Today, in the technocene, not seeing anything intelligible is the “new” condition of contemporary perception. Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious” introduced by photography has been updated to the unconscious of planetary scale computation. Capture agents comprised of one or more sensors vary in forms and sizes; from surveillance cameras detecting faces, over the sensors monitoring heartbeats, to the complex network of satellites orbiting earth and tracking devices. They can see through the entire electromagnetic spectrum, spanning gamma rays, x-rays, infrared to visible light, as well as micro and radio waves, which outstrip human sensibility. Machine vision plays out in the bubbling behind the scenes of surveillance capitalism: continually extracting, filtering, and decrypting data to be efficiently blackboxed by corporate big tech gatekeepers. Within this infrastructural system of prying eyes and sensors capturing our every move, we are excluded from a hidden order of reality, warping itself around earth. What occurs behind the scenes remains opaque, veiled in secrecy, impenetrable; yet these transparent appearing infrastructures re-configure the scenes of life, obscuring their entanglement with the material world.
NO MIND NO MATTER pries open the cracks by making this very dazzling dialectic between visibility and invisibility material, partially revealing the ‘something’ we do not see, cannot see, that which eludes capture by our naked eye. This exhibition weaves together new independent and collaborative works by Tatjana Vall, Johannes Kiel, and Justin Urbach. In resonance with Donna J. Haraway’s aesthetic strategy of “sympoiesis” as making-with, they co-produce a dynamic meshwork of intra-acting artworks, entangling the perceiving subject with and within their responsive feedback loops. The invisible relations among the distribution of artworks resist instant recognition, and are only rendered material, and thus visible, through the visitor’s intra-action within and across the space. The material visibility of the emerging feedback loops is set against the hidden mechanisms driving them behind the scenes. From being the ‘something’ captured and detected, to being the ‘I’ capturing and activating, the subject-object relation is ever-mobile, continually re-negotiated in attunement with the visitor’s co-production. By harnessing the contemporary powers of visualisation through a return to matter, Vall, Kiel, and Urbach re-articulate the politics of the (in)visible.
Exhibition: NO MIND NO MATTER
Artists: Johannes Kiel & Tatjana Vall and Justin Urbach
Exhibition duration: 26.6.24 – 27.7.24
Address and contact:
Kunstarkaden München
Sparkassenstraße 3, 80331 Munich
www.kunstarkaden-muenchen.de
