my accounts as they please, which ranged from my Facebook account, Apple ID, to online banking, whilst I attempted to live without a digital footprint for 6 months. If you want to know more about both of these projects, please watch my TEDx talk.

And then obviously Poisonous Antidote, the exhibition and online in 2016, and then the film in 2018, were the final parts of this series.

Mark Farid, Data Privacy: Good or Bad? at TEDxWarwick

There are many discussions about the need to value privacy as a protected right. Yet, I often feel that most people do not really care. Do you think that this is due to people not realising what a loss of privacy entails or is it simply that we have new definitions and forms of privacy?

Personally I think it’s because no one is giving a satisfactory response to the statement, “I have nothing to hide”. I put a lot of blame on this statement, as it really angers me. Mainly, because it’s not true – everyone has something to hide, but more so, because I doubt that everyone, on their own, universally came up with this statement, so they’re simply regurgitating an incorrect statement, that shuts down the conversation. Why it shuts down the conversation, is because, the phrase “I have nothing to hide” is based on a presumption that we are guilty until proven innocent. This question flips the subject, quietly, but firmly putting the onus on you to explain why you have nothing to hide. It suggests that you are guilty until proven innocent and this fundamentally goes against innocent until proven guilty. But as I say, I don’t necessarily blame the people making this statement, I blame others – myself included – for not being able to give a good, snappy one-liner response to this.

To come back a bit more to your question, on people not caring about data privacy, I had always ultimately assumed it would take a huge public breach of data privacy before people changed their view. And then Cambridge Analytica happened and I thought that would have played that role of offering a counter-response by showing what happens when private data is used politically and in the wrong way. However, it still hasn’t brought any real results – legally, socially and culturally – in fact, it is Mark Zucckerberg and Facebook who are suggesting the regulation that should be imposed on them! Truly Crazy!

I feel where work like mine has missed the point, is that think people need to be confronted with their data in front of loved ones, but then this becomes too unethical, and this is the problem, data misusage is hugely unethical, and to really highlight it, I think you must be equally, if not more, unethical.

Still, i feel that we’ve reached a point i find a bit unpleasant. I was recently at the Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig and that’s probably the only conference i attend nowadays where they tell you specifically that if you want to take a photo of the audience you have to ask people for their permission to be photographed first. Everywhere else, people do as they please and you end up finding photos of yourself drinking wine and making stupid faces on strangers’ Instagram accounts…

Speaking of the top of my head, this is touching upon two truths, I think.

First there’s the idea that in a free, neo-liberal world, the individual is at the centre: the individual is free to do as they pleases; asking for permission to take a photo of someone, in a public space, can be seen to be a restriction of the individuals (the photographers) liberty (to do whatever they want wherever they are). Obviously this is a slightly warped take on neo-liberalism as we’re talking about taking photos of people, but I think this is one of the roots of what enabled the normalisation of people to take photos of whatever they want. Of course then there is the uploading of the photos on the world wide web, but extremely rarely do people stumble across photos of themselves taken by strangers. But I think this has a bigger foundation in what the world wide web used to be, something free, open and for the people. Back in the day, pre-Facebook, when Google was simply a search engine, when Amazon was a bookshop, ideas of the internet, and even filming and taking photos in public spaces was completely different. But now, as the world wide web becomes more and more centralised, monopolised, and a capitalist Utopia – totally privately owned, essentially unregulated by governments, with a facade of being uncensored, free and democratic – we are the commodity and our data is the currency. This changes everything.

This leads us nicely into the second truth, which I think is a development of the centralisation of the world wide web. Facebook, Google and other privately owned online companies want your data, and want to know everything about you. Not you specifically, but you within the collective. Governments are quietly happy with this, for obvious reasons, along with the monopolisation (of the world wide web by Google and Facebook) as it’s hugely expensive and time consuming to get warrants to demand that lots of different companies must handover data. Getting two warrants, and forcing those two companies to do so is much easier and quicker than getting 20, for example. And then once they do get the data, getting it from one or two companies means they don’t have to process, organise or most importantly analyse your data themselves to nearly the same degree. If your data is coming from 20 different companies, that all use different formatting and (code) languages, then you have to change languages, and format, then aggregate and process this, and so on, which is very expensive and time consuming.

It’s significantly cheaper and efficient for Governments, advertisers, or anyone for that matter, to have one or two companies having all of your data.

And then of course when Google, Facebook, and the Government are ultimately in favour of a very similar, particular model, a subtle and continuous message from these companies and institutions will have underlying messages pushing the came philosophy – that data privacy doesn’t matter, or, ‘I have nothing to hide’. Overtime, this subtle message becomes engrained, and when you combine these incredibly powerful and influential companies (and Governments) you start to realise just how hard it is to argue, and succeed, in the fight for data privacy.

Coming back to your performance, i must say i found it very shocking, even though there is a long tradition of artists exposing their private life in the most open way (people like Tehching Hsieh, Marina Abramovic, Yoko Ono, etc.) I should be immune to a work like Poisonous Antidote but i’m not.

How has this one month performance changed the way you view social media and digital technology in general? Did it change the way you are using it?

Interestingly, Poisonous Antidote was actually the thing that got me to start using social media again. It really was my Poisonous Antidote. I’m not too sure about the title of the project, but it is a fitting one for my personal experience. As I mentioned earlier, when Data Shadow was being exhibited, and I gave the accompanying talk titled, Anonymity is our only right, and that is why it must be destroyed, I gave away the passwords to my entire online life, from my Facebook account, to my Apple ID, to my online banking account login details, and everything in between. This included my social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. That was in October 2015. Poisonous Antidote was September 2016. So for that period I didn’t have any account.

It was only halfway through September 2016 that I I started to use (new) social media accounts, and this was to see the difference without social media and with social media and how that would change the whole experience to me…

What!??! You didn’t have any social media account for such a long time?!

No, when I gave away my login details, people pretty much immediately changed the passwords to my accounts, and that was that. They were gone and I had no way of get them back. Someone had been using my Facebook account for quite awhile, with some friends getting messages from whoever had the account. Someone is still using my old Twitter account (@markfarid). They set it private and occasionally tweet at me which is both frustrating and fun. It’s worth noting that I didn’t have any kind of accounts for this period – social media to an Apple ID to a smart phone. In any case (and ironically) Poisonous Antidote – a fight for data privacy – made me go back to social media.

But yes, it changed the way I use social media, a bit, but social media – and most website – are quite limited in what you’re really able to do. And as was the case with the gallery director of arebyte Gallery (in the Poisonous Antidote film), other people significantly reduce all of your efforts.

Do you do anything specifically different?

I’m very clear about the way I interact with everything and treat it as if it were a public conversation. So for example, the way that UK is moving at the moment, regrettably I won’t be surprised if we, by necessity, have a form of privatised healthcare in the future, and social media data, amongst others, will almost certainly be one of the things used to decide how expensive or cheap your medical insurance is. So i’m extremely cautious about the kind of things I’m saying to friends and family on Messenger, along with any photos of me, and what I’m doing in them.

I do as much as I can, within reason, the ‘headline’ thing, I guess, being that for every service that I use online, (Facebook, Twitter, Skype etc.) I have a different email address linked to it. Each email address is linked to a pay-as-you-go sim card that’s paid for in cash. Facebook is linked to one email address. Twitter is linked to another one, as is every sign-up I do. Nothing is linked together. I also use fake information, such as fake names and wrong birth dates. Ultimately, if someone wanted to link these accounts together, they could, it’ll just involve a bit more legwork for whoever is doing it.

How many email addresses do you have?!

Haha, I’m not sure. Many many dozens.

But then it makes you look suspicious.

I guess so, but the idea of ‘Anonymity is our only right, and that is why it must be destroyed’ was that by various strangers using my old, but real Facebook account, Twitter account, JustEat, Quora, etc. there shouldn’t appear to be anything suspicious, as they’re being used. That’s the reason why i gave away my passwords, because you’re not able to delete your accounts, so giving away my passwords was the only way I could essentially think of to make the accounts redundant and make the data useless, and at the same time, become invisible, for use of a better word.

How did ‘Anonymity is our only right, and that is why it must be destroyed’ go? How long were you doing it?

‘Anonymity is our only right, and that is why it must be destroyed’ was from October 2015 to April 2016.

When i gave away my passwords in October, the plan was to live for six months without a phone or computer. About 3 weeks after the start of the project, the Paris attacks happened which changed everything. For me, the Paris attach was the 9/11 of Europe. That was the big moment when terrorism became really present in Europe – innocent people being shot in restaurants, concerts and on the streets. The political and social landscape changed overnight. The argument for data privacy, fell flat on its face. The argument for data privacy is built upon individuality and the option to not conform, which is hugely outweighed when confronted with life and death.

During this 6 month period, without a phone or computer, my financial life plummeted beyond all belief. Along with my social life. To talk to me, people had to travel across London and knock on my door and hope I was in.

At one point, my dad hadn’t heard from me for a few months and was incredibly worried. He drove three hours to London to see if I was alive. I returned home to my flat to see a hugely worried, angry, but relieved parent.

At this point, I ‘decided’ I would get a different phone each month and would give the number of that phone to 5 people each month, and it would be a different 5 people every month – to made it harder to link it to me, i.e. If you had my phone number one month, you wouldn’t get my new one the next month, and this included my parents. Due to a plummeting financial side, and a lack of work coming in, I also got 3 different computers, each one I would only use for very specific purposes, at very specific locations, at specific times, whilst using a VPN and Tor.

What i found most traumatic in this experience wasn’t the horrific financial struggles, nor the lack of a social life. Not even the fact that someone committed fraud against me during this time and totally destroyed my credit rating – to the point that I was rejected from a new phone contract last year. All of these things were bad but manageable.

The hardest thing, however, was the cultural vacuum that I lived in during this period. Each day, I was getting more and more disconnected from the ‘real’ world, and what I found was that, slowly, this was effecting how I was interacting with people, what we would interact about, and my overall confidence. For example, it took me over 24 hours to find out about the Paris attacks, but if you were on Facebook – which I had no access to – things were going crazy, you couldn’t not know about it, but in the physical world, people were barely, if at all, talking about it.

I absolutely became depressed and developed quite a serious dependency on drugs a few months into this, and I became a hermit in many ways. In a very simplistic way, one drug replaced another. It wasn’t sustainable – although I did do the 6 months, it was truly awful. Having privacy to allow my sense of self to be free is not what I thought it would be.

I’d recommend watching my TEDx talk, if you want to know more about ‘Anonymity is our only right and that is why it must be destroyed’ and Poisonous Antidote.

So Poisonous Antidote followed this in September 2016?

Poisonous Antidote was my flip back because I found that the exact opposite happened: in totally giving up privacy, by having external-internal, expectations placed upon myself, I was infinitely happier. But this is the problem – my projected self, a constructed image of who I want to be, had a dedicate place to exist, and in doing so, it placed my virtual self at the centre of my real-world experiences.

For the first fifteen days, I found my usage of phone and laptop were normal. If I consciously acknowledged a change, it was, if anything, that I gained in confidence – using the experience opportunely to send things I might otherwise have not. But on September 15, half way through the project, I made a Facebook and a Twitter account, and almost immediately I became aware, even anxious even, about some of my prior arrogance.

Progressively more changes occurred. When I woke up, my phone and computer were not the first things I looked at, as I didn’t want people to know what time I woke up. When I did eventually go on the Internet, check my emails or reply to messages, the first things I looked at was the news, not the Leicester Mercury to read about football. When I was working, I didn’t procrastinate – digitally anyway, because everyone could see. I became very aware of my locations, so I made sure that I was going out, that I was being sociable, and that people could see I was being productive with my time. I would speak to my family more, I was on the Internet less, I was more productive, and surprisingly to me, I was enjoying myself more.

Mark Farid, Poisonous Antidote, 2016. Film by Sophie le Roux

Mark Farid, Poisonous Antidote, 2016

This is very different from ‘Anonymity is our only right, and that is why it must be destroyed’…

Poisonous Antidode certainly highlighted my own online editorial habits, the density of our digital footprints and, for me, the necessity of privacy. Unlike ‘Anonymity is our only right, and that is why it must be destroyed’, where I gave up online privacy to gain personal privacy, only to realise social media is indispensable to contemporary life, Poisonous Antidote embraced the publicity of social media. Subsequently, I have found that I was consciously and subconsciously changing my actions and behaviour to ensure I conformed to my insecurities, rooted in society’s ideologies – that I was doing what I was “meant” to be doing and feeling validated by the knowledge people could see this.

My narcissistic thirst for approval led me to willingly relinquish privacy in exchange for a perceived social stardom, where I was constantly judging my actions and options through the potential reception of my newsfeed, assessing my and their adherence to a standardised code of conduct allowing a form of acknowledgment that confirmed my actions and behaviours. The validation Poisonous Antidote created could only be fulfilled by further consumption, and as we used it more, each post, action and interaction meant less, for I become more reliant on it to fill the growing void it created. It become a self-feeding machine.

Now of course, publishing every part of my online activity might appear to represent some dystopian future. But the truth is that most of us are doing exactly this right now, – albeit in a more limited way. We are constantly self-publishing the details of our lives to technology companies, to governments, and to our networks on social media. The difference between you and I is of degree, not kind.

I also recommend going on www.poisonous-antidote.com where you can see all of my data for the month. It has been hacked multiple times, but all of the data should be back on there. You can also see the Poisonous Antidote film which premiered at the Strasbourg Biennale, and was made in collaboration with the very talented film-maker Sophie le Roux!

Mark Farid, Seeing I, ongoing

Mark Farid, Seeing I, ongoing

And of course, i need to ask you about Seeing I which is scheduled to premiere in September 2019. For the performance you plan to experience the life of another person for 24 hours a day, for 28 days, only seeing and hearing what one person sees and hears, using VR. You had a 24 hour test. Could you tell us how it went?

