12
Harry Sanderson, Human Resolution (2012). Installation view at Arcadia Missa for PAMI, London. Digital video, perspex, monitor.
Harry Burke: Your “Human Resolution” project, which you exhibited as part of PAMI last year in London, comprised of a 3D hologram projector and accompanying sound piece, which translated the body of the viewer standing before it into a glitching but uncannily faithful grayscale projection (3D object). It was an attempt to reinsert the body into ubiquitous computing environments, which are too often conceptualized as immaterial, virtual, or idealist, and to re-emphasise the corporeal within the predominantly visual regimes of these technologies. Do you think it was, in this regard, successful?
Harry Sanderson: I think that rather than reinsert the body or to attempt to repair anything, it was an attempt to exhibit a kind of a lack that occurs when something is represented in that sort of way. There is a common
$UWLVW�3UR¿OH��+DUU\�6DQGHUVRQBY HARRY BURKE
7KH�ODWHVW�LQ�D�VHULHV�RI�LQWHUYLHZV�ZLWK�DUWLVWV�ZKR�KDYH�GHYHORSHG�D�VLJQL¿FDQW�ERG\�RI�ZRUN�HQJDJHG��LQ�LWV�SURFHVV��RU�LQ�WKH�LVVXHV�LW�UDLVHV��ZLWK�WHFKQRORJ\��6HH�WKH�IXOO�OLVW�RI�$UWLVW�3UR¿OHV�KHUH�
FRQFHSWLRQ�WKDW�LPDJHV�ZRUN�RQ�D�ÀDW�SODQH��IRU�H[DPSOH�LQ�D�UHJXODU�PRYLH�¿OH��DQG�WKLV�ZDV�DQ�DWWHPSW�WR�show how imaging technologies are moving beyond that into something that actually apprehends physical space. It wasn’t just a grayscale projection but it had depth; it would turn and you would see that it understood the contours of your body in a way that’s much more physical.
HB: It’s an attempt to materialize the space or spatiality of the image?
HS: More the increasing sophistication of cameras and surveillance technology, and that they’re no longer MXVW�DERXW�UHFRUGLQJ�ÀDW�SODQHV�RI�FRORXUV��WKH\�DUH�QRZ�FRJQL]DQW�RI�WKH�GLVWDQFH�WKLQJV�DUH�IURP�HDFK�RWKHU��It goes along with more sophisticated algorithms for interpreting the movement of things which are driven for-ward by the need for facial recognition software to keep track of people or be able to tell more about a subject IURP�DQ�LPDJH�RI�WKHP��7KLV�WLHV�LQWR�WKH�VWXII�,¶P�GRLQJ�ZLWK�³8QL¿HG�)DEULF´��RSHQLQJ�DW�$UFDGLD�0LVVD�RQ�2FWREHU���WK���ZKLFK�LQFOXGHV�EHLQJ�DEOH�WR�H[WUDFW�VRPHRQH¶V�SXOVH�IURP�D�UHJXODU�YLGHR�¿OH�XVLQJ��(XOHULDQ��YLGHR�DPSOL¿FDWLRQ�VRIWZDUH�
HB: How important do you think it is for an artist to interrogate these technologies as they’re being developed LQ�FRUSRUDWH�RU�PLOLWDU\�HQYLURQPHQWV"�)RU�H[DPSOH��WKH�YLGHR�DXJPHQWDWLRQ�WHFKQRORJ\�LV�D�PRQWK�ROG��DQG�there’s an interest of yours in taking things at this nascent point and attempting to interrogate how they devel-RS��RU�LQVHUW�D�FULWLFDOLW\�LQWR�WKHLU�XVH�EHIRUH�LW�EHFRPHV�IXOO\�FRGL¿HG�
HS: I think when a technology is nascent you’re able to see things about it that you won’t be able to see when it’s become fully integrated. There was an amusing moment a few years ago where one of the X-Men movies ZDV�OHDNHG�EHIRUH�WKH�HIIHFWV�KDG�EHHQ�¿QLVKHG��,W�ZDV�WKLV�KLODULRXV�¿OH�EHFDXVH�LW�ZDV�WKHVH�DFWRUV�DFWLQJ�EHIRUH�JUHHQ�VFUHHQV²EORFNV�KDG�EHHQ�¿OOHG�LQ�EXW�WKH�WH[WXUHV�ZHUHQ¶W�WKHUH�DQG�WKHUH�ZHUH�DOO�WKHVH�JDSV��$QG�LW�ZDV�UHDOO\�LQWHUHVWLQJ�WR�ZDWFK�WKH�¿OP�LQ�WKDW�ZD\��,W�ZDV�D�GLVDVWHU�IRU�WKH�¿OP�EHFDXVH�SHRSOH�JRW�WR�see how bad it was. That’s what it’s like with these technologies—they’re still a bit funky, and not fully slick, VR�\RX¶UH�DEOH�WR�VKRZ�WKHP�LQ�D�ZD\�WKDW�HQDEOHV�\RX�WR�VHH�ZKDW¶V�KDSSHQLQJ��$QG�LQ�WKH�ÀDZ�RI�WKDW��LQ�WKH�fact that it doesn’t totally integrate or work, there’s some capacity as an artist to reclaim a little bit of agency.
