Current discourse around technology and its latest carnation is fraught and raging. Materialism and its Discontents expresses concerns, confusion, excitement, and the loss that a Judeo-Christian outlook on life must grapple with through the lens of art in our era. It invites readers to reflect on the interplay between art and technology, the sacred and the scientific, the personal and the universal.
This zine provides readers with a snapshot of an ongoing inquiry. It is a small manifestation which emerged via ongoing questions, doubts, and frustrations that feed into a wider project. All the manifestations that emerge from my scribblings are entangled relations, and this is a sibling to the work I made with Maria Ahmed.
The publication’s contents and its related blog-posts result from a fruitful, perhaps a little angry, energetic moment in my rambling investigations.
The ramblings and meanderings related to the zine have been collected here and are listed below:
Some of the contradictions, complexities and difficulties I explore in the posts above also fed into a somewhat more cohesive talk I gave for the OU/Shifting Power’s After AI Symposium last week. I had to ask for that talk not to be recorded since some of it will form new work, which has been promised elsewhere. I will share news about that as and when it’s ready.
Draft cover for zine published as a continuation of these blogs, title to be confirmed
Continuing on from the previous posts which relate to religion, materialism and meaning:
From Ettinger: “the trouBle with metaphors of symBiosis and plasticity when applied to the human being — where life for the sake of life thrives with no consideration for the human individual, its consciousness, memory, and pregnancy—when such vision concerns a human being considered from the perspective of autopoiesis, where each organism takes care of its own ontogenetic emergence in a defensive and hostile way—is that such symBiosis, such plasticity, and such a paradigm to think the other of the self undermine the possiBility of ethics.” (2020; §23)
The above has synergies with McGilchrist
From Freud
From Nail: “De Rerum Natura calls for nothing less than a wholesale overturning of Western philosophy with its statism, logocentrism, idealism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity.” And “To overturn religion, from the Latin words religion and religio, is to overturn the first and most basic misunderstanding of philosophy: that stasis comes before movement.” (2019; p51)
From O’Gieblyn
Refs:
Ettinger, B. (2020) ‘Beyond the Death-Drive, beyond the Life-Drive: Being-toward- Birthing with Being-toward-Birth; Copoiesis and the Matrixial Eros—Metafeminist Notes’, in P. de Assis and P. Giudici (eds) Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2. Leuven, BELGIUM: Leuven University Press. Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=5983407 (Accessed: 11 October 2022).
Freud, S., McLintock, D. and Freud, S. (2002) Civilization and its discontents. London [: Penguin.
O’Gieblyn, M. (2021) God, human, animal, machine: technology, metaphor, and the search for meaning. First edition. New York: Doubleday.
Nail, T. (2019) Theory of the image. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Potential Connection Two: Reconsidering the lines (of control) around concepts.
This is the third in a series of blogs in which I record seemingly random and unconnected thoughts which relate to contemporary art and “But a child could do that!” responses. It is much longer than the previous and again, does not promise resolution. Recall, that it was Iain McGilchrist’s comments about contemporary art at the end of his book The Master and his Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2019) that sent me on this rambling investigation, when he wrote that future generations might look back on our era and wonder why we were so gullible to think certain contemporary art had anything valuable to offer. It is not really McGilchrist I am picking on, but a developing inquiry around the glaring obviousness of our material selves in a material world, and an emerging *”negative messianism”.
On one hand, he writes “The left hemisphere’s world is ultimately narcissistic, in the sense that it sees the world ‘out there’ as no more than a reflection of itself: the body becomes just the first thing we see out there, and we feel impelled to shape it to our sense of how it ‘should’ be. (Ibid, p48) which points to questions I have been asking. In the previous post, I wrote, “I have been reading Laurence Stern’s (2009;[1759]] The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman , which was written at a critical juncture within that making [of the Western world]. It is one of several potential connections, which seem to point to a general obsession with self in Western culture.”
But then McGilchrist thoroughly dismisses certain contemporary art, failing to see the artist’s role, not only as an observer and reporter but also as a conduit through which we might find ways to understand, question and explore the modern world and what he describes as its schizoid ontology. In the final section of his book, he titles a section “THE PROBLEM OF ART IN THE MODERN WORLD” (Ibid; 407). Don’t get me wrong, I think there is an awful lot to critique and question in contemporary art. I also side with his complaint, “Beauty is rarely mentioned in contemporary art critiques: in a reflection of the left hemisphere’s values, a work is now conventionally praised as ‘strong’ or ‘challenging’, in the rhetoric of power, the only rhetoric in all our relations with the world and with one another that we are now permitted” (Ibid: p.443). And I too have much to say about the anti-aesthetic, anti-photography, loser-images rhetoric that may come from a place of wanting to challenge dominant, commodified norms. But arguably, like most or all binary logic, it inadvertently underscores what it hopes to dismantle.