The 24-hour test run was in February 2014, using a DK1 (the first Oculus development kit). It went well. Well enough to pursue the project and put it on KickStarter in November 2014, which was ultimately unsuccessful. Since then however, I have gained funding from various place and institutions and done many, many, many more trials, the longest being 92-continuous-hours.

Unsuccessful? But i saw LOTS of articles about the projects and they all suggested that you already had the money!

Indeed, this was very frustrating. The KickStarter campaign got lots of press, but the press made no mention of the KickStarter.

In the 4 and a bit years that have followed however, the project is now being commissioned by arebyte Gallery, and is in partnership with the Sundance Institute, the National Theatre, UK, Imagine Science Films and looks set to be taking place at Ars Electronica in September 2019.

We have just finished developing the headband that record a 260 degree field of view left to right and 165 degrees up and down, along with audio. This is what the other person will wear, and has been the main thing holding us back from doing Seeing I, as it doesn’t exist, until now! It has a battery life of 36 hours along with a storage for 36 hours. We will be open sourcing the code, along with the .STL file for people to 3D print after the project has taken place.

The last three sections on the pre-production side to finalise is getting Ethical Approval on the project, and finalising the funders of the documentary (directed by Petri Luukkainen), which I can’t publicly name at this time. I hope to have these two parts finalised in the next two months.

The third section is who the Other person is. If you’re interested in applying, please visit www.seeing-i.com and apply online! We favour applicants living a life aligned with the ordinary rather than the extraordinary. This means, a real-life person who thinks their life is “too boring”!

Mark Farid, Seeing I, ongoing

How do you prepare for this performance?

Since January 2018 I have been, and will be until the exhibition in September 2019, spending prolonged periods of time in virtual reality – a minimum of 45-hours per week – to train my eyes to function in close proximity to LCD display (with no exposure to natural light). This is also to overcome any potential motion sickness I might experience.

The longest I’ve spent in continuous virtual reality is 92-hours, as I mentioned earlier. This was the longest trial I’ve completed without taking the headset off, watching footage from a single person’s life, from first person point of view. I’ve also spent four successive days in virtual reality on three separate occasions, but these were watching stuff on Netflix, YouTube and playing games.

In June 2018, I averaged 16-hours per-day in virtual reality for 23-consecutive-days. This was a specific test, focusing on my eyesight and any potential short or long term damages that might occur. The results found no long-term damage to my eyesight, with the only short-term damage being that he was short-sighted for the two following days.

And another key part of my preparation for the isolation that I will experience during the project, where I will have no human interaction, no stimulation, and no eye contact, I have attended two 10-day silent meditation retreats and I’ll be doing another three in the build up to the 28-day exhibition.

Thanks Mark!

Touch Me, the 1st edition of the Strasbourg Biennale of Contemporary Art was curated by Yasmina Khouaidjia. The event remains open until 3 March 2019 at Hôtel des Postes in Strasbourg, France.

Previously: Strasbourg Biennale. Being a citizen in the age of hyper-connectivity.
Poisonous Antidote was commissioned by Gazelli Art House, London, and in partnership with CPH: LAB.

If ever you happen to be in or near the city of Mechelen in Belgium this Spring (Spring starting in February courtesy of global warming of course), don’t miss a small but incredibly fascinating show at WINDOWBOX #, an artist-run space a short walk away from the splendid Saint Rumbold’s Cathedral.

Kaat Van Doren, MIROIR NOIR, 2017

The exhibition was curated by Sue Spaid and changes according to temperature. As for the title, “Climate Surprise”, it subtly echoes the rise of extreme and unpredictable climate events that have brought about scientific studies of how “climate surprise” impacts human behavior and health but also environmental policymaking.

I was particularly fascinated by the use that Kaat Van Doren, one of the two artists in the show, has made of bitumen, a material most of us would normally overlook. Because it is used for road surfacing and roofing, bitumen appears mundane and unsophisticated. And because the majority of the bitumen used commercially is a residue from petroleum distillation, we might view it as an inert and nasty material.

Van Doren, however, saw the artistic potential of the material. When the weather is cold, it becomes hard and brittle, its surface appears shiny and glass-like. When sun rays hit bitumen however, it gets more pliable and spreads a golden glow. The wonders of bitumen don’t end there. While visiting the show, i was told about the pitch drop experiment, an excruciating long-term experiment that aims to demonstrate the high viscosity or low fluidity of bitumen (which is a form of pitch, hence the name of the scientific exercise.) The material appears to be solid at room temperature, but is in fact flowing extremely slowly, taking several years to form a single drop.

The Pitch Drop Experiment – University of Queensland, Pitch Drop Time Lapse 2 years to date

The artist thus experimented with the various material dimensions of bitumen in photos and sculptures.

The most spectacular one is the giant Mirror Noir she made by spraying with bitumen an abandoned gas station in Campus Coppens, a former military site near Antwerp in Belgium. She covered both the inside and the outside the disused building, creating a striking contrast with the vegetation that had started to regain ground after human activities left the area.

Kaat Van Doren, MIROIR NOIR. In situ installation at Campus Coppens site, 2017

Kaat Van Doren, Miroir Noir inside 17092017 / 11.18 h

I was amazed by the poetry of the result. Bitumen, after all, is a sticky form of crude oil, a liquid i had come to associate with all the ills and evils of this world. As the artist explains on the page of the project:

Thanks to the special properties of bitumen the gas station Miroir Noir is not a finished product but a constantly evolving work, as the material remains susceptible to the impact of climatic aspects. Miroir Noir is both a reflection of and witness to the (in)visible processes of change in which we are all entangled: political, economic, climatological and ecological waves propelled by history.

Kaat Van Doren, From the Bitumina series, 2017

Kaat Van Doren, From the Bitumina series, 2017

Kaat Van Doren, From Bitumena series, Fig.1 to 24 (of 32), 2017

Kaat Van Doren, From the Bitumina series, 2017

The title of Van Doren’s series alludes to a painter’s tool called Mirror Noir. Also named Claude glass (or black mirror), this portable mirror was slightly convex and its surface tinted a dark colour. Picturesque artists in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries used it as a frame for drawing landscapes. They would turn their back on the scene to observe the reflection of the scenery in the mirror. The tinted surface reduced the colour range and precision, evoking the paintings of 17th Century landscape painter Claude Lorrain.

The black mirrors of our times are of course the black screens of our tablets and phones. The reflection of reality they produce is much sharper than the black mirrors of 19th century landscape painters but they nevertheless provide us with an experience that is more mediated (and sometimes even manipulated) than real.

Isabel Fredeus, Under the Weather #1 and #2, 2018

The other artist in the show is Isabel Fredeus. She explored another tool from the 19th century: the storm glass. This instrument was invented to help ship captains predict weather and thus the storms much dreaded by sailors. Her hand-blown storm glass sculptures also visibly react to weather, becoming more animated as temperatures rise.

Climate Surprise is curated by Sue Spaid. The show runs until 05 May 2019 at WINDOWBOX #, an artist-run space in Mechelen, Belgium. You can experience the changing exhibition through the gallery window as you walk by or take an appointment to enter and visit the show. There will be an event on Sunday 05 May 2019 to mark the closing of the changing exhibition.

Recent European immigration policies seem to be mostly dedicated to making external borders as impenetrable as possible, through the hardening of the conditions of entry and, most notably since the 2015 refugee panic, through naval operations in the Mediterranean and the erection of fences and walls. The numbers of migrants reaching European shores in search of asylum have dropped sharply over the past couple of years but the desire to deny them a chance to seek asylum is still fueling the xenophobic rants of far-right politicians like Viktor Orban and Matteo Salvini.

Dani Ploeger, SMART FENCE at Bruthaus Gallery, 2019

Dani Ploeger, Still from Border Operation, 2018-19, HD video, 3′. Documentation of action at Hungarian border fence

Artist Dani Ploeger has been looking at the fences recently built to toughen “Fortress Europe.” In particular the ones that use heat and movement sensors, sophisticated cameras and other so-called ‘smart’ technologies to shut off “illegal immigrants.” The hi-tech terminology used to describe theses fences obscure their inherent violence. Moreover, Ploeger writes, “their framing as supposedly clean and precise technologies is symptomatic of a broader cultural practice that uses narratives of technologization to justify means of violence” (think of the military drones and their supposedly surgical precision).

Last December, the artist traveled to the fortified border fence that Hungary had raised along its southern border with Serbia to keep out migrants and asylum seekers. The barbed-wire is capable of delivering electric shocks and is equipped with heat sensors, cameras and loudspeakers that shout inhospitable messages in several languages.

Once at the border fence, Ploeger cut off and ran away with a piece of razor wire from the border fence. This was a daring action: damaging the border fence is a criminal offence under Hungarian law.

Dani Ploeger, European Studies #1 (sensors). Exhibition view at Bruthaus Gallery

Dani Ploeger, European Studies #1 (sensors). Exhibition view at Bruthaus Gallery

Ploeger recently exhibited that piece of fence as well as a series of related works at Bruthaus Gallery in Belgium. His SMART FENCE project uses old and new media, from celluloid film to augmented reality, to explore the way we delegate our responsibility towards asylum-seekers to these tech-enhanced structures. Along the way, the artist also attempts to deconstruct the techno-ideologies that are often inscribed in these technologies of control and exclusion.

Dani Ploeger, SMART FENCE. Exhibition view at Bruthaus Gallery

The exhibition at Bruthaus Gallery is sadly over but i got in touch with the artist a couple of weeks ago to know more about SMART FENCE:

Hi Dani! I often have the feeling that we are a bit hypocritical in Europe, at least in the areas that are not in close proximity to these new borders. We point the finger at the US-Mexico wall and turn a bind eye at our own manifestations of intolerance and inhospitality. Do you have any idea about how much the European public is concerned by these European border fences?

I was struck by how many visitors of the exhibition seemed to know very little to nothing about the border fences that have been erected around the EU in recent years, especially considering how much attention the Hungarian border project has received in the media. I wonder whether this is because many just don’t engage much with international news reports or if they forget news events quickly due to the constant bombardment with spectacular and shocking information in networked culture (Paul Virilio discusses this latter phenomenon in his book The Administration of Fear, 2012). Either way, I didn’t get the impression that many people assess the current discussions around the US-Mexico wall in relation to recent border reinforcement projects in the EU. This impression is just based on anecdotal experiences in my direct surroundings though. I don’t really know about ‘the European public’ in general, if such thing exists.
Possibly more disturbing than the finger pointing towards the US, I find the recurring suggestion that the Hungarian border fence would merely be a manifestation of the backwards politics of Victor Orban’s nationalist-conservative government and hence in essence actually be a very ‘un-European’ project. This perspective ignores that Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, is also active at the Hungarian border fence and that Greece, Spain and Latvia, among others, have built or are building similar fences, although these have not received as much media attention. In the end, these fences are quite convenient to many governments across the EU that want to restrict immigration.

Dani Ploeger, Border Operation, 2018-19. Exhibition view at Bruthaus Gallery

What is amusing in the video Border Operation is that you’re stealing a piece of razor wire and you’re doing in broad day light and don’t seem to be in great hurry, even when the car with the security officers arrives. Did you know what you were risking? And do you think that it would have been ok because you’re an artist so you have some licence? 

Interesting you see it like that. What I found somewhat funny is the indecisive and confused behaviour of the border patrol officers after I have left and they are just standing around, unable to do anything substantial because they are stuck behind their own fence. While I was at the fence, I was actually scared shitless, especially when the alarm loudspeakers switched on and the patrol car arrived, all within one minute from when I first touched the fence. My glove was stuck in the bit of razor wire I was trying to cut off though, and I was really quite determined not to go home empty handed, so that kept me a few seconds longer after they arrived. One of the guards was only about a metre and a half away on the other side of the fence though, and yelling at me, so I was close to leaving my glove behind and running off.

I had deliberately approached the fence slowly and casually before starting to cut in order not to make my intentions obvious right away. I figured that if I would run towards the fence through the 300 meters of open field next to it the video surveillance observers would be alarmed right away. I had planned and timed the action carefully the day before, based on an examination of the area around the fence, the frequency of the patrols and a little practice with my bolt cutter. My camera was attached upside down in a tree and my packaging material for the wire, first aid kit and various other materials were hidden behind the ruin of a house across the field. I did my best to stay cool during the action and to cut slowly and precisely without panicking. Nevertheless, I was so excited that I messed up and cut through a wrong bit at first (cutting concertina razor wire somehow isn’t as simple as it appears), struggled to get through the steel wire with my tiny cutter, and then I was surprised by how quickly the guards arrived. They seemed to come from nowhere.

A tricky thing was that the fence stands a short distance inside Hungarian territory, which means that border patrol officers may use pepper spray or fire rubber bullets at people who are messing with the fence from the outside. They can also operate on the outside if they go out through a gate about 100 meters from where I was. Therefore, I went away from the fence as quickly as possible once I got my bit of wire, and ran back to Serbian soil. In Serbia, I still had to walk for about half an hour to reach the main road though, partly through open fields. I hadn’t been able to find out through my contacts at the Serbian Commissariat for Refugees and Migration if the Hungarian border force is in contact with Serbian police, so this walk wasn’t very relaxing either. I had identified a few hide-outs along the way in case police would show up.

Damaging the border fence has been criminalized in Hungary in 2015, so I guess that in Hungary I would now be a fugitive criminal. Getting caught would probably have gotten me into some serious trouble and I don’t think saying that I’m an artist would have convinced them to just let me go.

In the end, I don’t believe they would push for a serious prison sentence or something like that though, both because I can’t imagine they’d find a single person action relevant enough and because it would lead to tensions with other EU countries. So rather than me being an artist I think my EU passport would have given me some leeway.

I actually think I was mainly scared to get a serious beating, or just in general to get caught by an unknown authority for doing something illegal. This is also where one of the most relevant aspects of doing this action lies for me.

