Archive
Lost Islands at the Helsinki Biennial: a conversation with Samir Bhowmik
I had the pleasure to be an advisor for Samir Bhowmik’s art and performance project Lost Islands (2021) that was commissioned by the Helsinki Biennial. Here’s a talk/conversation we did with Samir as part of the public talks program of the Biennial – we discussed the Anthropocene, performance arts, the island and infrastructure, and other themes stemming from the Lost Islands (as well as Samir’s own art-research work).
Lost Islands
Lost Islands, a performance project by Samir Bhowmik (and co-choreography by Esete Sutinen) is on now at the Helsinki Biennial. Book your place if in Helsinki, but have a look at the trailer video for a glimpse of the themes: anthropocene, infrastructure, architecture, etc.
“Lost Islands is a series of expeditions tracing the route of an imaginary subterranean and underwater cable through the island of Vallisaari, with the artist serving as tour guide and narrator. The expeditions venture into the island’s topography, forested pathways, waterways, historical buildings, ruins and bunkers. Along the way, visitors are engaged and immersed in installations, film, theatre, contemporary dance, song, and experimental music. The expeditions will take place as a series of events staged on the island from June to August.”
For more info on the work and credits, see also https://helsinkibiennaali.fi/en/artist/samir-bhowmik/ .
Media Theory with the Terraformers
A new interview is out in the Strelka Mag. We conducted this discussion with Yulia Gromova in Moscow during my teaching gig at Strelka’s The Terraforming program in February. The interview also briefly touches on my brief that we executed with the program researchers: we inaugurated a new synthetic discipline called A Natural History of Logistics and related to the body of work in media theory, architecture, urbanism, etc. The idea was to tease out various historical and contemporary – actual and speculative – points of connections between systems often deemed “natural” and “technological” so as to problematise the division into the two, and also to understand the various affordances so-called natural systems have in relation to questions of infrastructure and logistics. This also then facilitated looking at the various material frictions in logistical systems in relation to territories, environmental concerns, political questions, etc. The results presented by the Strelka researchers of the Terraforming cohort 2019-2020 – from architects to designers to artists etc. – were really inspiring and impressive.
The interview in Strelka Mag also speaks of some other work, including on Geology of Media etc.
The Amazon Machine
Joana Moll’s new project The Hidden Life of an Amazon User launches online, investigating the relations of code, users, logistics, space and transport. It also deals with the double energies of energy infrastructures of online platforms/logistics companies such as Amazon, and the energies of usage of customers. I was also invited to write for the project; in my short text I outline how “Moll’s critical interface project can also be considered an experimental set up of the Standard Amazon User (SAU): a semi-automated algorithmic pattern of interface actions that are measured and guided by a mass of code and synchronised in relation to the planetary scale logistical operation that is the backbone of Amazon’s infrastructural and data-intensive operations – the warehouse driven architecture of digital economy. “
The full text here.
In Conversation with Geocinema
The Digital Earth fellowship program enabled me to work with Solveig Suess and Asia Bazdyrieva from Geocinema over a half a year period, and here’s a podcast conversation we recorded (with a big hat tip to Jessika Khazrik) recently. We discuss Geocinema project and their work in China relating to the Digital Belt and Road, and their methodologies of (feminist) filmmaking, audiovisual aesthetics of infrastructure, geopolitics and more. Their work resonates strongly with what is the core of the Digital Earth program’s theme:
“Digital Earth’ refers to the materiality and immateriality of the digital reality we live in – from data centers to software interfaces, and rare minerals to financial derivatives. Earth is dug, excavated, and ripped apart to extract the fundamental materials that keep the computational machine running – oil, coltan, sand, rubber, lithium form the material basis on which digital reality is built. At the same time, digital technologies enable new modes of circulation and extraction, of information and data.”
For me, the fellowship scheme linked also nicely to the Operational Images project that has recently started. I also recently discussed their work in relation to questions of Farocki’s operational images/Sekula’s instrumental images, and what sort of resonances and dissonances there exists in these conceptualisations and methods of moving and still images that concern automation, remote sensing, infrastructure, and large-scale systems. My next plan is to write some of these thoughts up into an article.
Have a listen and share with others who might be interested!