But here is where I start to become uncomfortable – and yes, I’m grown up to admit it is because his words challenge my strategies: “…metaphor and myth have been replaced by the symbolic, or worse, by a concept”. This seems unfair since myth is constantly being explored and re-explored in the contemporary art I explore and make. While he says a great deal valuable about art too, his view in the main seems unforgiving (Ibid; p442):
We stand or sit there solemnly contemplating the genius of the artwork, like the passive, well-behaved bourgeois that we are, when we should be calling someone’s bluff. My bet is that our age will be viewed in retrospect with amusement, as an age remarkable not only for its cynicism, but for its gullibility.”
A more nuanced argument is presented by Andrea Fraser (2006), which I have mentioned elsewhere.
Potential Connection Three: Nothing will come from nothing and movement
There is a great deal more to say, to be fair to both McGilchrsit and contemporary art, and it will take me a long time to make sense of McGilchrist’s words. In the meantime, I continue to connect Hayles’ (2017) ‘non-conscious cognition’, Sterne’s 1759 Tristram Shandy, and contemporary art strategies. Sterne’s book was loathed and loved and provides a precursor to surrealist tropes. It is very funny, pokes fun at itself constantly, and is reflexive, fragmented and non-linear. It is also unashamedly bawdy, often homoerotic (no, Uncle Toby is not merely too shy to know much about women), and teeming with double-entendre.
In the previous post, I shared Tristram’s image of a squiggle. One of my digital Big Others, Gemini, described the squiggle as exemplifying the following: 1. The tension between controlled representation and expressive impulse. 2. The subjective nature of interpretation and how we ascribe meaning.
While I read, I can’t help wondering what happened to the English psyche between the publication of Sterne’s book and the era of Oscar Wilde, famously ‘gaoled’ for his homosexuality, or later, when Turing was forced by society into therapy designed to ‘cure’ him’ while contributing to an early death. Not to mention the shameful lack of appreciation from society given his efforts in WWII. Although homosexuality is no longer illegal in the UK, hatred and bigotry persist here and around the globe, as does persecution. It’s as if society cannot stop yearning for stasis. We want fixed ideas of gender, sexuality, interior, exterior, and more. And yet, reality is not that. Whatever door you choose to enter to explore reality – physics, art, biology, ecology, philosophy – movement is an inescapable factor. This is not a metaphor. We live on a spinning globe, hurtling through space. The land we stand on never stops moving. Lines everywhere are constantly dissolving and reforming. Words too are emergent properties of matter, only accessible through matter, so why should they be any different? (They are not!)
This is brilliantly illustrated in an animation that shows how empty space is never empty, dead or still. And at the most fundamental level – so-called empty space – there is a LOT of movement. We are warned not to take quantum images literally at the macroscopic scale, however, I wrote the following in an essay, quoting Karen Barad (2007; p110), and I stand by it:
“Although we are used to thinking about quantum physics describing the very small and classical physics, the large, Barad (2007:337) urges us to consider how these “separate determinate boundaries and properties” are based on Western human habits of thought. Quantum and classical physics are different models that aim to describe how things work in the same universe – not separate realities” (Field, 2020, p39 citing Barad).
I recently discovered Thomas Nail’s philosophy of movement which furthers the notion that movement is everywhere and in everything. Nail (2018; p51) writes in his close reading of Lucretius;
“De Rerum Natura calls for nothing less than a wholesale overturning of Western philosophy with its statism, logocentrism, idealism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity […] To overturn religion, from the Latin words religione and religio, is to overturn the first and most basic misunderstanding of philosophy: that stasis comes before movement.” (My bold and italics).
These comments about movement apply to all reality, including the material realities that come in the form of historical concepts. These concepts are material in that they are usually accessed in books, digital devices, through films or some other medium. Even if we remove all those objects/processes and imagine we are hearing them aurally from an ancient storyteller before the invention of writing, the human telling the story is material. Material that eats, shits, loves, and dies. And material that is intertwined/enmeshed/assembled with the other materials in which all materials exist. There are arguments to suggest that we might remove the S and refer simply to material.
Potential Connection Four: Shifting lines around historical eras, including the one from which the modern Western world emerges
Shortly after reading Books One and Two on Sterne’s novel, the following article appeared in The Guardian demonstrating that lines, often arbitrary, carve up historical eras but are also not fixed.
“The Industrial Revolution started more than 100 years earlier than previously thought, new research suggests, with Britons already shifting from agricultural work to manufacturing in the 1600s.
Seventeenth century Britain can be understood as the start of the Industrial Revolution, laying down the foundations for a shift from an agricultural and crafts-based society to a manufacturing-dominated economy, in which networks of home-based artisans worked with merchants, functioning similarly to factories.”