When I watched video reportages about migrants cutting holes in the fence and running across, sometimes with entire families including small children, it hadn’t looked that scary to me. Thinking about what extreme challenges and dangers these people would have encountered on their journeys towards this border, getting rid of a bit of barbed wire and running across a few meters of border strip, with apparently the only serious risk being sent back, somehow seemed to be among the lesser challenges.

Considering how scared I was myself while merely stealing a bit of wire from this fence – not even trying to cross – makes apparent the extreme contrast between the relatively fear- and threat-free life many (Western) Europeans like myself are used to in comparison with the environments many migrants navigate. In this context, the lighthearted way in which some people and media speak of the supposedly gratuitous motivations of migrants traveling to Europe appears ridiculous: this is not a journey one would choose to undertake if the living conditions in the home country would be bearable.

Dani Ploeger, Sensitive Barrier (razor wire from Hungarian border, movement detector, electro-motor), 2019

Dani Ploeger, Sensitive Barrier (razor wire from Hungarian border, movement detector, electro-motor), 2019

Dani Ploeger, Sensitive Barrier (razor wire from Hungarian border, movement detector, electro-motor), 2019

I was very interested in the extract in the press material that mentions the violence that is enacted on humans and non-human animals. Could you explain how non-human animals suffer from the erection of these ‘smart fences’? 

Many animals, such as red deer, bears and wolves, used to have their grazing, hunting and migration routes through parts of EU borders that have now become impenetrable. The issue is not only that animals are no longer able to cross, but also that razor wire, which is the main component of the border fences throughout, is designed to deter humans. It is explicitly not intended for use against animals, because, unlike traditional barbed wire, they easily get stuck in it and die.

Dani Ploeger, European Studies #2 (wire). Exhibition view at Bruthaus Gallery

Dani Ploeger, European Studies #2 (wire). Exhibition view at Bruthaus Gallery

The AR technology used in European Studies #2 (wire) “was developed in collaboration with the AURORA project at the University of Applied Sciences Berlin with support from the European Union.” Isn’t it a bit ironic that the EU would contribute to a project that openly questions the management of its borders? Was everyone comfortable with the idea that you used EU money to criticise border control? 

This irony is important to me. The EU has an extensive and complex bureaucracy that regulates and manages funding for research, arts and other things. I see this as an important reason why there usually isn’t too much worrying among researchers or art producers about policy-critical work as part of funded research or art projects, as long as the work adheres to the immediate rules and regulations for the management of the grant. I.e. if there isn’t a written rule that says ‘your research may not criticize EU policies’ all is fine, because grant holders will be monitored and assessed by peers and bureaucrats, rather than politicians or other people with significant policy making power. This leaves some space to use funding for things that might go against the immediate interests of the Union.

At the same time, we shouldn’t overstate this critical or subversive potential though. In the end, actions like mine are usually only possible a long way down in the ‘funding-hierarchy’. My AR app was a tiny sub-project in the context of a large EU-funded research project. This larger project, the design and management of which I am not involved in, was the outcome of a successful bid under the “Strengthening the innovation potential in culture” scheme of the European Fund for Regional Development. As the title of the scheme already suggests, research projects will only be funded if their design demonstrates detailed and far-going endorsement of the economic-growth-driven interests that form an important aspect of the European Union’s raison d’être.

So I’d actually say that, in the end, the true irony of the seemingly subversive use of EU funding for my project primarily concerns the way in which a lot of critical artwork, including my own, is intertwined with government support structures for research and art that are increasingly driven by clearly defined economic objectives. These objectives are also reflected in restrictive migration policies, which are oftentimes based on prioritizing cutting costs over humanitarian considerations.

To what extent does the ‘successful artist’ of a neo-liberal cultural landscape (i.e. the one who gets access to funding and is exposed at funded events and venues) become complicit in the economy-cultural complex that ultimately shares responsibility for the excesses of violence and neo-colonial policies on and beyond the borders of the EU or, more generally, the Global North?

Dani Ploeger, Sensitive Barrier, detail (razor wire from Hungarian border, movement detector, electro-motor), 2019

These ‘smart’ technologies of ‘defense’ and the way they function elude visual representation. They make migration almost abstract. Your works, on the other hand, make their violence almost palpable. Have you not been tempted at any point to make the connection between the human and non-human animals who suffer from the deployment of these technologies more obvious and maybe also more (easily) emotional by adding the presence of migrants trying to go through them?

Many journalists and artists have done work that focuses directly on the human suffering in the context of these structures (suffering of non-human animals not so much). This work is very important, among others to counter the tendency to imagine migration as some kind of abstract phenomenon as you point out. But I think there are also aspects of the current problematics around migration that cannot be addressed adequately by this work, and which require different approaches.

Firstly, when the attention is focused on representations of migrants trying to cross the fence, architectural and technological aspects tend to move to the background. This is understandable and desirable – thank god engagement with human experience prevails over barbed wire and motion detectors – but it also means that the significant role of narratives and applications of technology in the ‘management’ of migration and territorial control remain under-examined.

Secondly, as I already mentioned above, I often find that when watching video and photo representations of migrants trying to break through these border fences the places and situations paradoxically seem a lot less threatening and violent than they actually are experienced in a material encounter. The material presence and digital close-up views of razor wire and the quasi-nostalgic analogue photographs of sensor installations in my work do by no means give access to the experience of encountering the border fence as a migrant. But I do hope that they offer an additional way to engage with the violent implications of the desire for closed borders, an engagement that operates more through a sense of haptic visuality, rather than emotional narratives.

Any upcoming project or field of research you’d like to share with us?

I see the work I presented at Bruthaus Gallery as the beginning of a longer project that looks into borders, technologies and their narratives, so I will probably make more work around this theme over the next year or so. In addition to the video I exhibited now, I made a 3D video recording of the action at the Hungarian border from first-person perspective with two action cams that were attached to my forehead. I will use this footage to make a work for VR headset which will engage more with the experience of stress and fear that I mentioned in response to your earlier question. Another thing I am working on at the moment is an AR app for public space. When you point your device at a replica of a sign from the border fence that reads “CAUTION: Electric fence” the app will construct a life-size 3D model of the border fence around this, so you are standing right next to it.

Later in the year, I will make a new work for a group exhibition at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin, titled Weapons of Art. For this, I am planning to travel to another part of the EU to look for fencing, but I don’t want to say anything more about that yet.

Thanks Dani!

Previous works by Dani Ploeger: e-waste, porn, ecology & warfare. An interview with Dani Ploeger and Global control, macho technology and the Krampus. Notes from the RIXC Open Fields conference.
See also: The System of Systems: technology and bureaucracy in the asylum seeking process in Europe, Watching You Watching Me. A Photographic Response to Surveillance and Transnationalisms – Bodies, Borders, and Technology. Part 2. The conference.

SUPERFLEX. We Are All in the Same Boat, with texts by curator Jacob Fabricius, urban geographer Stephanie Wakefield, curator Gean Moreno, Professor of Latin American Studies George Yudice and science-fiction writer Mark von Schlegell. Published by Hatje Cantz.

On amazon USA and UK.

Summary of the book: The critically-acclaimed Danish artist group SUPERFLEX, founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger (b. 1968), Bjørnstjerne Christiansen (b. 1969), and Rasmus Nielsen (b. 1969), create humorous and playfully subversive installations and films that deal with financial crisis, corruption, migration, and the possible consequences of global warming. The artists describe their practice as the provision of “tools” that affect or influence social or economic contexts, and often root their projects in particular local situations, inviting the participation of viewers. Their work poses questions of political, economic, and environmental behavior and responsibility. This catalogue accompanies the group’s first major museum survey in the United States and highlights video, sculpture, and installation works relevant to the history, present, and future of cities like Miami, poised on the leading edge of pressing issues such as climate change and immigration.

SUPERFLEX, Flooded McDonald’s, 2008

I saw SUPERFLEX’s Flooded McDonald’s many years ago. The film is set inside the life-size replica of a deserted McDonald´s fastfood gradually flooding with water. At first, the idea sounded funny. But as water was rising so was the tension. The film heralded a time when nothing, perhaps not even the most brutal forms of capitalism, would be able to interrupt the effects of global warming.

It was 2008 and the film was not only premonitory, it was also pure SUPERFLEX. It weaved together darkness and the humour, pop culture and environmental anguish, capitalism and provocation, etc.

Over time, the artists have realized bold works that confront some of modern society’s most unsavoury aspects with free goods, free beers, resistance to social control, calls for solidarity and of course tools! They are one of the very few artists whose works you can encounter in fancy art museums, in agricultural areas, in ordinary commercial shops, in the street or in a Turkish restaurant.

SUPERFLEX, Foreigners, please don’t leave us alone with the Danes, 2002

SUPERFLEX. We Are All in the Same Boat is the publication that accompanies the exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College (MOAD) in Miami.

It’s not a catalogue. That would be too boring for SUPERFLEX. It’s a little volume that opens on pages and pages printed in blue and white. The kind of blue you associate with Miami. The kind of blue of the water you imagine will one day wipe Florida off the map if we continue to respond to environmental urgency with indifference and inefficient measures. The pages are printed with photo documentation of SUPERFLEX works. The essays don’t start before page 143. They are worth the wait.

Professor of Latin American Studies George Yudice pens a fascinating essay that places SUPERFLEX’s work in the context of the city of Miami. As you read his text (and the ones of the other contributors) you realize why Miami is the perfect setting for a SUPERFLEX exhibition. The city presents many of the problems that characterize our times: immigration, tax havens, inequality, gentrification, money laundering, climate change, narcotraffic, etc. Anything you can find in big cities seem to grow in an exacerbated, almost vexing, way under the Miami sun.

Urban geographer Stephanie Wakefield and curator Gean Moreno explore a contemporary art economy in which artworks are regarded as a commodity. They posit that the tools that SUPERFLEX proposes have the potential to open up new spaces of possibilities: they can be used as incitements, provocations, gift and instruments to fight against forms of enslavement.

Science-fiction writer Mark von Schlegell gives us a glimpse of one of the future versions of Miami. We’re in 2099, the main protagonist of his short-story lives on a houseboat in Miami, an independent entity cut from mainland USA by sea rise. Against all odds and floods, the city has managed to to reinvent itself and keep its hedonistic lifestyle. Adaptation to the new aquatic condition of the city are shrewd, ecological (if that’s still a concept in 2099) but, as undersea wedding chapels linked to human trafficking demonstrate, the new version of Miami has lost nothing of its dark edge.

If you love SUPERFLEX’s work as much as i do and you’re curious about life on a planet that’s lost most of its coastline but none of its resourcefulness then you might enjoy this little publication.

Here’s a a handful of works by SUPERFLEX:

SUPERFLEX, Hospital Equipment, 2014. Photo: Mr. Ali Shahin

Hospital Equipment is a piece of “readymade upside-down.” The artist sourced and delivered operating theatre equipment to hospitals in conflict areas. The surgical equipment is first displayed as installation in a gallery. When the exhibition ends, the equipment is shipped directly to a selected hospital in a conflict zone to be used as potentially lifesaving medical instrument by doctors and nurses, rather than works of art to be contemplated. The photographic documentation of the installation remains with the collector who purchased the work. The first equipment was sent to a hospital in Gaza. The second one to a hospital in the western Syrian city of Salamiyah.

SUPERFLEX, Experience climate change as a Cockroach, Copenhagen, 2009. Graphic design by Rasmus Koch Studio

As part of the official cultural program in connection with the UN Global Climate Summit in Copenhagen 2009, SUPERFLEX offered a group session in which participants were hypnotized in order to perceive climate change as cockroach. Five more sessions were planned to happen on different locations concerning different animals.

SUPERFLEX, The Fermentation Act, 2016. Photo: Keizo Kioku. Courtesy: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

SUPERFLEX, The Fermentation Act, 2016. Photo: Keizo Kioku. Courtesy: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

Water is drawn from the air in the exhibition space, collected and heated with tea. The tea is then fermented with sugar the kombucha fungus. After the fermentation process, the liquid is poured into glass jars and stored on shelves. Depending on the type of tea used, the colours and flavours vary and create a museum of colourful teas produced from human body perspiration.

SUPERFLEX, Free Shop (Family Mart, Tokyo), 2003

Free Shop takes place in an ordinary shop, anything purchased in the shop by any given customer, on the days of the performance, is free of charge. Shoppers are not made aware of the “promotion” until they arrive at the till. Free Shop has been held in Germany, Japan, Poland, Denmark and Norway.

SUPERFLEX, Today we do not use the word ‘Dollars’, 2009

A contract was established between the artists and an Auckland based branch of the ANZ bank that required any staff member to pay one dollar to their staff social fund every time she or he used the word “dollar”. The contract, signed by the bank manager and SUPERFLEX, was printed, framed and displayed in the staff room for the duration of the day.

SUPERFLEX, Kwassa Kwassa (Still image from the film), 2015

SUPERFLEX, Power Toilets / UN (A copy of the toilets from the United Nations Security Council headquarters, New York installed in Park van Luna, Heerhugowaard for public use), 2010. Photo: Superflex

SUPERFLEX, We Are All In The Same Boat, 2018

The book is co-published by the Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College (MOAD) which is running SUPERFLEX: We Are All in the Same Boat, a survey of the artists’ work that you can visit until 21 April 2019 if you’re lucky enough to be in the neighbourhood.

“Shoot the women first!”, a German official is reported to have advised in the 1980s when members of GSG-9, the country’s elite anti-terror squad found themselves in front of a large group of people suspected of being terrorists. Eileen MacDonald used the order as the title of the study of female terrorists she wrote in 1991. Navine G. Khan-Dossos, in turn, borrows it for an exhibition that looks at the theme of female targets.

