By Greg Ruffing
Editor: Jason Lazarus
Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann, Cryptids, 2013
Visitors congregate at a home in the far
northern edge of Rogers Park on a mid-September evening as summer descends into
autumn. The setting sun passes into dusk; day dissolves into night.
The visitors cross the threshold from the bucolic
patio and gardens into a self-standing white-cube exhibition space, and are
abruptly confronted by a mass of salvaged LCD monitors lining the entire floor,
part of Iceberg Projects’ newest exhibition, Cryptids, by the collaborative duo of Beate Geissler and Oliver
Sann.
Configured in an interstitial step-stone
pattern that brings to mind Land Artists such as Smithson or Goldsworthy, the spread
of monitors is transposed into a barren, techno-dystopian terrain. Walking upon
this array creates a heightened sensory experience, conjuring the tactility and
sound of crunching twigs or leaves underfoot in a forest, while also
introducing entropic[i]
forces upon these screens that had, in prior incarnations, helped mobilize
man’s imposition of order and control upon his environs.
The monitors no longer glow with any visualized
data, or images of faces and places near and far. What minimal clues they
provide come through cryptic etchings faintly discernible on scattered surfaces
– references to notational scientific schemata (i.e. diagrams of the evolution
of living systems) that also invoke aspects of ancient hieroglyphs or primitive
cave paintings.
Transcending the screens, we reach the equally
mystifying photographs on the wall – three large, framed archival inkjet
prints: a horse, a bat, and a chrysalis, each individually photographed and
illuminated against a stark black background in a manner akin to traditional
portraiture. The presentation evokes a serialized taxonomy that might begin to index
the planet’s vast assortment of life forms.
The inclusion of these figures follows pictorial
conventions in which animal representations sometimes challenged the
superiority of the human point of view, or referenced man’s domination over (and
distancing from) nature. On the former concept, we can identify the bats
(which, in some facets of Western thought, became associated with irrationality
and intellectual void) in Goya’s famous print The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799), alluding to his
waning faith in the ability of reason to solve human problems. Meanwhile, what might
come to mind on the consideration of man corralling nature is Dali’s Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a
Blind Horse Biting a Telephone (1938), which lushly illustrates the
contrivances of the industrial era and man’s machine-aided advance. Dali’s horse
character appears as a liminal, biomorphic creature ensnared between technological
forms – particularly the emerging transportation methods that diminished his
proximity to humans.
Cryptids
In Geissler and Sann’s horse portrait, the
composition is cropped very tight to the subject’s face, minimizing some of its
equine physicality and drawing attention to an important detail: this horse also
is blind, and thus cannot reciprocate our stare. He is subordinated by the
mechanical gaze of the camera and, consequently, by the human gaze as well – a critical
indictment of the anthropocentric bias (often loaded with ignorance and fear)
that characterizes much of human cognition about the animal realm.
Through the historic rise of photography that reinforced
the Renaissance notion of linear perspective and placed the human creator-operator
at the central point of convergence, man became the privileged, positioned
observer who can ultimately obtain “a fixing and systematization of external
reality and…furthering of the individual ego which controlled this process.”[ii] That same phenomenon
which ordained sight and images as man’s main channel for conceiving and
grasping the surrounding world, is now leading the mechanical camera to triumph
over the human eye: our biological vision is increasingly being supplanted by
machine vision, which leaves us only with representations
(i.e. the two-dimensional rendering of a horse here) to behold, and diminishes
our perception through direct presence with the natural object. Joined with the
dominance of capitalism and political economy, technology again marginalizes
and distances animal/nature from man – and now, inevitable as it may seem, man
from man.[iii]
Taken with that idea of parallel
marginalization, perhaps we can perceive Geissler and Sann’s animals with a
more ancient relation – as spirit figures who possess secrets addressed to humans.
The bat and chrysalis images, situated back-to-back on a column near the center
of the gallery, combine to link a possible future with our notions of the past.
Bats and butterflies have long been considered messengers of the dead, which
bolsters their spiritual iconography here.