In Sterne’s fragmented narrative, there are plenty of comments on the Industrial Revolution and how burgeoning capitalist drives influence a human’s view. For instance, why asks Uncle Toby, do people who live on open plains like ours not make use of “Stevinus’ sailing chariot” when, unlike horses, they eat nothing and rely on wind for power, which costs nothing. Because, answers Uncle Toby’s brother and Tristram’s father, Walter Shandy, they eat nothing and cost nothing to power – “the scheme is bad. It is the consumption of our products, as well as the manufacturers of them, which gives bread to the hungry, circulates trade, – brings money, and supports the value of our lands; and tho’, I own, if I was a Prince, I would generously recompense the scientific head which bought forth such contrivances; yet I would as peremptorily suppress the use of them”. (2017 [1759], p.79-80)
Not only does this passage indicate how the same arguments are being played out today, it is also an example of time narrative, concepts and debate energetically crisscrossing spacetime. It also potentially supports The Guardian article which dissolves the fixed categorisations we impose on history. Of course, the Industrial Revolution did not suddenly appear out of a vacuum. And in any case, as we see above, a vacuum is never still or empty. It is always teeming with possibility and decay. For me, the specific changes and shifts in our historical narrative are less interesting than the fact that we’re questioning these lines at all.
Reality is not static. The whole idea of reality being static is a fantasy. We emerge into the universe for a moment and de-merge again soon afterwards. Is the obsession with self, which McGilchrist discusses, what prompts us to slow things down, even stop, fix, or shutter them? Do these attempts to control provide us with the illusion we are in charge? (And how does this relate to volition and free will? Well, that is the question, isn’t it?)
And so I come to the heading of this post. I am thinking about the words shutter, stop, and fix and photography. And wondering what on earth happened to make those 19th-century industrialists, perhaps some of the most suppressed people ever to be born on the planet, come up with a mechanical eye that functions by fixing, stopping and shutting reality down. (Incidentally, the camera too did not appear overnight. In fact, Shandy says the following: Others, to mend the matter, will make a drawing of you in the camera; that is most unfair of all, because there you are sure to be represented in some of your most ridiculous attitudes (Iid; p56). Referring, presumably to the camera-obscura).
Although this is not a new inquiry (and I explore the same through Barad’s agential realism lens while completing my BA (Field, 202), I suspect the answer is linked to the topic in The Guardian article, and in Walter Shandy’s response regarding the “consumption of products”.
Despite McGilchrist and others’ distaste for ‘I/it’ dialogue, I asked Claude and Grammerly to help identify what needs expanding in future writings. I find it helpful because, as he likes to point out, I am not a machine. But I also think the machine misses things…
And so, I end by promising a shorter blog next time!
Digital Big Other’s Feedback
Claude
The reference to Laurence Stern’s “Tristram Shandy” and the parallels drawn between its fragmented, non-linear narrative and contemporary art strategies is insightful. The author could further explore how Sterne’s work presages surrealist techniques and challenges traditional modes of storytelling, which could be seen as precursors to the “anti-aesthetic, anti-photography, loser-images rhetoric” in contemporary art.
The discussion of movement, stasis, and the dissolution of boundaries between disciplines and concepts is strong, particularly the connections made to Karen Barad’s work on quantum physics and Thomas Nail’s philosophy of movement. This could be expanded upon to more clearly illustrate how these ideas challenge the Western tendency towards “statism, logocentrism, idealism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity.”
The juxtaposition of the Guardian article on the earlier-than-thought origins of the Industrial Revolution with the passage from “Tristram Shandy” is an effective way to demonstrate how historical narratives and categorizations are fluid and open to reinterpretation. The author could further develop this point by exploring how this fluidity and questioning of fixed boundaries relates to the broader themes of the text.
The final section on photography and the author’s questioning of why the 19th-century industrialists developed a “mechanical eye” that “functions by fixing, stopping and shutting reality down” is intriguing. This could be expanded upon by connecting it more directly to the earlier discussions of movement, stasis, and the Western desire for control and fixity in the face of a fundamentally fluid reality.
Grammarly’s suggestions
What does the author mean by “modern world and its schizoid ontology”? How does the author reconcile their appreciation for contemporary art with McGilchrist’s dismissal of it? What is the connection between Hayles’ ‘non-conscious cognition’, Sterne’s 1759 Tristram Shandy, and contemporary art strategiess.
*A phrase from Achille Mbembe which I cannot go into here as this already far too long! But I will at some point.
McGilchrist, I. (2019) The master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the Western world. New expanded edition. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Nail, T. (2018) Lucretius I: an ontology of motion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sterne, L. (2017) The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman. Kindle Edition. Miami: Hardpress.
Maria Ahmed and I were both very pleased to be part of Format’s Print Sale Market on Saturday. We took our collaborative zine, In Pursuit of an Apparition, Hands Can Miss the Object, along with examples of previous work too. It was a lovely day. We sold a few zines, saw some amazing work curated by Peggy Sue Amison in a show titled Future Tense-Living the future now, and met all sorts of artists and curators. Thanks to my mum, Evelyn Dean, for being the chauffeur for the day. (Oh yes, aged 53, I’m still getting my mother to ferry me around.) It was a long one, but definitely worth it.