Navine G. Khan-Dossos at Z33 House for Contemporary Art. Photo: Kristof Vrancken Photography and Research

Navine G. Khan-Dossos painted in pink one of the walls at the entrance of Z33 House for Contemporary Art. Photo:

For Shoot the Women First, her solo exhibition at Z33 in Hasselt, the artist recreated a shooting range. Paintings in soft colours are hanging on the wall and from the ceiling. The first ones you encounter carry symbols similar to the type of targets used in Discretionary Command training. During those police and military trainings, shooters receive a chain of commands which require them to shoot at triangles, circles and squares of various colours in a certain order.

As you walk through the exhibition space, the reference to a body become less abstract and you soon recognize human shapes on the paintings. The exhibition is choreographed so that your body comes in close proximity of the targets, making the experience feel somewhat ominous and almost visceral.

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Pink Discretionary Command, 2018 at Z33 House for Contemporary Art. Photo: Kristof Vrancken Photography and Research

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Pink Discretionary Command, 2018 at Z33 House for Contemporary Art. Photo: Kristof Vrancken Photography and Research

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Pink Discretionary Command, 2018 at Z33 House for Contemporary Art. Photo: Kristof Vrancken Photography and Research

All the works in the series feature the colour pink. Not any type of pink but the particular shade of pink used to paint the doorways of brothels in the Metaxourgeio neighbourhood of Athens.

The area was the theater of police brutality against women in 2012 when a group of drug-users were arrested and forced to undergo HIV tests. It was assumed that the women were prostitutes. They were imprisoned on charges of grievous bodily harm for transmitting the virus through sex work. Most of these women had never worked as prostitutes and were not even aware they were HIV-positive. The violence towards them didn’t end there. The police published their mug-shots and personal data on their website and the images spread from there to major TV channels and other media. Eventually the charges were dropped, but some of these women struggled to recover from this experience of incarceration and public shaming.

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Grey Discretionary Command, 2018 at Z33 House for Contemporary Art. Photo: Kristof Vrancken Photography and Research

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Grey Discretionary Command, 2018 at Z33 House for Contemporary Art. Photo: Kristof Vrancken Photography and Research

Being diagnosed with HIV meant that, for the authorities, the body of these women epitomized deviance and bio-terrorism. They were both a danger and a target, both victims of society and perpetrators of sexual disorder. The colour pink in the paintings is thus not one that evokes innocence and romanticism but violence, violation of privacy and HIV criminalization.

Khan-Dossos managed to give a presence to these women without ever using the humiliating mugshots that had been shared online and in the Greek mainstream media.

Shoot the Women First demonstrates that it is possible to use abstract forms to convey a poignant narrative, to talk about violence without using explicit images. Perhaps, that’s the smartest way to do it now that images of violence are so commonplace online that we barely register them.

The work doesn’t address only the fate of these women but also the one of other marginalized bodies. The pink triangles in some paintings allude to the rise of AIDS activism, and in particular ACT UP’s SILENCE = DEATH posters. The work also refers to the militarization of the US police and their use of lethal weapons against civilians. And in general, the harassment of women worldwide which, as recent stories like the Ligue du LOL in France and the Spanish far-right parties pushing back against gender equality indicate, shows no sign of abating. Not even in 21st Century EU.

While writing this review, i also couldn’t stop thinking about 19 year old Shamima Begum. In 2015, she was an English schoolgirl who left her family to join the so-called Islamic State. We don’t know whether she committed crimes while in Syria. The United Kingdom has nevertheless decided to revoke her citizenship and the young woman now sits in a Syrian refugee camp with her newborn son. A few days ago, a shooting range in north-west England has made headlines for using a photo of her face as a target, following “a large number of requests from customers.”

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Bulk Targets 1-100, 2018. Opening at Z33 House for Contemporary Art. Photo: Kristof Vrancken Photography and Research

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Bulk Targets 1-100, 2018. At Z33 House for Contemporary Art. Photo: Kristof Vrancken Photography and Research

One room is filled with heaps of gouaches on cardboard. The shape and number of ‘Bulk Targets 1-100’ refer to the target models for training. The vast number of these works on a humble material suggests their throw-away use, the sheer banality of violence. On the other hand, they also hint at the possibility that we can make them ours and train as an army that would fight against the demonization of vulnerable people.

The exhibition also features one of Khan-Dossos’ motifs: a standard forensic ruler that runs the walls of the exhibition rooms and transforms the gallery into a crime scene. Crime investigators use forensic rulers to facilitate photographic documentation of evidence at crime scenes. Its title, Below the Belt, evokes not only the unfair and slightly cowardly practices that often accompanies gender politics but also the physical and metaphorical site of domestic violence and control.

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Silent Latitude (detail) and Below the Belt (detail), 2018 at Z33 House for Contemporary Art. Photo: Kristof Vrancken Photography and Research

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Silent Latitude, 2018 at Z33 House for Contemporary Art. Photo: Kristof Vrancken Photography and Research

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Silent Latitude, 2018. Opening at Z33 House for Contemporary Art. Photo: Kristof Vrancken Photography and Research

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Silent Latitude (detail), 2018 at Z33 House for Contemporary Art. Photo: Kristof Vrancken Photography and Research

The last work Khan-Dossos is showing in Hasselt is Silent Latitude. This new commission is part of the other exhibition you can visit now at Z33: Dissidence – Quilting Against. Silent Latitude is a quilt designed together with the members of the Greek Trans Support Association in Athens and embroidered with the help of MIA-H Fashion Incubator for Accessories in Hasselt. This “community-made textile” evokes the value of collective labour as a healing and bonding activity, referring to the Beguines, laywomen from the urban middle class who lived together in domestic spaces (such as the ones that house Z33 exhibition spaces), supporting themselves with their labor, outside of male control and without submitting to monastic rule.

Ending the show with the quilt lifts up the spirits. The work points to a more hopeful humanity, one that relies on solidarity to create, defy and resist.

Navine G. Khan-Dossos – Shoot the Women First was curated by Silvia Franceschini. Dissidence – Quilting Against was curated by Ronald Clays. Both exhibitions remain open until 26 May at Z33 – House for contemporary art in Hasselt, Belgium.

Photos of the opening ‘Shoot the Women First’ & ‘Dissidence’.
India Doyle did a fascinating interview with Navine G. Khan-Dossos for Twin back when the artist was showing the first iteration of Shoot the Women first at The Breeder gallery in Athens. Also worth your time: Ruins – Chronicle of an HIV witch-hunt, a documentary directed by Zoe Mavroudi about the women victims of HIV criminalization in Athens.

Previously: Painting on and painting off ISIS propaganda.

Stachybotrys chartarum, aka black mould, is one of the nastiest guests you can find in your home. The microfungus grows inside damp buildings and produces toxic spores. Its presence in your home can affect your health and expose you to greater risks of suffering from respiratory problems, allergies or even immune system disorders.

The problem seems to be particularly common in London rented accommodations. Landlords are either too stingy or too sloppy to take the necessary measures to limit the moisture in the air. When they are not just plain greedy and let the flats deliberately rot so that tenants will move out and the property owner can renovate the building and turn it into lucrative Airbnb accommodations.

Avril Corroon, Spoiled Spores, 2019

Avril Corroon, Spoiled Spores, 2019

Avril Corroon, a young artist currently pursuing a Masters in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University, decided to give a pungent visibility to the problem of rogue landlords and poor living conditions in rented accommodation. She did so by making artisan cheeses using bacteria cultures collected directly from the mould growing in London housing. I wouldn’t eat the cheeses she makes but they look surprisingly convincing!

The project is called Spoiled Spores (at the moment.) Corroon’s social critique might be insalubrious but it is also one of those rare projects that manage to talk about gentrification and class divide with humour.

I got in touch with Avril and asked her to tell us more about her range of “sick building” cheeses:

Avril Corroon, Spoiled Spores, 2019

Avril Corroon, Spoiled Spores, 2019

Avril Corroon, Spoiled Spores, 2019

Hi Avril! I’ve never made cheese in my life. You made yours using bacteria cultures collected from the mould growing in London housing. How did you discover the existence of these bacteria and their suitability to make cheese?  



Neither had I before this. To make blue cheese you add penicillium roqueforti to your milk and rennet, so I wondered what would happen if I swapped the ‘good mould’ for ‘bad’ mould and if it’d make a black mouldy cheese? Or what a Camberwell Camembert would look like from damp mould grown in a flat in Camberwell in London?

I had no idea if the cheese would come out looking and smelling like cheese or if the new mould would cause it to fall apart. It turns out that it does look and smell like cheese but as for taste I don’t know, it’s definitely not fit for consumption.



I’ve been doing call outs online and using word of mouth to find people living with mould and then visiting to take samples to make an individual cheese.
 Another element to the project is filming the homes where the moulds come from and interviewing the participants about their lives and any health problems they might have living around black mould. Some of them said they had mild respiratory issues and many said they constantly have to ask the landlord to come and sort it after the mould reappears after cleaning and repainting.

Avril Corroon, Spoiled Spores, 2019

Avril Corroon, Spoiled Spores, 2019



Of course, what i found most interesting about the project is that it is, if i understood correctly, a comment on the poor living conditions in rented accommodation. Could you elaborate on that?  

I had a lot of black mould growing in my last accommodation in Dublin and know many people living in damp housing managed by neglectful landlords. I wanted to make something that juxtaposed the mould, as a sign of neglected living conditions in rental property, with an artisan product like cheese, as a possible marker of gentrification.

Developers and city planners focus on areas, intentionally allowing them to become run down before pumping investment into recreating a new narrative of the area, as somewhere more attractive for middle and upper classes making it difficult for the community to sustain living there.

I hope that the work gives a sense of how interlinked and calculated disinvestment and investment is as a system and also gives the finger to private landlords for charging extortionate rental prices for poorly maintained flats and houses.

At the moment I’m being evicted from my rental accommodation in Elephant and Castle in South East London as developers are going to build luxury apartments. That whole area is under new urban development. Property developers Delancey have been given the go ahead by the council to take down the famous 75 year old Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre to make a ‘town centre’, but it’s already a centre for the traders and large multicultural community who go there. Up The Elephant campaigners are bidding to pose a legal challenge to drop the scheme, which is great.


I’m critical of how art institutions play a role in gentrification and want the work to address this too. In the work, I’m taking mould from people in bad living conditions and creating a high-end commodity out of this suffering as cheese, but then by giving it the status of art it then becomes a super commodity in the art gallery. I’m very interested in how the work touches these seemingly separate economies and how it can implicate a wider system than just the individual landlord. The cheese stink in the gallery and you can’t get away from the smell. It’s making an accusation there to question how art institutions function in the creation of inequalities, disinvestment and gentrification in areas.


Avril Corroon, Spoiled Spores, 2019

The photo of the bedroom the mould came from doesn’t suggest “yummy! appetizing!” to me. How ready are people (and you!) to taste the cheese? Is it allowed to actually have people consume them or is there some Health and Safety issue that would prevent you from organising tasting sessions?  

At first some people have really wanted to try it before seeing the video footage of how they’re made. I have artisan style labels for each corresponding cheese, which includes on it the first name of the person who lives with the mould, the type of accommodation, and annual rent and location details in the ingredient list. It’s easy to not read the label in full, as much as we don’t read the ingredients on most packaging, so the cheese still retains a sort of sinister element to it. Authentic artisan cheeses that are expensive, strong smelling, especially the blue cheeses, don’t really seem like they should be edible anyway, but we’ve been assured that they are. If no one had told you that you can eat cheese with blue mould veined through out it, you wouldn’t put that in your mouth would you?

I like toeing between the lines of disgust my cheese looks no more suspicious than normal cheese, like a savory present waiting for the landlord.



Excerpt of Fresh Paint on The Walls, full duration 9min, 2016

How does the work fit into your own practice? Does it build upon some of your previous works? I’m thinking about Fresh Paint on the Walls which looks at the difficulty of living in the neoliberal city through the antics of an awful landlord who licks beige walls and covers his face in paint.


I make work, which uses my own surroundings or living and working conditions as a starting point and then re-present them in an exaggerated manner with a satirical narrative in video or through interventionist actions in live performance.

In Fresh Paint on The Walls, the archetype of the monstrous Landlord is obsessed with ingesting magnolia coloured paint, resulting in megalomaniac behavior and terrible spatial judgment, which causes him to charge extortionate rates for small rooms. The cheese work feels like a continuation from this work and shares some similar imagery such as eating from interior walls.



In some of my previous work, I outline a story with voice over narration, the cheese is more suggestive of a narrative instead. While I was making one of them I was reminded of Roald Dahl’s The Witches where all the witches have an AGM and plan a grand opening of sweet shops where they’ll poison all the children and turn them into mice. Except here, maybe it’s all the landlords who come to stuff their faces instead.

Avril Corroon, Spoiled Spores (installation view), 2019

Avril Corroon, Spoiled Spores, 2019

What’s next for the cheese? Was it a one off or are you planning to reproduce the cheese experiment in other settings?

At the moment I’m working on this project along with others towards my degree show for my masters in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University. I’m making new cheeses, visiting homes, taking mould samples and filming homes from new people that I come into contact with.

I’d love to take the project further and travel with it to make further renditions that are area specific to where it’s exhibited, so that each place and the specificities to that local are examined. I’m also getting in touch with food labs to get an analysis of the cheese sample and its toxins.

Getting other expertise in to expand the work could produce interesting results, like getting a cheesemonger and a real estate agent together to assess the value of a mouldy house or one of my cheeses. I think there’s a lot of ways I can develop the work further.


Thanks Avril!

Invisible Colors. The Arts of the Atomic Age, by Gabrielle Decamous, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Languages and Cultures at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan.

On amazon USA and UK.

Publisher MIT Press describes the book: The effects of radiation are invisible, but art can make it and its effects visible. Artwork created in response to the events of the nuclear era allow us to see them in a different way. In Invisible Colors, Gabrielle Decamous explores the atomic age from the perspective of the arts, investigating atomic-related art inspired by the work of Marie Curie, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the disaster at Fukushima, and other episodes in nuclear history.
[…]
Emphasizing art by artists who were present at these nuclear events—the “global Hibakusha”—rather than those reacting at a distance, Decamous puts Eastern and Western art in dialogue, analyzing the aesthetics and the ethics of nuclear representation.