Operational Images project funding
Some news: I am happy to announce that we have won a large grant for our proposal “Operational Images and Visual Culture” with colleagues at FAMU, photography department, part of the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague. Funded by the Czech Science Academy, our research team will engage with contemporary visual culture, photographic theory and the notion of operational images that stems from Harun Farocki’s work. The project is not solely focused on Farocki but the concept of the operational – sometimes translated as operative – image becomes one of the guiding lines of inquiry that facilitates useful, interesting and alternative ways to understand media archaeology of technical images (as patterns, as measurement, as instructions etc.) and contemporary practices of photography. Automated, instructive, algorithmic, measuring and non-representational images are here part of our focus that stems from some of the discussions of past year’s of media, film and visual theory.
FAMU has a great reputation, not least as a renowned film school and I have had the pleasure of collaborating especially with Dr. Tomáš Dvořák over the past year on other projects already. Stay tuned for updates from our Operational Images project and please get in touch if you have any questions!
The Project’s FAMU website for further info.
Library’s Other Intelligences videos
Our show Library’s Other Intelligences is on at Oodi in Helsinki until March 10th and we have now our videos of the three featured pieces! Please find links below:
Jenna Sutela: nimiia ïzinibimi
Jenna Sutela’s nimiia ïzinibimi is a unique book based on an invented new language representing those who lack first-hand access to, or the ability to produce, “natural” language.
Samir Bhowmik & 00100 ENSEMBLE: Memory Machines
Samir Bhowmik’s and 00100 ENSEMBLE’s Memory Machines is a performative art project that explores the infrastructure of the Central Library Oodi
Tuomas A. Laitinen: Swarm Chorus
Tuomas A. Laitinen presents Swarm Chorus. He composed a performative installation and a sound piece with generative tools that are interpreting the construction of medieval musical canons. The work as a whole is likened to an ecosystem of circulating substances, with its words, inspired by ecological science fiction, functioning as fictional recipe poems describing and decoding an alchemistic combination of matter and meaning.
In addition, the Code, Craft, and Catalogues: Arts in the Libraries-seminar will take place in New York on March 9th. It is also part of the Mobius fellowship program.
Earth/Sky exhibition in San Diego
I am happy to announce that our exhibition Earth/Sky opens in San Diego, at Calit2 gallery in March! Curated by me and Ryan Bishop, the exhibition features works by Heba Y. Amin, Femke Herregraven and Susan Schuppli. Please find below a longer curatorial note and a schedule of the opening seminar we are organising in conjunction of the launch party (March 7th).
EARTH/SKY is an exhibition of environmentally-informed artistic engagements with the intersection of vertical and horizontal planes. The art works explore the myriad ways in which the juxtaposition of earth and sky metonymically evokes a range of X/Y axes that allows for material and immaterial interactions between horizontal and vertical planes. The ground of the earth is also the ground that delineates when air becomes sky. The cinematic image and the calculated image are a further part of defining how the vertical and horizontal, the earth and the sky link up as realities that can be measured. The images that are presented in these works are also in such a way technical forms of measurement – from climate science to the political control of territories. From climate change to contemporary finance and migration, the pieces set environmental questions and environmental perspectives into a dialogue with contemporary global politics that always, however, is situated across particular regions and sites: from aerial views of oil slick simulations to bird flock and drones in desert landscapes of Egypt and on the fictional landscapes of swamps and shorelines, images conjure territories and territories are conjured up landscapes on the X/Y axis.
Three artists included in the exhibition are Susan Schuppli (London, UK), Femke Herregraven, an artist based in the Netherlands, and Heba Y. Amin, a Berlin-based Egyptian artist. Schuppli’s installation “Nature Represents Itself” is an oil film simulation and hydrocarbon composition that documents both the initial surface slick as well as subsurface plumes resulting from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Produced in 2018, this simulation is exhibited in conjunction with audio detailing the lawsuit led on behalf of the rights of nature against BP. While satellite transmissions, the underwater video feed, and even Public Lab’s activist mapping project all combined to document the aftermath of the disaster, the slick was already operationalizing an independent mode of media itself. Oil spills are literally slick images that find their cinematic origins in petroleum production. Schuppli presents the oil spill in its legal and aesthetic form to propose the ecological site as a material witness fully capable of representing its own damaged condition.
Herregraven’s “Sprawling Swamps,” was shown at transmediale 2018. An ongoing multimedia project begun in 2016, “Sprawling Swamps” is a series of fictional infrastructures dispersed within the cracks of the contemporary financial geography that operate on a technological, legal and social level. The infrastructures are located in specific locations from swamps to shorelines but also engage with the immaterial economies of value. The piece attempts to engage with infrastructure as it relates to the turbulent dynamics of nature – itself a crucial part of the current discussions about landscape that is determined across technological and ecological questions.