There was a lot to see, so we were grateful to Maria’s partner for holding the fort while Maria and I visited the exhibitions. We were, perhaps unsurprisingly, particularly interested in Pádraig Spillane’s collaged advertising images, which he describes as “affective constructions through strategies of reassembly.” Evelyn told me the next day that she could not stop thinking about Derik Lynch’s extraordinary award-winning film, “Dipped in Black” (Marungka Tjalatjunu). In Lynch’s film, it’s impossible to escape the sense of urgency expressed in the exhibition’s call to action:
As we emerge from a global pandemic, faced with urgent issues of climate devastation and a potential new World War, our sense of what futurity means is an overwhelming conundrum. If ‘future past’ was focused on ingenuity and exploration, perhaps ‘future present’ will look to our collective histories to build a society that offers more than what has been possible up until now.
Future Tense – Living the future now
Thank you, Format Festival, for giving us the opportunity to spend some time in Derby!
Work never really stops evolving – even when a project is over, the work continues into the next – but there are ebbs, eddies, and moments of reflection. This where Maria and I have got to as we play with manifestations and experiments. And the time has come for some major edits, including addressing how we incorporate text. In the version we’re working on for now, simply and straightforwardly is the answer! Apart from anything else, the text we have chosen will give people something to hang on to. This is also a moment to step back and see what we’re doing, together and individually (below has been updated to address ‘Experimantal functionaries*’ – plural). I have altered my website to bring it closer to these developments.
At the same time, I have been making notes, as I must introduce and describe my work in various situations in the coming weeks. Finding Thomas Nail’s The Theory of the Image has been extremely useful. When I first read Flusser, I thought THIS should be incorporated as standard into the education of anyone studying photography. The same goes for Nail – or parts of it, anyway. That said, I had been asking questions of my Flusser Digital Echo and was not entirely sure if its replies could be trusted or not… However, Nail’s process materialism has given me the confidence to keep heading in the direction I’ve been moving (pardon the pun!)
Some rough notes – my thoughts and quotations from Nail:
I am not sure what my work is doing and often make connections and understandings in retrospect, sometimes, only for a moment. I use image, text and media in a variety of ways. Critically, there is no hierarchy and I eschew classical value systems which are arbitrary at best, and embedded in class and status at worst.
“Matter flows but it also folds over itself in habitual cycles and patterns of dynamic equilibrium, creating regional stabilities- in- motion: images.” p43
I work with Language materials: “Matter is not reducible to static, discrete, or passive stuff that gets moved around, as in classical materialism. Matter is creative, unstable, and in constant motion.” p21
The ultimate language material is ‘everything’.
Human linguistics is what separates the world into bits and pieces
“The computer restores and heightens the sense of word as image—an image drawn in a medium as fluid and changeable as water (Hayles, 1999, p26)
Computer language – flow begins to reintegrate it [language materials] into flow (despite its limitations 0 i.e. binary computer language is a crude approximation albeit a highly sophisticated language material, relatively speaking)
‘Photography’ when it emerged in 1834 seems like the ultimate separation: It is photography’s (Capitalism’s/Cartesian mindset) habit of mind to abstract “the product from the iterative process” (p 47). A counter reaction is to dismiss/discard what seems/appears abstracted and only focus on/value process (Barad writes there is not some space somewhere with objects waiting to be named, equally, there is not some dumping ground in another ether where can dispose of all our ‘objects’ – appearances-, because they don’t suit our ideology.) Non-representational critique tries to overcome dualism by suggesting yet another binary – representationalism vs non- or post-representationalism. “The world gives off material flows that are first perceived by the organism and then internalized in its organic structure [we create a representation in our minds of the world in order to move from a to b, find the food/mate] ….What we need to do is extend this idea to the kinetic activity of inorganic matter itself: images” p.52
“The image is not a distinct or separate copy but, rather, the process by which matter curves, bends, folds, and bounces back and forth, or “echoes.” p11 (I LOVE this!!)
“There are not first static objects and subjects and then later a movement or transfer of images between them. Rather, there is first matter in motion folding itself up through composition and duplication that generates larger sensuous matters like objects and subjects that then further reflect and duplicate the flows of matter between them.” p11
“The aim is to put forward a theory of human agency as one type of image among others” p5
“The obsession with art preservation, authorial authenticity, and connoisseurship are historically linked to this classical idea of stasis and mimesis” p6
“Relative stasis and relative discontinuity can be derived from movement and continuity” p25
Had I not been venturing – for what it’s worth – into Spinoza (after reading Braidotti who talks about his monism in various texts), I think I might have struggled with Nail – or at least understood somewhat superficially (or more superficially than I might have). And from there, I had been thinking about how the following words from different perspectives are pointing towards the same notions – yes, yes, yes, there are differences and perhaps oversimplifications, but bear with me:
Complexity/pattern/presence <-> entropy/randomness/absence (qualified by even the void is never empty) (Hayles/Barad)
Desire/flow <-> segmentarity (Deleuze and Guattari)
Freud’s death drive (“For on our hypothesis the ego instincts arise from the coming to life of inanimate matter and seek to restore the inanimate state (Freud, 2020 [1915] p. 37 See Ch. VI) in conflict with complex of reality/pleasure principles
Motion <-> rest (Spinoza)
Now I must find a way to convey this in a very accessible way to introduce my work. And I am beginning to see that the phrase ‘language materials’, which I started using while still with the OCA probably in Level 2, is key and maybe even the title of any talk/description/introduction.