Shiga Lieko, Child’s Play, 2012

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your manias become science) , 1981

Homma Takashi, Mushrooms from the Forest, 2011

Invisible Colors explores how artists make palpable the imperceptible, the intangible, the unthinkable. The catastrophic accidents, the lethal weapons, the impoverishment of ecosystems, but also the invisible ‘everyday’ radioactivity.

Gabrielle Decamous’ book is not the first publication about art and the nuclear but it expands the observation field to artworks and perspectives that the West has often neglected. The scope of her investigation is vast in terms of the geography, time frame and creative disciplines examined.

In terms of geography, the analysis is looking both East and West. With Chernobyl, Fukushima, Nagasaki and Hiroshima of course. With the Three Mile Island accident and the nuclear tests in the Pacific and in Nevada. But the author also looks at regions across the world that have been affected by the nuclear and yet remain under the radar. The Namibian communities living around the Rössing open pit mine, for example, don’t get much attention nor compensation for the high cost their bodies and environment pay to ensure that the West has access to the dangerous mineral resource. Or the people living in the South Pacific islands where the French carried out nuclear tests they insisted were “clean” in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s when you realize how much the colonial legacy endures into our complex globalized world.

Critical Art Ensemble, Radiation Burn, 2010

Kaneto Shindo, Lucky Dragon No. 5, 1959

Jean Schwartz, The Radium Dance, part of the W.C Whitney production Piff!, Paff!, Pouf! in 1904

The chronology Decamous considers is equally comprehensive. It brings in works from the time of Marie Curie’s discovery of radium up until the aftermath of Fukushima. I was particularly fascinated by the work of Movimento Nucleare, an artistic movement founded in Milan in 1951 with the objective to create works that respond to the atomic age, often with a clear political, antinuclear message. The broad historical perspective is a particularly precious one because, as the author explains, the West tends to look mostly towards the future at the expense of a deep reflection around past mistakes.

I associated representation of the atomic age with visual arts. Fortunately, Decamous isn’t as parochial as i am. Her book thus explores how other art forms such as the performing arts and music (with Iron Maiden, Sun Ra, even The Stranglers!) are keeping the discussion around the atomic age alive. Literature seems to have been particularly responsive to the discovery of radium, going from adventure novels haunted by the fear of evil men stealing radium to more doomsday narratives that reflect a growing awareness of radium’s harmful effects. There was scifi novels, A-bomb books but also poetry and mangas, most notably Barefoot Gen, a series loosely based on Nakazawa Keiji’s own experiences as a Hiroshima survivor. Decamous even uncovered the existence of a cookbook! In 1965 and 1970, two members of the Women Strike for Peace Movement did indeed publish Peace de Resistance, a cookbook that included simple recipes for those days when WSP’s efforts were needed to protest against the testing of nuclear weapons.

As Invisible Colors makes clear, representing the nuclear is not an easy task. First, the subject itself is delicate. It evades our standard notions of materiality and our very limited and very human conception of time. It makes it ethically difficult to represent terrible loss and suffering, to draw any aesthetic pleasure from it.

Michael Light, 045 STOKES 19 kilotons Nevada 1957. From 100 Suns : 1945-1962

The most powerful obstacle to a straightforward and honest nuclear representation, however, is the industry’s dark power. Countries like the USA and France, for example, never shied away from censorship and cover-ups to ensure that nuclear activities remained shrouded in secrecy. In France, the media were pressured so that the public didn’t have to face any unpleasant questioning of what was happening in mines in Madagascar, in Gabon and in France. The U.S. documented their activities in a way that would render the atomic age fabulously visual. The military-produced images of the US tests in the Pacific are so spectacularly appealing that they eclipse the human and animal victims and any longlasting damage to the landscape.

The author also reveals how the nuclear industry uses art to support their agenda, reaching out to artists and sponsoring comic books and exhibitions. Just like car manufacturers and (fossil fuel) energy giants are doing today to greenwash their industry.

As Invisible Colors brilliantly argues, art and humanities must keep the nuclear memory radioactive and alive. Because recording and remembering are also political acts.

Carole Langer, Radium City, 1987

Igor Kostin, Robots couldn’t handle the intense radiation at Chernobyl so the nuclear cleanup job fell to the “liquidators” — a corps of soldiers, firefighters, miners, and volunteers. Part of the series Chernobyl – The Aftermath, 1986. Photo

Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, Nanking Massacre, 1975. Part of the Hiroshima Panels

Keiji Nakazawa, Barefoot Gen, 1973-1985

Yosuke Yamahata, A woman and her child appear in a state of shock the day after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, 1945

Shomei Tomatsu, Beer Bottle After the Atomic Bomb Explosion, 1961

Chris Burden, The Atomic Alphabet, 1980

Shiga Lieko, Mother’s Gentle Hands, 2009

Tomoko Yoneda, Chrysanthemums from the series Cumulus, 2011

Ikeda Ai, Sievertian Human – Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment, 2015

Jürgen Nefzger, Sellafield, England, 2005. From the series Fluffy Clouds

Jürgen Nefzger, Kalkar, Deutschland, 2005. From the series Fluffy Clouds

Critical Art Ensemble, Radiation Burn, 2010

Rebecca Zlotowski, Grand Central, 2013 (trailer)

Robert Del Tredici, The Richest Uranium Mine on Earth, 1986

Related book: The Nuclear Culture Source Book.
And stories: Perpetual Uncertainty. Inhabiting the atomic age, Sonic Radiations. A nuclear-themed playlist, After The Flash. Photography from the Atomic Archive, Gamma Sense. Open, fast and free gamma radiation monitoring for citizens, Anecdotal radiations, the stories surrounding nuclear armament and testing programs, Inheritance, a precious heirloom made of gold and radioactive stones, etc.

We might not be as human as it seems. Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are bacteria, viruses, fungi, archaea and other microscopic organisms that colonize both the inside and outside of our bodies and form the human microbiota.

Even though we are not conscious of it, this microbial material affects our mental and physical well-being in ways science has only just started exploring. The microorganisms facilitate digestion, regulate the immune system, protect us against disease and manufacture vitamins. We live in such inter-dependency with our microbiome that some talk about holobionts, making us an assemblage of a host plus the resident microbes that inhabit it.

Alma Heikkilä. Kiasma Commission by Kordelin 2019. Installation view at Kiasma. Image courtesy the artist

Alma Heikkilä, Warm and moist | decaying wood (detail.) Photo: Petri Virtanen / Finnish National Gallery

Artist Alma Heikkilä wants us to open up our eyes to a world without which our world wouldn’t exist. It’s not just about the microbiome. She finds these imperceptible worlds everywhere. Where we only see a decaying log of wood, she sees a hot spot for insects and fungi. Where we see dirt and soil under our feet, she senses a vast universe of creatures that communicate and keep the underground and the overground alive. We know we breathe oxygen in, she knows we inhale also other gases, airborne bacteria, fungi as well as all kinds of pollutants.

Heikkilä wants us to become more sensitive to all the micro-organisms we overlook, either because microbiological elements are difficult to experience with our sole human senses or because Western culture has made us too individualist to give much consideration to species other than our own. Beyond these microscopic creatures, her work also touches upon other subjects that lie beyond human sensory perception, not as a result of their tininess but because they out-size us. They are massively distributed in time and space and are what environmental philosopher Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects“. Global warming is the most famous of these hyperobjects. Just like microorganisms, they exceed our human apprehension but we can’t keep on ignoring the powerful interdependence between them and us.

Alma Heikkilä, Primary sensory interface with the external world, 2017. Image courtesy the artist

Alma Heikkilä, Primary sensory interface with the external world (detail), 2017. Image courtesy the artist

Heikkilä uses painting to address the necessity to acknowledge the importance of nonhuman life and our symbiotic relationship to it. The difference of scale between the ultra-small organisms and the hyperobjects she investigates is reflected in the composition of the paintings. The size of her works is overwhelming and forces you to take a step back but their visual details and material qualities draw you closer.

Her concern for these invisible forms of life is reflected in the critical examination of her own artistic practice. Heikkilä carefully assesses the impact the materials she wants to use might have on ecosystems, for example. She shuns planes and travels with ‘slow’ transportation only. She even bought 11 hectares of forest, not to use as a resource for her own work but to ensure that it continues being a habitat for biodiversity and acts as a carbon sink for any strain her activities has on ecosystems. Directly or indirectly. This might seem charming to many but her efforts put to shame all the artists, curators and reporters who explore the topic of the anthropocene with much gravitas but don’t think twice before taking a taxi or a plane instead of perfectly convenient public transport systems. It’s going to be interesting to see how working processes like hers will influence the way the art world operates.

The artist has just opened a show at Kiasma in Helsinki that defies anthropocentrism and gives visibility to the various processes of multispecies companionship. Each of her painting installation is like a microcosm of entities that coexist, combine and interact.

Another fascinating element of the exhibition is the way it challenges museum conventions. Heikkilä urged curator Satu Oksanen to consider opening up the usually carefully-controlled exhibition space to a natural element: light. Natural light now floods the space, coming from a sky light and a large window. Light is thus another participant to the show. Depending on the time of your visit in Kiasma, your eyes will have to adjust more or less to its intensity (artificial lights will be turned on if it ever gets too dark to experience the exhibition though.)

Alma Heikkilä. Kiasma Commission by Kordelin 2019. Installation view at Kiasma. Image courtesy the artist

Alma Heikkilä. Kiasma Commission by Kordelin 2019. Installation view at Kiasma

Alma Heikkilä. Kiasma Commission by Kordelin 2019. Installation view at Kiasma. Image courtesy the artist

Alma Heikkilä is the second recipient of the Kiasma Commission by Kordelin, a project that aims to provide international exposure for one selected Finnish artist. The project is funded by the Alfred Kordelin Foundation which supports the sciences, literature, the arts and public education in the country with grants and awards. Helsinki-based Maija Luutonen was the first recipient of the Kiasma Commission by Kordelin.

Through this commission, Heikkilä receives the support of the Kiasma staff, has been commissioned new works and has gained visibility but she also got a chance to collaborate with Elina Minn. The dramaturge will invite the public to join workshops that explore cellular consciousness inside Heikkilä’s show at Kiasma. Titled Somanauts – Workshops for experiential anatomy, the one-hour sessions are ‘undoing’ practices that enable participants to focus on experiencing the world inside their body.

Alma Heikkilä, soil ~ minerals mixing with the living (detail). Photo: Petri Virtanen / Finnish National Gallery

Alma Heikkilä, soil ~ minerals mixing with the living. Photo: Petri Virtanen / Finnish National Gallery

I didn’t know the work of artist and activist Heikkilä before visiting her show in Helsinki. But i did know about Mustarinda, the collective of artists and researchers she co-founded a few years ago. The goal of Mustarinda is to combine scientific knowledge and experiential artistic activity in order to lay out a path towards a post-fossil culture. Check out their residency calls if you’re interested in their work and fancy spending time in an isolated house with a lovely garden at edge of the Paljakka Nature Reserve in Finland.

Alma Heikkilä. Kiasma Commission by Kordelin was curated by Satu Oksanen. The exhibition remains open at Kiasma in Helsinki until 28 July 2019.
Check out this page for information about Somanauts – Workshops for experiential anatomy with Elina Minn. /blockquote>

Studio Drift creates elegant installations and interactive sculptures that explore the relationship between nature, human and technology. The creative duo currently has a solo show at the new, spectacular Amos Rex art museum in Helsinki. During my visit there, I was vexed to learn that everybody but me knew the work of Studio Drift.

Studio Drift, Light bulb, from the series Materialism

Studio Drift, Drifter, 2019. Photo: Stella Ojala for Amos Rex

Studio Drift, VW Beetle 1980, from the series Materialism. Photo by Stella Ojala for Amos Rex

A huge block of concrete floating above visitors’ heads, a light sculpture made of dandelion seeds and LED-lights, etc. Studio Drift excels at experimenting with technology. Materialism, the work in the show that impressed me the most, was decidedly less technologically sophisticated but it nevertheless tells a powerful story about how little we know about the objects we surround ourselves with.

For this series, the designers took consumer goods such as a vacuum cleaner, a classic Nokia phone, a Volkswagen Beetle, a pencil, a PET bottle, a light bulb and a bicycle and literally reduced their complexity to the raw materials they are made of.

Still, Materialism is an affecting exercise in dismantling consumer culture, in leaving aside functions and in ennobling the resources we extract from the Earth at great human and environmental costs.

Studio Drift, Materialism

Studio Drift, Pencil, from the series Materialism

Studio Drift, Gazelle Bicycle 2005, from the series Materialism. Photograph by Gert Jan van Rooij

Each big or small object in their Materialism series becomes unrecognizable. A bicycle is converted to blocks of rubber, polyurethane, steel, aluminum, lacquer paint and other materials. A pencil becomes wood, graphite and a bit of paint. Sometimes the inside of objects is rather surprising. Who knew that a Volkswagen Beetle from the 1980s contained horsehair and cork, for example?

Studio Drift writes that “If humankind could somehow perceive this connection to materials, to our collective consumption and the earth it impoverishes, it would be a leap in our social evolution, in building an awareness that we must somehow become better stewards of our future.” I disagree with that confident statement. I think we’ve been warned time and time again that our reckless looting of the earth is becoming “unsustainable”. Newspapers, documentaries and scientists have spent the past few years telling the Western world that we need to consume less, that resources are not infinite, etc. And yet, we’re still here. Students are protesting in the streets and politicians pretend younger generations will get tired of asking for a future we’ve stolen from them.

