About the work
“What are you?” “What do you do?” “What’s your work about?”
I think, doodle with images, and write about the crisis of the visual. I explore language; its instability, its tyranny, its poetics, its generative power; its constant articulations through and as matter.
Silence.
Or,
“Oh, I was sure it was about AI.”
I’ve long been obsessed with language, value systems, and our Western insistence that language exists outside and separate from matter, which, perhaps due to training as an actor in the early 90s, never rang true. In the framework I subscribe to, having experienced as much during those years, language and material are fundamentally inseparable, except through our habitual desire to categorise and apply value. Languagematerial always and only ever emerges from and informs itself. We are part of that process, not aliens flown in from a different universe. AI, therefore, is inevitable to my inquiries, scribbles and digital doodles, since it too is a manifestation; intra-acting languagematerial. As is paper, text, image, speech and voice, to name a few others. I tend to be less interested in what an image might look like than in how it emerges. The interplay of matter, which may always be languagematter, is what interests me most, while acknowledging that despite the proliferation of images, what we see/hear/feel when we engage with them continues to seduce and repulse us viscerally. This does not mean I am on the side of process vs representation. I am impatient with such binary splits, especially when, as argued by Vikcki Kirby (2011), they ‘entrench the logic they claim to undermine’.
Language is integral to all of us and my work; a revolution is taking place inside and through language – the fluidity of code, through which AI operates, seems fundamentally related to the fluidity and complexity the world is grappling with today.
We’re lving though a linguistic/techno/scientific revolution which is happening whether we want it to or not, know about it, or (and for a variety of reasons, some of which render individuals and groups relatively blameless, some less so) remain barely aware of associated, often violent, or disturbing paradigmatic shifts and relational consequences.
Such a reality both drives and emerges from our informational age, an era in which everything is potentially reduced to a soup of undifferentiated slop, apparently leaving us untethered, prone to paranoia and resistant to reason; but it also brings experimentation with form, allowing us to address systems and modalities that want overturning and/or reconfiguring. Straight dichotomies that many took for granted no longer look so certain, despite voices insisting on the opposite. In a universe underpinned by digital ‘scribing’ systems, ancient absence and presence are usurped by pattern and pedesis (a term employed by Thomas Nail to describe material movement that isn’t utterly unconstrained, although from our point of view, can seem erratic and chaotic). As such, my work addresses the potentials and risks of these shifts, but it is neither practice nor theory-led, which remains in the realm of ‘either/or’ logic. Kirby’s evolved concept of always/already feels more helpful, hopeful and forgiving. The inquiries on these pages are examples of ongoing, entangled, embodied discovery that come about via my obsessions with the feminine and contemporary media’s influence, constitution or destruction of our world (often simultaneously). I aim to celebrate and exploit the dissolution of entrenched binaries and dualisms within a symbolic realm that feels dangerously unstable and/or wonderfully fluid, depending on your point of view and tolerance for opposing tensions and/or acceptance of ‘superposition’ (a term borrowed from quantum mechanics by François Laurelle and subsequently Katarina Kolozova to describe the way opposing forces can exist together while transforming each other, i.e. deeply entangled). However, I also acknowledge and worry about resulting instability and loss of collective ground, even though much of that ground can seem redundant, if not antediluvian. As I work through paradoxes and philosophical conundrums, I do my utmost to avoid negative nostalgia, nihilism and sanctimony, holding on to empathy for all I’m worth. (Of course, I frequently fail. Nevertheless, empathy and a commitment to pluralism, underpinned by Martin Buber’s concepts of dialogue and listening, sit at the core of my project. Listening sometimes entails hearing, not to what is voiced, but to what isn’t.)
Influenced by Maya Deren’s call to discover a new language for film in the 1930s and 40s, in the 21st century, I embrace an expanded definition of 'the image', encompassing optical, sonic, and haptic elements (Nail, 2019). I categorically reject accepted media hierarchies. Poetry can be made with anything, even shit. So far, I’ve avoided literal shit but will mix various materials – from tinfoil, film, and textiles to AI-generated content and organic matter – while rejecting received wisdom about the value of this or that medium over another. This results in projects that aim to traipse across and through boundaries, manifesting simultaneously in print, online, or installation, with image, text and performance. Nevertheless, I heed Hannah Arendt’s warning in Truth and Politics; beware of images made in the mechanised (and now automated) world, however they come into being.
Books/articles that inform the work:
Arendt, H. (1968). 'Truth and Politics', in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Enlarged edition. New York: Viking Press, pp. 227-264.
Buber, M. (2002). Between Man and Man. Translated by R. G. Smith. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203220092.
Deren, M. (1946). An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. New York: The Alicat Book Shop Press.
Gamble, C.N., Hanan, J.S. and Nail, T. (2019) ‘WHAT IS NEW MATERIALISM?’, Angelaki, 24(6), pp. 111–134. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1684704.
Hayles, N.K. (2017) Unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious. Chicago (Ill.): University of Chicago Press.
Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kirby, V. (2011). Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kolozova, K. (2017). ‘Philosophy as capitalism and the socialist radically metaphysical response to it’, Labyrinth, 19(2), pp. 57–66.
Nail, T. (2019). Theory of the Image. Oxford: Oxford University Press.