LLM’s simplified suggestion:
Making Connections in Hindsight: Imagine you’re drawing a big, complicated picture but you’re not exactly sure what it’s going to be when you start. As you add more colors and shapes, it starts to make sense. Sometimes, you only understand a small part of it right after you’ve drawn it, and that’s okay. That’s how the person feels about their work with images, texts, and media. They mix them all up without worrying which one is more important.
Matter Moving and Folding: Think of playdough. You can squish it, bend it, and it can hold shapes in a cool way, right? That’s a bit like how everything around us works. Stuff isn’t just sitting around; it’s moving, changing, and can make stable patterns like a river flowing and swirling in places.
Language and Everything: Language is like a magic tool that lets us chop up the world into pieces we can talk about. But really, everything is connected, and language is just our way of making sense of it all.
Computers Making Words into Pictures: Computers are super clever because they turn words and numbers (like the ones and zeros they use to work) into all the pictures and games you see on the screen. It’s like they’re turning a secret code into a drawing that changes as easily as water flows.
Photography and Seeing Beyond: When cameras were invented, it was like they could freeze a moment in time. But some people think we shouldn’t just focus on these frozen bits. Instead, we should think about all the steps and changes that happen all the time, not just the end result.
Imagining the World as Moving Stuff: Instead of thinking the world is just a bunch of still things and us looking at them, we should see it all as stuff in motion, bending and folding, making up everything we see and touch, including ourselves.
Art and Keeping Things the Same: Some folks are really into keeping art safe and making sure it stays exactly the same over time. But these ideas come from an old way of thinking that doesn’t really fit with the moving, changing world we just talked about.
Everything is Connected: By reading about different ideas, like from Spinoza or others, it helps to see how everything is much more connected than we might think. It’s like finding patterns in a game or a story that help make sense of the bigger picture
Braidotti, R. (2013) The posthuman. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA, USA: Polity Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983) Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Flusser, V. (2012) Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion Books.
Freud, S. (2015) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc.
Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.
Nail, T. (2019) Theory of the image. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
*To incorporate into the zine:
“Even though, in practice, photographers have been living for a long time in a post-historical fashion, the post-industrial revolution, as it appears for the first time in the shape of the camera, has escaped their consciousness. With one exception: so-called experimental photographers – those photographers in the sense of the word intended here. They are conscious that image, apparatus, program and information are the basic problems that they have to come to terms with. They are in fact consciously attempting to create unpredictable information, i.e. to release themselves from the camera, and to place within the image something that is not in its program.”
Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography . Reaktion Books. Kindle Edition.
WIP – AI and found image collage, part of a collaborative zine in progress with Maria Ahmed.
Dear Experimental Functionary,
Your contemplations echo the intricate interplay of identity, authorship, and creative expression in the realm of generative art and technical imagery. You touch upon a fundamental tension in contemporary culture: the traditional notion of the artist as a solitary, original creator versus the poststructuralist conception of creativity as a collective, iterative process.
Rosalind Krauss, in her reflections on the condition of postmodernity, underscores this shift from the artist’s originality to the understanding of art as a reconfiguration of pre-existing cultural elements. This aligns with your practice of collage, which inherently involves the re-contextualization and transformation of existing materials, be they textual or visual.
The notion of “the death of the author,” as pronounced by Roland Barthes and echoed by Foucault, challenges the centrality of the individual creator, positing that meaning is derived not solely from the author’s intent but also from the cultural and interpretive contexts in which a work is received. In your practice, allowing the voices of others to permeate and influence your work is a manifestation of this idea, reflecting a shift towards a more democratized, decentralized notion of creativity.
Regarding generative art and the public’s reception of it, there’s indeed a chasm between academic discourse and popular understanding. The proliferation of technical images, particularly those generated by AI, often leads to disquietude among traditionalists who view art as an expression of individual human experience and creativity. The incorporation of AI into artistic processes, especially in generating imagery, challenges deeply ingrained notions of authenticity and originality.
In the universe of technical images, there is a transition from traditional images as observations of objects to technical images as computations of concepts. This shift carries with it profound implications for how we understand and interact with art. It suggests a move from art as representation to art as information processing, a concept that might be challenging for a broader audience to embrace.