Studio Drift, Nokia 3210, from the series Materialism. Installation view at Amos Rex

Studio Drift, Dandelight, from the series Materialism. Photograph by Gert Jan van Rooij

Studio Drift, VW Beetle 1980, from the series Materialism

Studio Drift, Materialism at Amos Rex. Photo by Stella Ojala

I’ll end with a few images of the Amos Rex art museum. Its programme of exhibitions that mixes the ultra contemporary with modern artists (right now they have a big show dedicated to René Magritte) is almost as impressive as its architecture. JKMM Architects excavated the ground beneath an ex-bus station, hid the museum down there and created skylights that bubble up through the surface of the ground as domes, turning the square into a playground for skaters and children. The space also has the usual museum shop and an exquisitely renovated Art Deco cinema called Bio Rex.

Amos Rex Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo: Tuomas Uusheimo / Amos Rex, 2018

Amos Rex Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo: Mika Huisman / Amos Rex

Amos Rex Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo: Mika Huisman / Amos Rex

Amos Rex, Bio Rex, Helsinki. Photo: Tuomas Uusheimo / Amos Rex, 2018

Amos Rex, Bio Rex (interior), Helsinki

Elemental, Studio Drift’s solo show, remains open at Amos Rex in Helsinki until 19 May 2019 alongside the first show in Finland dedicated to René Magritte.

Have you ever felt that your constant use of electronic devices was causing physical pains? Maybe your eyes feel dry from too much screen time. Your elbows are strained. Or maybe you have sleep disorders. Are you worried that your fingers are being eroded by all that swiping and typing? Do you look prematurely aged because of your hunched posture?

Center for Technological Pain, Handsfree headset to liberate the users hands

Center for Technological Pain, Tranquility Cube

In these cases and many others, the Center for Technological Pain has the solution for you. Dasha Ilina, the CEO of the company, designed a series of stunning prototypes that promise to cure your tech-related ailments and even prevent them from appearing.

Instead of selling the miraculous contraptions at the high price they command, Ilina graciously offers small manuals that explain how to build them yourself using affordable materials.

Center for Technological Pain, Friction-Free Gloves leaflet

Center for Technological Pain, How To: Friction-Free Gloves

CTP even customized a series of self-defense techniques and published videos online to teach you how to help your friends and relatives battle tech addiction.

There’s obviously a lot of satire in Ilina’s work. There’s also far more sense that it might seem. After all, we’ve all seen the articles that warn us against sitting for hours in front of a laptop (some extravagantly call it “the new smoking”) or against looking down on your phone (it gives you a double chin, my dear!)

Dasha Ilina is currenty showing the CTP at the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris and this Summer she will be teaching her Self-Defense Against Technology moves at NØ School Nevers, a summer school for students, artists, designers, hackers, activists, educators and anyone who wish to engage in critical research around the social and environmental impacts of information and communication technologies.

I asked her to wear her CEO suit and give us lowdown on her promising start-up:

Hi Dasha! What i like about your project is that none of the objects you made would be useful to me (i think). Yet, the Center for Technological Pain drove me to think about the topic of health problems caused by digital technologies a lot. Whereas i would normally prefer to forget about the issue. What brought you to explore the idea of designing solutions to health problems caused by digital technologies? Did you feel there was a demand that wasn’t addressed?

I first started thinking about the relationship between health and technology when I started really looking around me and paying attention to my friends behind their desks, strangers on the streets or cafés and, in addition to that, when I heard endless complaining from my friends that spend all day behind their computers about their constant neck problems, or back pain etc. It wasn’t immediately clear to me to start creating these solutions, but I made one just to try and see what people think of it or how useful they find it. I wouldn’t say that this project was created out of a demand, per say, because I wasn’t making these objects to sell them or even to help people, at first that is.

When I first started working on CTP, it was mainly to come up with efficient, yet totally absurd objects that would serve more as a commentary, rather than design objects. Though there were moments when I considered making highly useful objects, but what’s the fun in that?

Dasha Ilina, Headset to Reduce Eye Dryness

How did you decide which objects to design? Was it the result of complains by people around you? Articles in newspapers?

A lot of the objects are results of either my own tech-pain, or of those around me. For example, the Friction-Free Gloves were a result of a complaint from a friend of mine, who told me that after working on her laptop with the trackpad all day and swiping on her phone, she feels discomfort in her fingertips, as if they’re almost sanding away. This wasn’t anything I ever experienced but she had told me about it after I had committed to create as many solutions as time allowed, so I made the Friction-Free Gloves, which protect your fingertips with sponges. As a nice bonus, since sponges are conductive they can easily be used on a smartphone screen, though not all sponges work super well.

So I’d say about half of the problems came from personal contributions, however a lot of the objects as solutions to the same problem, such as cubital tunnel, came from research. After I’d used up all of my knowledge of tech-pain, I started reading a lot of medical articles. One of my favorite outcomes from one of those articles is the Headset to Reduce Eye Dryness. I was trying to figure out why my eyes were getting so dry and tired after working on my computer, and one of the reasons was that, when looking at a screen, our brains are so occupied with trying to decipher the information on the screen that they forget to send the signal to our eyes to blink as often as we need to. So I thought why not make an object that will put some eye drops in your eyes, in case your brain gets distracted.

Center for Technological Pain, Handsfree headset to liberate the users hands

Center for Technological Pain, Stylus Helmet to Liberate Fingers

The accessories you created for the Center for Technological Pain are ironic and a bit ridiculous-looking. Besides, the risks the project explore sound quite benign so why should we take them seriously?

The objects are quite ridiculous, I agree. They become all the more ridiculous when worn, but the problems the solutions bring up are very real and could potentially lead to serious health problems if not treated early on. With the example of cubital tunnel I read that if the patient has the syndrome and doesn’t do anything to stop putting pressure on the elbow or straining it in general, it could lead to the loss of feeling in the fingertips. Of course, I don’t know how bad someone’s state needs to be in order for it to come to that, however reading about that about a year ago really made me wonder for the first time, whether, if not the objects, then at least CTP shining a light on these health problems lots of people don’t think about could help someone, for example in a preventive way.

The Focus Box. Image courtesy Dasha Ilina

The CTP hosts a series of workshops aimed at empowering and educating people of all ages on the topic of technology-related pain. Do participants come with their own real or imaginary health problems and the solutions to them? Could you take us through some of the most amusing/ingenious ideas and accessories others made during these workshops?

Each session normally starts with a quick presentation of the aim of the workshop, as well as some previously made solutions, so even if the participants don’t have ideas at the beginning of the workshop they normally quite quickly come up with something. Most of the time the problems they work on are really personal, which in my opinion always makes for the most intricate solutions, because as soon as the participant realizes that they’re creating something for their own good (whether they ever use it or not), they become more engaged with the creative process, at least in my experience.

As for the most ingenious ideas there are really so many, but I will pick a few. Just a few weeks ago I hosted a workshop at the Meta Marathon in Düsseldorf, where one of the participants straight away had a very ambitious idea, but one that required him coding a software or a google chrome extension. So we took some time to think about how his idea could be translated into a physical object and eventually he decided to create this Focus Box, because he worked at a software development company where he was constantly distracted by his coworkers. When he started working on it, he told me that he had never used cardboard before and that in order to create this object he needed to first “learn the properties of the material.” He was the last participant to finish his object, but when it was done it was as well constructed as a Google Cardboard!

Belt for mobile phone. Image courtesy Dasha Ilina

Another object I’ll mention briefly was created by a younger participant (around 12 year old) during a workshop at Le Cube. He was clearly quite advanced in the topic of tech-pain, because without hesitation he chose to work on the electromagnetic waves emitted by the cellphone, which could cause damage to the brain. As a solution to this problem, he created a belt in which you would place your phone in order to keep it as far away from your head as possible. I thought it was a great idea, which is why I decided to not bring up the problems that can arise from the placement a phone next to one’s genitals.

A CTP demo. Photo credit: Julien Mouffron-Gardner

All the objects in the collections are as no-tech as can be. Only the “Eye strain reducing glasses” rely on technology. Does that mean that sometimes the only solution to a problem caused by tech is to throw more technology at it?

Maybe! Those glasses were actually the first object I created, so I’m not sure if that could be a reason why it’s the only one that involves tech. I’ve tried thinking about how the same solution, meaning something that forces the user to take a break from the screen, can be performed in a different, no-tech way. I don’t have a good idea just yet, but I think that the best way to achieve the same result would be through a self-defense move, one that would require your partner to karate chop your computer so that it closes therefore forcing you to look up from your screen.

Self Defense Techniques Against Technology

I tried some of your Self-defense moves against technology on my boyfriend. Sleep Defense is a favourite of mine. It never goes down very well though. Why did you make these moves so aggressive and unpleasant for the receiver of these tactics?

That’s great to hear, I’m glad you’re enjoying the moves! They are very aggressive and I do always try to make the point that they could hurt someone. But the reason they are that way is because I did not make them up. All of the self-defense against technology moves are based on real self-defense moves, so of course the tactics come from methods of protection and survival, they are meant to be unpleasant and in their real application they are meant to hurt the other person involved.

You grew up and studied in Russia and then in the USA and now you live in Paris. Have you observed different types of tech-related pains and solutions from country to country? Do people have different ways to misuse and harm themselves with tech in France than in Russia or the US for example?

That’s a great question, of course I wasn’t thinking about tech-pain back when I was living in Russia and the US, so to answer I will have to go off my memories. Something that becomes really problematic in Russia during the winter is the need to use your phone on the street when its -15 degrees outside mixed with the wish to look cool and not wear gloves. Of course on the other side, most of the times (at least with iPhones) when you take your phone out when it’s that cold it just refuses to turn on, so I guess Apple presented us with a solution of their own.

As for the US, the first thing that comes to mind is a very popular, yet very serious problem of texting and driving. I don’t know if percentage wise more people text and drive in the US compared to France and Russia, but the truth is that everyone drives in the US, so it does become a big problem, even if a small percentage of the population does it. When it comes to texting and driving, aside from the obvious safety problems that it causes, which could lead to car crashes, it’s also terrible for the drivers neck, as most often than not it requires constantly looking down. In addition to that, I imagine that it’s also very uncomfortable for the hand that is performing the texting, especially the thumb.

CTP, The Nose Palm move

Any upcoming event or field of research you’d like to share with us?

Yes! There is one event coming up this summer I am particularly excited about, which is NØ School Nevers. It’s an Art and Technology Summer School in Burgundy in France that is organized by one of my former teachers, Benjamin Gaulon. I will be giving a Self-Defense Against Technology class, but besides me there are 29 other artists/hackers/researchers, etc. who will be giving workshops, lectures, performances and more. And if you would believe it there are still some places available to be able to participate in this 2 week long summer program!

Thanks Dasha!

NØ School Nevers, is a unique international summer school, held in Nevers in Burgundy for students, artists, designers, makers, hackers, activists and educators who wish to further their skills and engage in critical research around the social and environmental impacts of information and communication technologies. 1-14 July in Nevers, France.
The Center for Technological Pain is also participating to the show Computer Grrrls. History, Gender, Technology, curated by Inke Arns and Marie Lechner. The exhibition remains open until at the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris until 14 July 2019.

A week ago, i was in Rome to visit the spectacular Centrale Montemartini (a former power plant converted into a museum for Ancient Rome sculptures) and an exhibition at MAXXI about artistic imaginaries in the age of AI. That one had a couple of very good works (by Nathaniel Mellors & Erkka Nissinen, Zach Blas, Trevor Paglen and others who never disappoint.) The exhibition closed a few days ago but the guide is available as a free PDF if you’re curious about the show.

Halil Altındere, Wonderland, 2013

Ugo La Pietra, Sistema disequilibrante, il Commutatore, 1970

Fortunately, MAXXI has another exhibition to explore if ever you’re in the neighbourhood. It’s not only packed with excellent, provoking works, it also remains open until the end of April. The Street. Where the World Is Made shows the work of artists who look for a public in the streets, not within the sterile walls of a museum or art gallery. They use public space as an environment to exchange, agitate, experiment, debate and set off the unexpected.

The exhibition is organised according to themes: public actions, daily life, politics, the community, innovation, the role of the institution and of course many of the works can easily fit into several categories.

The exhibition is massive. There are over 200 works. Many of them videos which means that i ended up spending a whole afternoon inside the museum. It’s also very noisy and chaotic. Like a busy urban street.

The Street. Where the World is Made/La Strada. Dove si crea il mondo. Exhibition view. ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Ruscio, courtesy Fondazione MAXXI

Abraham Cruzvillegas, The Simultaneous Promise, 2011

Instead of writing down my usual ultra-verbose review, i’m going to quick fire some of the videos i really enjoyed during my visit. I’m not keen on being bombarded with videos (to say the least) so the ones below are short and quite amusing:

Starting with the one that made me laugh out loud, especially after i had read the description.

During months, Iván Argote walked around New York city looking for unattended police cars. As soon as he found one, he hid behind it and shaked it while his camera was rolling. It looks like some sex or violent action is taking place inside the vehicle. During the making of the film he was stopped three times and managed to not get arrested by acting as a crazy french tourist.

Iván Argote, The beginning of something, 2011

Speaking of crazy. Or at least very bold… Marcela Armas walked at a leisurely pace in the middle of urban traffic in Mexico city wearing a kit with 7 different car horns and other automotive sounds. She used a control on the arm to activate the devices and establish communication with the drivers. Some drivers honked to express their great perplexity, others to participate in a collective concert.

Occupation is an action arising from the occupation of space for car traffic, as a reflection about humans as carriers and noise generators, but also, about the loss of sovereignty of human body in times of consumption society and exacerbated urban growth.

Marcela Armas, Ocupación/Occupation, 2007

Marcela Armas, Ocupación/Occupation, 2007

Marcela Armas, Ocupación/Occupation, 2007

Say what you want about Santiago Sierra, he certainly knows how to get people’s attention. The video he made together with Jorge Galindo was one of the very first i saw upon entering the gigantic exhibition. It could have been swamped by the dozens of video works i saw during my visit. But it did remain in my mind the whole afternoon.