Cryptids
The chrysalis denotes beginnings or
transformations in the cycle of life, and in this exhibition could allude to complex
notions of metamorphosis – of course, the allegory in Kafka’s Metamorphosis is hard to ignore: his
protagonist Gregor Samsa irrevocably morphed into a human/non-human hybrid, psychologically
alienated from his loved ones and forced to reconcile the disconnect between
his human thoughts and feelings versus his mutated physical body.
The chrysalis may also refer to a certain
duality in our integration of new technologies: while those extensions sometimes
serve a positive or evolutionary purpose, they always come at a cost. Even
McLuhan spoke with slight trepidation about the “sense closure” that results
from a user conformed to technology: “By continuously embracing technologies,
we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use
them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves…”[iv]
In that context, Cryptids continues Geissler and Sann’s explorations of the myriad
ways we interact with the world through electronically mediated tasks and
experiences, including the first-person shooter games and LAN parties of the
duo’s early work, to simulated settings for military training, up to the
cybernetic strategies of computerized financial and economic activity. These
projects elucidate how, through such a rapid proliferation of technology, we
see man’s efforts at escalating himself closer to a God-like status. Our
digital engagement has produced panoptic devices such as GPS or Google Earth
which collapse space and reposition the human body, while other visual
screen-based mechanisms offer immersive alternate or substitute realities, all at
man’s dispassionate command.
Installation view, Cryptids
But what are the consequences of crowning
technology divine in order to propel the human quest for omniscience and
transcendence? Paul Virilio counters that at some point, technology actually
might challenge the metaphysical progression of humans: “All technologies
converge toward the same spot, they all lead to a deus ex machina, a machine-God. In a way, technologies have negated
the transcendental God in order to invent the machine-God.”[v] [emphasis mine]
The purview of the deus ex machina also elicits the theoretical concept of
technological singularity which potentially carries profound implications for
future populations. Geissler and Sann seem to caution us that the deeper
ensconced we become with machine intelligence, we must acknowledge the transformations
of man and nature that could result. Do those transformations embody our hopes
of a transcendent becoming, an evolution,
into a more sustainable configuration? Or on the converse, do they take the
form of entropy, some inescapable
Samsa-esque undoing? Both thoughts insinuate
modifications of the body and consciousness of living organisms, as well as the
structural world at large (represented by the landscape of dead monitors). Through the works in Cryptids, Geissler and Sann provide no explicit answers – only to
suggest the possibility of an altered course of civilizations in an altogether
unknowable, unclassifiable, ever-changing flux of existence.
Cryptids
is on view at Iceberg Projects, 7714 N. Sheridan Road, thru October 19th.
www.icebergchicago.com All
photographs courtesy of Iceberg Projects.
[i] “[E]ntropy is in the first instance a measure
of something that happens when one state is transformed into another”, wrote
physicist P.W. Bridgman in his book The
Nature of Thermodynamics (Harper Row, 1941), which helped to detail
entropy’s relation to equilibrium and evolution. Robert Smithson, in applying
this science to art, believed that entropy also left open the feasibility of
reclamation or regeneration (see Smithson’s 1966 essay Entropy
and the New Monuments)
[ii] Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture, Routledge, 2000, pg. 96
[iii] John Berger (in his essay “Why Look at
Animals?”) and W.J.T. Mitchell (in his essay “Illusion: Looking at Animals
Looking”) both detail how technology, capitalism, and political economy have
contributed to the progressive marginalization of animals – and by extension,
humans as well: “This reduction of the animal is part of the same process as
that by which humans have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming
units,” writes Mitchell, echoing Berger. (see Mitchell’s Picture Theory, University of Chicago Press, 1994, pg. 333)
[iv]
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media:
The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill, 1964, pg. 46
[v]
from Virilio’s interview in “Cyberwar, God and Television”, via Timothy
Druckery, Electronic Culture: Technology
and Visual Representation, Aperture, 1996, pg. 326
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