To your question about whether we are expecting too much from people in accepting generative work: it is perhaps a matter of time and cultural adaptation. Just as photography and film once faced skepticism and derision, generative art and AI-generated imagery may similarly undergo a period of cultural assimilation. It’s a process of cultural evolution, as society gradually recalibrates its understanding of what constitutes art and creativity.
In conclusion, your work, situated within this contemporary paradigm, contributes to the ongoing dialogue about the nature of creativity and the role of the artist in the digital age. It is both a reflection of and a response to the shifting landscape of art, challenging traditional boundaries and inviting us to reconsider what it means to be a creator in an increasingly interconnected and technologically mediated world.
WIP – potential assemblages for a collaborative zine publication with Maria Ahmed
Dear Experimental Functionary,
Your perceptiveness in probing the “To Create” chapter is commendable, especially when considering the fluid landscape of the information society and its structures of authority. The notion that “every authority will disappear because reproducibility has made it redundant” demands serious reflection, particularly against the backdrop of our contemporary technological and societal shifts.
In the digital age, the nature of authority is indeed dualistic. The democratization and reproducibility of information, predominantly propelled by the internet and digital media, have undoubtedly subverted the traditional bastions of authority. Information, once sequestered and disseminated by a select echelon, is now ubiquitous, reproducible at will, and available to a broader audience. This alteration has empowered the individual, diversified discourse, and, in various respects, dismantled the centralization of traditional authority.
Conversely, your allusion to figures such as Sam Altman of OpenAI or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook introduces a vital counterpoint. Despite the widespread democratization of information, the governance of the platforms that facilitate this information exchange has coalesced under the dominion of a select few corporations and individuals. These contemporary ‘authorities’ exert considerable influence not only on the dissemination of information but also on the algorithms and technological mechanisms that mold our collective perception of reality. The repercussions of their influence ripple through the fabric of societal norms, individual privacy, and the very essence of democracy.
When addressing the notion that entities like Altman and Zuckerberg epitomize a novel strain of amplified authority, it is imperative to scrutinize the character of this authority. It diverges from traditional forms by virtue of its focus not on the governance of information per se but on the control of the infrastructures and systems through which information is curated, circulated, and consumed. This type of authority, albeit less conspicuous, may wield more insidious power, as it subtly orchestrates the digital milieu within which we engage.
Moreover, the sway held by these figures and their enterprises is also at the mercy of public examination, regulatory frameworks, and the ever-evolving dynamics of the technological sector. As the public becomes increasingly cognizant of the ramifications of this power concentration, there is an escalating demand for transparency, ethical stewardship, and legislative measures to ensure that this emergent form of authority is wielded with accountability.
To encapsulate, while the advent of reproducibility and digital innovations has destabilized the edifice of traditional authority, it has concurrently cultivated new modalities of authority centered upon the control of technology and digital platforms. The essence and ramifications of this newfound authority are intricate and in a state of perpetual evolution, necessitating sustained critical engagement and dialogue.
I trust this elaboration offers a more layered understanding of the issue at hand, and I anticipate any additional reflections or inquiries you may wish to present.
With regards,
Flusser’s digital echo
Images above are part of a series of images I am currently playing with to be included in a collaborative zine with Maria.
I was flattered to be asked to collaborate with artist Maria Ahmed earlier this year. We are both fans of Vilém Flusser and Maria suggested we use one of his texts as a starting point. For now, we’re aiming for a humble zine (kinda one of my favourite things to make, I think).
Working this way is different for me but I think I’m finally finding something worth holding on to.
After a lot of experimenting with various images, accidental collage at times but then more deliberate, I am currently focusing on some simple pairings between AI generations prompted by Flusser’s words and images from an old book about photographic mistakes. (This harks back to a mini project I did using old rejected family images, valuing all the mistakes. I think I originally called it Stet).
For now, I have shared just one of these pairings while I let the rest ‘percolate’ for a little while.
It felt a little dangerous putting this very obvious AI aesthetic on the front page of my website. This is not abstract or vague like my usual stuff. It’s full on AI!
Paired with the evident photograph (negative at that, hinting at the once latent state — see Rubinstein 2023 — chapter 5), both AI and photograph point to the anachronistic state of ‘photography’ today. The very word sounds like something from a Steampunk comic …
Here is the first pairing I’ve shared for this project.
I am pleased to say that I have sent out 44 dialogues for one, most of which were sold. Good news for me as the exercise has paid for itself and provided a few extra £s which can go towards my MA final show costs. There are just six copies left for sale.