In 2012, one of the worst years for the economic crisis in Spain, Sierra organized a motorcade of seven black Mercedes-Benz sedans topped with upside-down monumental portraits of King Juan Carlos I and the six prime ministers of the Spanish democracy by painter Jorge Galindo. Bystanders, taken by surprise, posted cellphone documentation as the procession was making its way along the Gran Vía of Madrid.

The soundtrack of the video is “Warszawianka“, a song used as an anthem by Polish workers in 1905 and adopted by populist movements worldwide.

Jorge Galindo and Santiago Sierra, Los Encargados (Those in Charge), Gran Vía, Madrid, 15 Agosto 2012

In Recife (Brazil), rural traditions are often at odds with the city status as a booming industrial center and film capital. Hearing that the local government was planning to ban animals hauling carts from the streets, Jonathas De Andrade decided to organize a horse-drawn cart race in the city center. The artist was only able to stage the race by asking the authorities for a permit to make a movie. The horse owners, however, were invited to participate in a real horse race. The video features an aboiador—a singer from the countryside who improvises verses and rhymes and talks (in what seems to me the most beautiful language in the world) about the challenges of country living, the dehumanizing urban conditions, marginalization, etc.

Jonathas de Andrade, O levante (fragmento) – The Uprising (excerpt), 2012-2013

Future past perfect pt. 03 (u_08-1) was inspired by a fascination for automation processes as well as Carsten Nicolai‘s work on codes and grids. A man stops his van next to a row of vending machines. He inserts a coin, but instead of the usual procedure, the machine starts performing its own peculiar performance on the notes of one of the artist’s compositions.

Carsten Nicolai, Future past perfect pt. 03 (u_08-1), 2009

Not much is happening in Eric Baudelaire‘s video. Yet, there is something hypnotizing in the movements of the main protagonist and in the uneventful life that surrounds him. The action takes place on a Paris metro platform where a billposter covers an advertising billboard with a sequence of images that depict a car parked on a Parisian street: it bursts into flames, is swallowed up in smoke and then is reduced to a charred carcass. The laborious method of gluing the posters takes 72 minutes in total, a slow pace that contrasts with the assault of violent images that news media typically serve us.

Eric Baudelaire, Sugar Water, 2007

Eric Baudelaire, Sugar Water, 2007

HeHe set a remote controlled toy car through the streets of New York emitting coloured smoke clouds. The tiny vehicle made more conspicuous a pollution passersby have long stopped paying attention to.

Hehe, Toy Emissions (my Friends All Drive Porsches), 2007

Paradox of Praxis #5 is part of a series of performances in which Francis Alÿs undertakes seemingly futile tasks or labors. The most famous one is Paradox of Praxis #1 (1997) in which the artist pushed a massive block of ice throughout the streets of Mexico City until it completely melted. In this video, however, Alÿs kicks a ball of fire during the night in Ciudad Juárez. As you follow his path, you catch glimpses of a urban fabric in crisis.

Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis #5, 2013

In 1995, Lin Yilin quietly built, dismantled and moved a brick wall from one side of a busy road to another. The performance, which took place in Guangzhou, forced drivers to swerve around him. His long and laborious performance transformed a stable wall into a roving one, creating moments of pause in the turbulent flow of urban life.

Lin Yilin, Safely Maneuvering across The Road, 1995

Halil Altındere’s film Wonderland documents the anger and frustration of a group of youths from the Sulukule neighborhood of Istanbul, home to Roma communities whose houses were destroyed as part of an “urban renewal” development project. Shot as a music video, Wonderland follows the young men of the hip-hop group Tahribad-ı isyan (Rebellion of Destruction) as they rap about inequality and gentrification. They express their exasperation through derelict streets, beat up a security guard and destroy symbols of the redevelopment project. The film was a run-up to the Gezi Park demonstrations, where people protested against the plan to replace Gezi Park, one of the few remaining green spaces in the center of the European side of Istanbul, with a shopping center and luxury apartments.

Halil Altındere, Wonderland, 2013

All kinds of objects are being thrown from one end of a road to the other: rocks, boots, helmets, broom sticks, chairs, a wheel, tires, barrels, etc. Fumes from tear gas start to float over the scene. When the one-sided riot stops, the street appears clear again and then objects are being thrown from the other side of the street this time. It’s beautiful, dangerous, poetic. It happened during our century and all the centuries before that.

Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado, O Século (The Century) – Brasil, 2011

That’s it for my video tour. Here’s more images and works from the show:

Anna Scalfi, Untitled 2005 (Green Woman on the Traffic Light), 2005

In an 8-hour long action, Anna Scalfi was granted the permission to climb up and change the contours of the figure on the pedestrian traffic lights from male to female in the historical centre of Rovereto.

Raphaël Zarka, Riding Modern Art. Sculpture: Ulrich Rückriem, Untitled (four wedges), 1992. Skater: Eli Reed. Photograph: Jonathan Mehring

Raphaël Zarka, Riding Modern Art. Sculpture Andy Athanassoglou, Trio. Skater: Jan Solenthaler. Photographer: Alan Maag

When he was at art school in the late 80’s, Raphaël Zarka realized that skateboarding was guiding his perception of forms, volumes and materials. The black and white photographs from his series “Riding Modern Art” are drawn from skateboarding magazines. Each of them shows how skaters are giving a new dimension to the abstract and geometric forms of modern sculptures installed in the public space. Since it started in 2007, the series has become a huge participative work to which several photographers and skaters contribute. I found it interesting to read that when Editions B42 published a book about the work, ten images had to be removed from this collection, “as sculptors have refused to see their artwork reproduced. The spaces dedicated to those photographs remain purposely empty.”

Allora & Calzadilla, There’s More than One Way to Skin a Sheep, 2007

In There’s More than One Way to Skin a Sheep, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla evoke the coexistence of modern technology and traditional instruments such as the tulum, an early form of bagpipe from Turkey. The video shows a cyclist repurposing the traditional musical instrument to inflate a punctured tire on the streets of Istanbul, creating a noisy disruption in the urban landscape. The cultural object, used as an implement to address a modern malfunction, represents a resourceful adaptation to today’s world.

Lin Yilin, Golden Town, 2011

Halil Altındere, MOBESE (Gold Camera), 2011

Andrea Salvino, Troppo presto troppo tardi, 2015

Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, «Big Donut Drive-in», Los Angeles, ca. 1970. From the “Las Vegas Studio”-project curated by Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli

Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, The Strip seen from the desert, with Denise Scott Brown in the foreground, Las Vegas 1966. Photo: Robert Venturi. From the “Las Vegas Studio”-project curated by Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli

Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, Advertising signs on the Strip, 1968. From the “Las Vegas Studio”-project curated by Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli

Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, «The Big Duck», shop in the shape of a duck on the highway on Long Island, Flanders, New York, ca. 1970. From the “Las Vegas Studio”-project curated by Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli

Martin Creed, Work No. 1701, 2013

Martin Creed, YOU RETURN Work No. 1701, 2013

Martin Creed, What the Fuck Am I Doing, 2017

Pedro Reyes, Ciclomóvil, 2007

Patrick Tuttofuoco, Velodream (Mattia), 2001

Patrick Tuttofuoco, Velodream (Riccardo), 2001

Cao Fei, Hip Hop Fukuoka, 2005

Monica Bonvicini, Don’t Miss a Sec’., 2004

Boa Mistura, Crossed Anamorphosis (detail), 2018

The Street. Where the World is Made/La Strada. Dove si crea il mondo. Exhibition view. ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Ruscio, courtesy Fondazione MAXXI

The Street. Where the World is Made/La Strada. Dove si crea il mondo. Exhibition view. ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Ruscio, courtesy Fondazione MAXXI

The Street. Where the World is Made/La Strada. Dove si crea il mondo. Exhibition view. ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Ruscio, courtesy Fondazione MAXXI

The Street. Where the World is Made/La Strada. Dove si crea il mondo was curated by Hou Hanru and the curatorial team of MAXXI. The show remains open until 28 April at MAXXI in Rome.

X-Ray Architecture, by architecture historian Beatriz Colomina.

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Publisher Lars Müller writes: Modern architecture and the X-ray were born around the same time and evolved in parallel. While the X-ray exposed the inside of the body to the public eye, the modern building unveiled its interior, dramatically inverting the relationship between private and public. Architects presented their buildings as a kind of medical instrument for protecting and enhancing the body and psyche.

Beatriz Colomina traces the psychopathologies of twentieth-century architecture—from the trauma of tuberculosis to more recent disorders such as burn-out syndrome and ADHD—and the huge transformations of privacy and publicity instigated by diagnostic tools from X-Rays to MRIs and beyond. She suggests that if we want to talk about the state of architecture today, we should look to the dominant obsessions with illness and the latest techniques of imaging the body—and ask what effects they have on the way we conceive architecture.

Children during a heliotherapy session, 1937. From: Le Visage de L’enfance (Paris: Horizon, 1937), p. 201

Frits Peutz, Schunck Glass Palace, Heerlen, the Netherlands, 1935

The machine we live in is an old coach full of tuberculosis, wrote Le Corbusier in his 1923 essay Towards a New Architecture.

He and many of his fellow modern architects made it one of their missions to expel tuberculosis and other diseases from buildings. It wasn’t just the health of patients that was to be restored but everyone’s. After all, some of these architects believed, we are all sick to some varying degrees.

Beatriz Colomina (whose previous publications The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196x-197x and Domesticity at War i greatly enjoyed) unravels the links between Modern Architecture, tuberculosis and X-ray, the technology associated with it. The hypothesis that tuberculosis helped make modern architecture modern sounds like a bold one but Colomina is very convincing when she explains how architecture responded to the anxieties of a society obsessed with fresh air, sun light, the spreading of germs, physical exercise and hygiene.

Hydrotherapy at the sanatorium “Lebendige Kraft,” full body wrap by Dr. Maximilian Bircher-Brenner, Zurich, 1910. Universität Zürich, Institut für Medizingeschichte Bircher-Brenner-Archiv

Dr Jean Saidman, Revolving Sanatorium in Aix-Les-Bains, France, 1930. Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images

The general consensus at the time was that a patient suffering from TB needed to live and breathe in an environment that would dry out the inside of their body. Cue to architects designing domestic gym rooms for exercising as well as roofs and balconies for sunbathing.

The real testing ground of new techniques, materials, experiments and architectural innovations however, was the sanatorium. Alvar Aalto, for example, saw patients as ‘horizontal clients’ and adapted the architecture of the medical establishment to their supine position. The Paimio Sanatorium he designed was an integral part of the medical treatment. Radiologist Jean Saidman conceived a revolving sanatorium that ensured that patients faced the sun as much as possible.

Modern architecture aspired to heal the body but also the psyche, with smooth, white and clean surfaces that would anaesthetize bodily sensations. Buildings were thus conceived as a form of medical equipment, an exercise machine but also a cocoon sheltering the fragile psyche. Richard Neutra even claimed that his works could improve the sex life of their inhabitants.

Alvar Aalto, Paimio Sanatorium, exterior view with sundeck balconies, ca. 1934. Alvar Aalto Museum Jyväskylä, Finland

Winning models Marianne Baba (L), Lois Conway (C) and Ruth Swensen standing next to plates of their x-ray during a Chiropractor Beauty contest. (Photo by Wallace Kirkland//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

X-Ray had an even more profound impact on architecture. Its dicovery refashioned the perception of space and in particular the relation between inside and outside. After x-ray, modern buildings started to look like medical imaging with transparent glass walls that revealed the inner structure. Furniture, light bulbs, pyrex cookware followed their lead. And because x-ray also changed the concept of what is visible and what is invisible, the private became the subject of public scrutiny.

Colomina adds another dimension to this architecture: the blurred vision, the glass surface of the building that catches the gaze in layers of reflections of the surrounding environment. Describing the Glass House (1949) he had built, Philip Johnson compared its glass surface to a beautiful, ever-changing wallpaper.

Passive Millimeter Imaging (PMI). Front and back X- ray views of a male subject during BodySearch surveillance. Revealed on the body are bags of cocaine (shoulder, waist); scalpel blades (chest); plastic gun (back); metal gun and file (legs)

You don’t have to be passionate about architecture to be engrossed in this book. The text is witty, clear and packed with anecdotes. The photos are plentiful and often astonishing (to me at least.) More interestingly, Colomina’s research finds many echoes in contemporary society. The impact architecture can have on our well-being is still a contemporary preoccupation, with calls to design buildings that will encourage people to move and shed weight or with the current discussions around sick building syndrome some office workers suffer from. The quest for transparency also remains very much alive. With the difference that surveillance technology has now replaced glass walls. In short, the book might be entertaining but it also does a great job at highlighting how the architectural discipline is capable of assimilating and reflecting changes in society.

Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret boxing on the beach in Piquey, 1933

Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta, Photographie mittelst der Röntgen-Strahlen, 1896, cover and Chamäleon cristatus

Fluoroscopy of the chest, New York Medical Journal, February 23, 1907

Alvar Aalto, Paimio sanatorium, upper sun terrace with patients taking the fresh-air cure, 1933. Alvar Aalto Museum Jyväskylä, Finland

B. Čermák, the Viewing Glass Tower of the Chamber of Commerce Pavilion, Exhibition of Contemporary Culture in Czechoslovakia, Brno, 1928

View of SANAA’s installation in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, Barcelona, 2008. Fundacio Mies van der Rohe

Maison de Verre, 31 rue St-Guillaume, Paris

Exterior view of George Keck’s Crystal House, constructed c. 1934 for Chicago’s Century of Progress World’s Fair. This photograph was taken at night and features R. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Car parked within

Spreads:

Other books by Beatriz Colomina: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196x-197x and Domesticity at War.