The third piece in the show, Amin’s “As Birds Flying”, provides a view of the sky in flight and as flight, but in so doing comments on politics, surveillance, paranoia and environmental manipulation. A self-conscious mediation on the aerial view and its erasure of the geometry of perspective inherited from the Renaissance, Amin’s work explore the political absurdity generated by an obsession with the televisual mastery of the air and ground. Taking an incident from 2013, in which a stork fitted with an electronic device for migratory research was mistaken for a non-human source of surveillance and thus taken into custody by Egyptian officials, Amin’s cinematic response then becomes a meditation on migration of birds in parallel to human migration and the control of also rural territories. “The short, allegorical film is constructed out of found drone footage of aerial views of savannas and wetlands, including settlements in Galilea – sweeping views that seem to be taken by the ‘spy’ stork in the above story. ‘Seeing the country from the top is better than seeing it from below’, the soundtrack says, with footage of a bird soaring in the air. Funny, absurd and disconcerting, the video’s suspenseful cinematic soundtrack contains the reconstructed audio sequences of dialogue from Adel Imam’s lm Birds of Darkness.”
Each of these three works explore how the intersection of earth and sky is imagined, realized, subverted, represented and manufactured within complex ecologies of time, finance, science, technology, aesthetics and power. The ineluctably inextricable dimensions of ecological and environmental influence of sky on earth and earth on sky become the foundations for aesthetic, scientific, technological and political examination provided by these three artworks.
The exhibition is accompanied by an artistic-academic panel that addresses the topic of earth and sky as examined by considerations of the earth’s surface and its vertical, media technological determinations.
We are also screening Susan Schuppli’s vertical cinema piece Atmospheric Feedback Loops as part of the opening event.
Earth/Sky
Thursday, March 7, 2019
Time: 5:00pm-7:30pm
5:00 Calit2 Auditorium; Atmospheric Feedback Loops Screening
5:30 Panel Discussion with Ryan Bishop, Jussi Parikka, Susan Schuppli, and Femke Herregraven, Moderated by Jordan Crandall
6:30 Reception and gallery open
The show will run March 7-June 7, 2019, with gallery hours 12pm-5pm Monday-Friday.
The events are free and open to the public
http://gallery.calit2.net
http://qi.ucsd.edu/events/event.php?id=2974
For the opening, RSVP requested to galleryinfo@calit2.net
Library’s Other Intelligences opens
I am happy to share that our joint project with Shannon Mattern, Library’s Other Intelligences, opens in the new Oodi library in Helsinki in January!
Digital cultures of alternative intelligence, library architectures as a stage for performance and imaginary languages, and memory machines tours that take you through the library as a living organism of infrastructure are some of the themes the works by Jenna Sutela, Samir Bhowmik and Tuomas A. Laitinen address!
The opening takes place on January 11th including a small symposium on January 12th. There is also a press tour on Wednesday 9th of January – please be in touch if you want to attend.
Warm welcome to all! A brief blurb below including a link to the Memory Machines tours.
Memory Machines tours: January 11, 12 &13 at 18:30. Sign up here.
The Library’s Other Intelligences, an art project organized by the MOBIUS Fellowship Program of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York in collaboration with the Helsinki Public Library, will open at the new Central Library Oodi in January 2019. The project features newly commissioned artworks, original research and a series of events, including an opening celebration on Friday, January 11, and a symposium on Saturday, January 12.
MOBIUS fellows Jussi Parikka (University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art, UK) and Shannon Mattern (The New School, US) have commissioned Finnish artists Samir Bhowmik, Tuomas A. Laitinen, and Jenna Sutela to create works that examine the new intelligences represented in our evolving knowledge institutions. These artworks reveal the alien logics of neural nets, give voice to machinic and speculative languages, and make visible the material infrastructures that allow intelligence to circulate. The exhibition’s featured artists are known for work that engages with AI, biological intelligence, digital culture, and the infrastructures of modern societies.
Visitors to the library will be invited to engage with the works – and with the new building – by attending live performances, embarking on expeditions, and reimagining how we will read, listen, and learn in a new techno-cultural future. The opening celebration will take place at Oodi on Friday, January 11, from 7 to 10pm; and the curators and artists will host a symposium about the exhibition on Saturday, January 12, from 2 to 4pm.
Image: Jenna Sutela: nimiia ïzinibimi, 2019
On Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio (1932-2018) passed away recently in September. We wrote a short piece with Ryan Bishop about him – Blitzkrieg Baby.
Machinology 