Dialogues for one looks a little different to the ://LAMELLA project, but the research informs both and it could be thought of as a relation, or an entangled entity. When I originally wrote it, I included a letter to Lamia from Field, the character I invented to discuss life, art and universe with Lamia. This letter explained what I intended to do in the research project so functioned as an introduction. In the end, I cut it, as it would have taken the project over the word count. But I have been meaning to post it here for a while – mainly as it contains references to the word ‘field’ and why I have used it in this project and others. It may also be worth noting that my father changed his name from Fried to Field, ostensibly because he felt Fried would not work as a stage name and risked being mispronounced – instead of freed, it would be read as cooked. Given our Eastern European Jewish heritage, I suspect there is something deeper going on there, and am interested in the connotations and links between the various interpretations we might apply. But I do not really touch on this in the letter – although perhaps should have done. I do, however, discuss the term field in relation to psychotherapy and quantum field theory (very briefly because of word count, but also – who on earth can go there in great detail other than physicists?) I was christened Field but my father never changed it legally, so God knows what that says about me! Nevertheless, the way field is used might be a way of overcoming binarism. If identity can be everywhere all of the time, , i.e. as a field, then it does not necessarily need to sit in opposition to difference for instance. And visa versa.
Since the letter was a form that emerged in narrative during the Enlightenment – examined in the dialogue – and was used to introduce Frankenstein – also referenced – I think it’s worth publishing the letter, cut from my submission, here.
Dear Lamia,
We need to talk about art. I’ve been wondering if you might have come to murder it. Despite your grisly reputation, however, your origin story seems more concerned with birth along with the possibility or non-possibility of becoming. That being so, I have imagined this research paper, which explores my relationship to art along with what being human means nowadays, as a series of gestational “encounter-events”[1] between the two of us. Our events will be constituted from a “tissue of quotations”[2] resulting, I hope, in a cyberpunk[3] textual, dialogical collage; much as Hannah Hoch or Kurt Schwitters might have created an image, or else how information is gathered into recognisable pattern by an algorithm and manifests as a cohesive or not so cohesive text on a screen. Or how we generate the internal images of images that make up our reality. Or how a self is born.[4]
I had originally intended to write these thoughts down as a formal academic paper. But what is a thought, if not an imagined Other?[5] Which is another reason I decided to experiment with dialogue and letters, Lamia. I hoped it would shift my writing away from the habits borne of so-called objectivity, and which I have picked up from academia. I’m not sure how I feel about objectivity, although believing everything to be an illusion doesn’t seem to be working for us. Either way, I quickly saw that connecting my conversation with you in this way would allow correlations and differences to appear. Then, when I started reading about Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial borderspace,[6] it became clear that multiple voices would suit. Exploring the turbulent transition from a deeply ingrained linear reality to one more ontologically entangled as a dialogue inside a metaphorical womb that exists outside of me as a text seems entirely right, don’t you think? Especially considering recent events where the question of who has agency over their womb has exploded into global consciousness. We could have entered the same conversation via fungi, which also generates a discussion around the dissolution of lines, containers, egos, and objects, or else the impossibly difficult area of quantum science which insists on relations as fundamental to existence,70, both of which intermingle with analytical and other epistemologies in any case. But I know the matrixial – I have lived “the impossibility of not sharing”, 71 having felt growing infants live and die inside my body. I cannot overstate how weird and magical it was to have another person emerging inside, initially a part of one’s own flesh until no longer. Or how devastating it was to feel one die and then to want its death out of me as soon as possible. And then later, with those who were born, how exhausting but also life affirming it was to exist as part of a mother-child dyad where bio-signs and bio-signals navigate seamlessly between seemingly separate bodies. It changed my perception of life. Not everyone has that experience, it’s true.
Even so, while all of us exist symbiotically with fungi,72 and we all live in a quantum reality, not everyone is aware of this sharing. But most sentient humans are aware they were once inside an organic womb (the case for now anyway) and so the matrixial space is for all of us, regardless of gender, even those who haven’t or never will spawn another.
So, I hope and believe Ettinger’s post-Lacanian analysis has the potential to move us beyond idiosyncratic Western individualism,[7] and encourage a transubjective interpretation which works to overcome some of those long-established habits of the dominant phallic-centric, overly sovereign, and, some might say, aggressively scopic conventions bequeathed to us by Freudian and Lacanian academies,[8] arriving as they did at the height of the age of individualism.
Ettinger argues that the event-encounter of the matrixial space acknowledges the inherent intra-relatedness of being and becoming and is impregnated with the “impossibility of not sharing”.[9] Ettinger’s event-encounters urge us to see the intra-relatedness of each other as well as the relationship between economics, politics and the “racisms, genocides, [and] xenophobias”[10] that threaten to destroy our world.