It’s easy to be a future-phobic these days. It’s easy to be anxious, dubious, critical about what tomorrow will bring. Unfortunately, it’s less easy to ignore the future and pretend we don’t care. The future is, as we know, already here with its cohort of mass extinction, private armies, state surveillance and climate disasters. But is that all there is to the future?

Entrance of the STRP festival. Design by HeyHeyDeHaas. Photo by Boudewijn Bollmann for STRP

Quayola, Promenade. Photo by Hanneke Wetzer for STRP

This year’s edition of the STRP festival in Eindhoven decided to look at the future with an open, critical and -dare i say- hopeful eye. Their take on the future is not about being naive and resolutely utopian. It’s more subtle than that. It’s about realizing that being stifled by fear is what leaves us in the hands of powerful corporations, far right politicians and other merchants of solutions too rosy and simple to be credible.

As STRP writes in their statement:

We refuse to flee in a crippling nostalgia. We have had enough of the dark and tough flirt with dystopia and ask ourselves out loud: how in heaven’s name can we come through this conservative and fear-driven period together?

This year, the STRP festival looked for inspiration in artistic experiments that evoke the possibility of a more nuanced future. The participating artists never promised to have all the answers but at least they broaden the questions and perspectives.

I’ll come back later with a report on the STRP conference. In the meantime, here’s my quick tour of some of the artworks i particularly enjoyed in the exhibition this year:

Mike Mills, A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought Alone (excerpt), 2014

Mike Mills interviewed about a dozen children of people who work at Silicon Valley. Some of these parents are engineers, others work at a Google cafeteria.

Aged eight to twelve, these children are the ones who will actually be inhabiting the future that the Silicon Valley is selling to us.

First, the filmmaker asks them to speak briefly about themselves. That’s as charming as you might expect. Soon, however, Mills casts the children as futurologists. It turns out that when they are asked about what tomorrow will bring, kids can be quite ambivalent. Some look at the future with bright, enthusiastic eyes. Others are disillusioned. Most present a mix of enthusiasm and pessimism. On the one hand, they embrace technology. They play Minecraft and think that because we have access to so much knowledge, we must be smarter than our ancestors. But their vision of tomorrow can be bleak too: we won’t have trees anymore, we’ll get holographic plants instead; people won’t meet each other physically because the machines will mediate all human interactions, there probably won’t be any animal around either.

The whole film is online.

Hannes Wiedemann, Grinders (A North Star 1.0 implant is being inserted into a person’s arm)

Hannes Wiedemann, Grinders (Amanda is receiving a ‘tragus magnet implant’, Tehachapi, CA)

Hannes Wiedemann, Grinders. Exhibition view at STRP. Photo: Hanneke Wetzer

Hannes Wiedemann, Grinders (Implantation of a ‘tragus magnet implant’ is being performed while others are watching and recording the procedure with their mobile phones. Tehachapi, CA)

Body hackers are decidedly less hesitant about the positive impacts of technology on their life. They call themselves Grinders, implant magnets in their finger to aquire a sixth sense, embed speakers into their ears and attempt to get closer to machines in order to simplify their lives.

Hannes Wiedemann met members of this community and documented some of their operations. Since no licensed surgeon would accept to perform these procedures for them, the hackers have to learn how to do it themselves (or to each others). It’s risky and far more gory than the idealised vision of the transhumanist future that Ray Kurzweil and his friends are presenting us with.

What makes their faith in technology so interesting is the way it challenges the future and ethics of body enhancement.

Quayola, Promenade (excerpt)

Quayola, Promenade. Photo by Hanneke Wetzer

Quayola uses machines to enhance human perception but his approach is far less intrusive than the one adopted by the Grinders. Promenade follows a drone as it is flying over the forests of the Vallée de Joux in Switzerland. The film explores the logic and aesthetics of autonomous vehicles computer-vision systems. These machines scan natural environments, decode and portray them using parameters and perception tools different from the ones a human would use.

The artist conceived this work as another chapter in the long historic tradition of landscape painting. Just like his artistic predecessors, he (or maybe the machine) uses the landscape as a pretext to discover new aesthetic languages.

Teun Vonk, A Sense of Gravity, 2019. Photo: Hanneke Wetzer

Teun Vonk, A Sense of Gravity, 2019. Photo: Hanneke Wetzer

Teun Vonk wants to make us more aware of the continuous pull of gravity. His immersive installation encloses the visitor (only one at a time) inside a space that challenges their every senses. But it is less about what you feel when you’re suspended in his big soft vessel and more about how you reconnect with your bodily experience once the trip in the floating bubble is over and you’re walking back onto the ‘normal’ space.

The work invites us to reflect on weightlessness and the relevance of human physicality in the future. Will we completely forget about it as our lives become more and more virtual? Will it take another dimension if we ever get to leave this planet and move to some distant celestial body?

Aki Inomata, Why not hand over a ‘shelter’ to hermit crabs?, 2009-ongoing

Aki Inomata, Why not hand over a ‘shelter’ to hermit crabs?, 2009-ongoing. Photo by Juliette Bibasse

Aki Inomata, Why not hand over a ‘shelter’ to hermit crabs?, 2009-ongoing. Photo by Hanneke Wetzer

Hermit crabs are born with soft, exposed abdomens that leave them vulnerable to predators. They protect their body by squatting empty seashell or hollow pieces of wood they find abandoned on beaches. Increasingly also they adopt the trash that litters our shores. As they grow, they need to move house and find bigger shells.

Aki Inomata creates artificial shells that adapt to the natural shapes of hermit crabs.

Based on CT scans of real hermit crabs’ shells, her 3D-printed habitats feature iconic architectural monuments or even famous cityscapes. The artist then places one of her creations in a tank and waits to see if the small creature will pick up an organic shell or the plastic shelter as its new residency.

The project is delightful and it hints at a future when a new intimacy between the organic and the synthetic will be celebrated (surely we can do better than plastiglomerates and turtles chocking on discarded toys.) However, i wish it showed more compassion to hermits crabs. First, by enclosing them in much bigger tanks. But also by allowing them to enjoy the social life the species is used to.

Katja Heitmann, Laboratorium Motus Mori. Photo: Hanneke Wetzer

Katja Heitmann, Laboratorium Motus Mori. Photo: Hanneke Wetzer

Katja Heitmann, Laboratorium Motus Mori. Photo: Hanneke Wetzer

Over the past few decades, tech companies have quietly been patenting human gestures. Either to prevent competitors from relying on certain physical gestures or to make humans more machine-like.

Choreographer Katja Heitmann has been looking at the other side of this control of our every moves. As technology ‘optimises’ machines and humans and turns them into more ‘efficient’, more compliant tools, could some movements be perceived as superfluous and disappear over time?

Concerned by the possible ‘extinction’ of movements that are part and parcels of our humanity, the artist set up a theatrical laboratory in which she invited the public to donate conscious and unconscious movements. These movements were analysed by dancers and transformed into movement sculptures.

This living exhibition of moribund movements also invited the public to reflect on what makes us humans but might disappear under the pressure of productivity and efficiency.

Merijn Hos in collaboration with Jurriaan Hos, Soft Landing, 2019. Photo: Hanneke Wetzer for STRP

Merijn Hos in collaboration with Jurriaan Hos, Soft Landing, 2019. Photo: Hanneke Wetzer for STRP

Soft Landing is a set of curtains that surrounds your with layers of soft colours as you advance inside the installation towards a large orange ‘sun’. The colour spectrum goes from cold to warm and subtly change in intensity as more people join in. The less visitors are moving inside the space, the more vivid the hues.

HeyHeydeHaas with Désirée Hammen and Pol Tijssen, Exit Through The Flower Shop, 2019. Photo by Boudewijn Bollmann

HeyHeydeHaas with Désirée Hammen and Pol Tijssen, Exit Through The Flower Shop, 2019. Photo by Boudewijn Bollmann

HeyHeydeHaas with Désirée Hammen and Pol Tijssen, Exit Through The Flower Shop, 2019. Photo by Boudewijn Bollmann

To exit the festival, all visitors had to walk through ‘the flower shop’ where they couldn’t buy flowers but they could linger and enjoy their scents, colours and total absence of electronic components. I thought it was a stroke of genius. The flowers almost magically brought visitors back to their basic physical senses and reminded them that some things, like the appreciation of the simple things in life, will never change.

Augmented Reality Tour Billennium with Uninvited Guests & Duncan Spearman. Photo by Boudewijn Bollmann

Augmented Reality Tour Billennium with Uninvited Guests & Duncan Spearman. Photo by Boudewijn Bollmann

The ruminations around the future continued outside of the exhibition space….

Only a few decades ago, Strijp-S (where the STRP festival is located) was an industrial park that belonged to electronics company Philips. The area was nicknamed ‘the forbidden city’. Only Philips employees could enter. In the 1990s Philips gradually left Eindhoven and in the early 2000s, the old factories opened up their doors again. This time to artists workshops, design shops and offices for the creative sectors. Uninvited Guests & Duncan Spearman took visitors on a time-traveling guided tour of the Strijp-S area.

The narrative starts with the arrival of Philips in the area, then quickly moves the current hip and design identity of the area. Soon, past and present are discarded and we were invited to move around the area and see the future of Strijp-S.

The “archaeologists of the future” who guided the tour gave us a smartphone and a selfie stick to raise towards the built environment. After a few seconds to allow the AR technology to adjust, future architectures and activities appeared on the screen. We could see and hear the world of Strijp in 2030 and later we could also experience the area in 2090. 2030 was innocent enough. All organic food on balconies, energy-saving public lights, etc. 2090 was downright dystopian and riotous.

The last chapter of the tour was an invitation to imagine and design Strijp’s future. I found myself in the group with the wildest imagination: a volcano would fill the main square in 2060, it would spit cooked sushi for roaming dinosaurs (de-extinct thanks to the wonders of biotech) to feast on. As we were fantasizing about this wild future, it started appearing on our screens. A visual artist was listening to our conversations and drawing our speculations from a nearby office and then streaming it to our devices.

Augmented Reality Tour Billennium managed to materialize a reality that isn’t here yet. It also turned out to be a very entertaining and smart way to engage participants in lively debates about their local context and how it will be affected by the passing of time.

More works and images from the exhibition:

Lauren McCarthy, Waking Agents, 2019. Photo by Hanneke Wetzer

Lauren McCarthy, Waking Agents, 2019. Photo by Hanneke Wetzer

Yann Deval & Marie G. Losseau, Atlas. Photo by Boudewijn Bollmann

Yann Deval & Marie G. Losseau, Atlas. Photo by Boudewijn Bollmann

Yann Deval & Marie G. Losseau, Atlas. Photo by Hanneke Wetzer

The STRP exhibition was curated by Gieske Bienert, Juliette Bibasse and Ton van Gool. The next edition of the festival will take place in Eindhoven on 2 to 5 April 2020. But the next Scenario # 3 is already planned for 6 June 2019.

Plastic Capitalism. Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste, by Amanda Boetzkes, Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

Amazon USA and UK.

Publisher MIT Press writes: Ecological crisis has driven contemporary artists to engage with waste in its most non-biodegradable forms: plastics, e-waste, toxic waste, garbage hermetically sealed in landfills. In this provocative and original book, Amanda Boetzkes links the increasing visualization of waste in contemporary art to the rise of the global oil economy and the emergence of ecological thinking. Often, when art is analyzed in relation to the political, scientific, or ecological climate, it is considered merely illustrative. Boetzkes argues that art is constitutive of an ecological consciousness, not simply an extension of it. The visual culture of waste is central to the study of the ecological condition.

Edward Ruscha, Molten Polyester, 2005

Drawing on the writings of Georges Bataille, Timothy Morton, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Rancière and other thinkers of modernity, aesthetics, politics and ecology, Amanda Boetzkes investigates the use of waste in contemporary art. In her essay, the art historian challenges us not to reduce an artwork using waste to a critique of consumer culture or of modernism in general. It’s more complicated than that. If waste is so popular among artists today, she explains, it is because it reveals the value systems, beliefs and politics that shape our planetary condition.

Plastic Capitalism is both a book about contemporary art and an essay that exposes the blind spots between economy and ecology. Through her selection of artworks, the author dissects waste and reveals its many dimensions, dilemmas and contradictions. Waste is both valueless and a commodity. It is visible and invisible. It is a lowly legacy of global capitalism and a formidable force that hides complex industrial infrastructures, labor power and massive energy expenditures.

Alain Delorme, Murmurations: Ephemeral Plastic Sculptures, 2012-2014. Film by Quentin Labail

The final chapter offers a stimulating reflection on plastic. Plastic, Boetzkes explains, is the ultimate petroleum-based material, the agent that symbolizes humanity’s mastery of planet and its total impotence to alter the course of the Anthropocene, it is the icon of throw-away culture and of a durability that stretches into a future when there’s no one left to use it.

I won’t pretend that Plastic Capitalism is a light and easy book. I often found myself huffing and ploughing through the text. Yet, i soldiered on. The author’s readings of the work of well-known and less famous artists (Mal Chin, Agnes Varda, Critical Art Ensemble, Agnes Denes, Thomas Hirschhorn, etc.) opened up new perspectives on performances and installations i thought i knew. It also allowed me to see more clearly that the formidable power of waste extends far beyond its (much visualized and calculated) physical mass.

Some of the works i (re)discovered in Plastic Capitalism:

Critical Art Ensemble, A Temporary Monument to North America Energy Security, 2014

Critical Art Ensemble, A Temporary Monument to North America Energy Security, 2014

Antony Gormley, Waste Man, 2006

Francis Alÿs, The Seven Lives of Garbage, 1994. Photo via

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 24 July 1979 – 26 June 1980

Tejal Shah, Between the Waves – Landfill Dance, 2012

Swaantje Güntzel and Jan Philip Scheib, Spring Cleaning performance from the Plastisphere series, 2016

An Te Liu, White Dwarf, 2012 at the Musée d’art de Joliette

Tara Donovan, Untitled (Plastic Cups), 2006-2015