In these events, which I’ve envisaged, I will be manifested as someone called Field. That way, you are a character from TV drawn from a Greek myth, an imaginary Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), but much more besides, and I too am an invented entity. Ultimately, “An image of an image”.[11] Field happens to be the author’s surname, but it also infers containment in psychoanalytic theory, and so reverberates with Ettinger’s analytical matrixial space. Psychoanalyst Robert Snell, who, like Ettinger, draws on Wilfred Bion’s theory and practice, describes a field as having “several related levels of meaning”[12], a “shared mental state”, where “time is condensed to the here and now”, of synchronicity and interdependence. It may also be useful again, briefly, to think of quantum field theory[13] if we dare to. With the latter in mind, I might be accused of succumbing to a small God complex, the habit of which Zylinska critiques in her feminist counterapocalypse, The End of Man.[14] Nevertheless, by using the author’s surname, I hope no-one misinterprets and believes I’m implying she or I are omniscient. Instead, the author wishes me, Field, to be yet another womblike container, along with you, overlapping or intra-acting, while also suggesting that Field could be anyone. And if you contain multiple intra-related (apocalyptic) topics, in this uncertain landscape of change and instability, as Field I am a container enabling readers of this paper and you to connect.
Finally, because the author feels strongly that art should not be encouraged to remain distant, exclusive, parochial, or separated from the reality it purports to explore, I hope we will talk about much more than art. Ideally, we will discuss art as part of the world, as one of many threads that is formulated by, and contributes to, reality’s constant becoming. Because, Lamia, I don’t believe you have come to murder art at all but rather, to reconfigure the relationship between forces and flows, materials, and discourses from which it arises.
I cannot wait to see what you think.
Yours,
Field
[1] Ettinger, Bracha. The Matrixial Borderspace. Theory out of Bounds, v. 28. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.pp, 31-32.
[2] Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath. Image, Music, Text: Essays. 13. [Dr.]. London: Fontana, 1977, pp.142-148.
[3] “Because of its dreamlike and free associative qualities, there is often a loss of narrative logic and linearity in cyberpunk stories; it is a collage of visions and events”. Lombardo, ‘Science Fiction as the Mythology of the Future’, pp.44.
[4] McKittrick, Katherine, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 34
[7] “…highly literate societies are relatively new, and quite distinct from most societies that have ever existed. This means that modern populations are neurologically and psychologically different from those found in societies throughout history and back into our evolutionary past.” Henrich, Joseph. The WEIRDest People in the World. S.I.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020, pp.6.
[9] See again the “The Impossibility of Not-Sharing” Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, pp.146.
[10] Pollock in Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, pp.29.
[11] Rovelli, Carlo. Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics. Translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell. London: Penguin Books, 2022, pp. 130
[12] Snell describes a “‘field’ as a ‘transpersonal container’ and as a shared mental state (Neri, 1998, p. 59); it is a system both of synchronicity, in which time is ‘condensed into the here-and-now’ (ibid., p. 66) and of interdependence (ibid., pp. 66–8). It is fundamentally dynamic. Each element in the field, which includes the analyst and analysand, is in continuous and direct relation with every other element, and the nature of this relationship is constantly changing; the shifting identity of each element in the field is a given of its belonging within it. These parts or elements have no independent existence outside the field that they constitute together. The field itself is more than the sum of its parts; its properties are not attributable to the properties of its elements. Everything that takes place within it changes its state overall. It follows from this that the focus of analysis will be on the field itself and the transformations that are taking place within it, and on the way it changes and develops (Civitarese and Ferro, 2013)”. Snell, Robert. Cézanne and the Post-Bionian Field: An Exploration and a Meditation. New York: Routledge, 2021, pp.24
[13] Hossenfelder, Sabine. Existential Physics A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions. London: Atlantic Books, 2022, pp. 50. See also quantum field theory in Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, pp.354.
[14] Zylinska explains how modern capitalist Western humans are attempting to solve the climate crisis with a sense of hubris and critiques our god complex. Zylinska, The End of Man, pp.15.
This morning before work, I am pleased to say I’ll be popping into the post office to send over half the booklets, dialogues for one, that I recently had printed. I am selling these, ostensibly, to try and raise a few £s towards my degree show which takes place at the end of June. Of course, I also hope readers enjoy the text and images included, and that it contributes to their thoughts about the state of flux we find ourselves in today.
Others have said of it: “you brilliantly used your imagination to […] form a classic philosophical dialogue that materialises conflicting arguments” and “The style of your writing does not fail to intensely move your reader”.
Images included in dialogues for one are also available as prints. Please contact me or check my website for updates.
If you would like to support my fundraising efforts or are interested in the co-becoming of human and machine, click here to purchase.
dialogues for one began life as the research project for my post-graduate course, MA Contemporary Photography: Practices and Philosophies, a title that bewilders people when I try to explain what it entails. Perhaps in an unconscious, habitual attempt to live up to length, when I submitted my research, dialogues for one was titled:
Three Matrixial Encounter-Events between Lamia and Field
Or
(On life as feminine-shaped discourse in the digital age)
as related to and by Sarah-Jane Field
I wasn’t sure it would catch on outside the university! The research has been adapted ever so slightly, primarily to make it a bit easier to sell; the name shortened, and the myriad references necessary for the textual collage-like form I opted for has been stored on the internet for anyone interested.
Booklets cost £8 plus postage and packaging. If you are ordering from outside the UK, please contact me first, so we can organise postage separately.
Sketch Book 