HB: This seems like a different approach to an artistic attitude towards technology that’s developed in some parallel scenes—artists who hang out at tech conferences, for example—where new technology is much clos-er fetishized than critiqued.
+6��3HUVRQDOO\�,¶P�QRW�VR�HQDPRXUHG�ZLWK�WKH�HI¿FDF\�RI�WKHVH�WHFKQRORJLHV��DQG�WKHLU�SODFH�ZLWKLQ�JOREDO�power structures—often materialized as forms of interaction and surveillance. To ignore this strikes me as extremely dangerous. It’s straight valorization. Tech conferences seem like a place for just shopping. I’m also VKRSSLQJ��EXW�,¶P�ORRNLQJ�IRU�VRPHWKLQJ�EH\RQG�WKDW�SURFHVV��ZKLFK�LV�ZK\�WKH�³8QL¿HG�)DEULF´�UHQGHU�IDUP�is kind of an odd piece. It’s almost like a diagram. It is an attempt to foreground the process of production, and present artworks as part of a chain of production that relies on the consumption of power and resources, rather than existing in an immaterial realm of data and thought. We’re building a small supercomputer that will render videos by six artists—Hito Steyerl, Clunie Reid, Maja Cule, Takeshi Shiomitsu, and Melika Ngombe Kolongo & Daniella Russo—with the installation including an accompanying sound piece.
I suppose it’s a really tricky position for anything that tries to be politically engaged—the inevitable credibility you give to the objects you take as the basis for your critique. You appropriate technology in an attempt to show it in a critical light but at the same time you reproduce those conditions.
HB: I think things can be beautiful at the same time as being explicitly political or critical or whatever. How you stop something from stagnating aesthetically is trying constantly to reawaken yourself to what its VRXUFH�LV��)RU�PH��WKLV�WLHV�EDFN�WR�WKH�LGHD�RI�H[SORULQJ�WKH�LPDJH�DV�D�WDQJLEOH��SK\VLFDO��'�REMHFW��DQ�idea which also comes across in your MUTE text, also titled “Human Resolution,” in which you argue for the need to recognize “the exploitation and violence required for [digital technologies’] continued production”. $OO�\RXU�ZRUNV�VHHP�WR�LQYROYH�D�VSHFL¿F�PRYH�WKDW�LVQ¶W�DERXW�H[SORULQJ�WKH�IDFH�YDOXH�RI�DQ�LPDJH�EXW�instead the different ways it instantiates meaning and relations of various kinds. In contrast with the argu-ment you make in the article, in which the image ties us to other people, the Human Resolution installation focuses attention back on the self. When people are looking at the projected image of themsleves in Hu-man Resolution, are they looking in a mirror, or is there a better analogy by which to think about it?
HS: I think it’s an abstraction of the self that reveals the way the “self” can be so quickly annihilated by rep-resentation.
HB: How should we respond to that?
HS: Well, I don’t really think it’s my place to say how people should respond to that. I merely thought that it was something worth putting out there. I respond to it by attempting to make work that expresses an increasing criticality toward what it is embroiled with, and by trying to be more politically engaged in my everyday life. There is an alternate way of thinking about things, and I found that resisting apathy and an “oh well technology’s always exploitative so you should just get over it” mentality was a positive thing for me—for both my work and my well-being. It’s more interesting to not get over it. That’s why I can’t answer WKH�³ZKDW�FDQ�ZH�GR´�TXHVWLRQ�EHFDXVH�,�¿QG�XVLQJ�WHFKQRORJ\�WR�FULWLTXH�D�SUREOHP�PRUH�LQWHUHVWLQJ�WKDQ�having a technological solution. I’d rather be engaged in a struggle for something than have any kind of solution where we can make a better internet or a better credit card or something.
HB: It’s the same process of not critiquing the problem but improving it…
HS: Yep. A nicer capitalism.
HB: We should talk about Haptics, where artist Yuri Pattison invited you to make a touchable 3D hologram ZLWKLQ�KLV�)DUDGD\�&DJH�SURMHFW��D�)DUDGD\�FDJH�LV�D���WK�FHQWXU\�LQYHQWLRQ�WKDW�EORFNV�RXW�H[WHUQDO�HOHFWULF�currents, which Pattison recreated as a residency space in SPACE Studios). What’s the difference between this work and Human Resolution?
+6��)XQQLO\�HQRXJK��WKH\¶UH�EDVLFDOO\�WKH�VDPH�VHWXS��,�WKLQN�WKDW�WKH�+XPDQ�5HVROXWLRQ�VKRZ�LV�D�ORW�PRUH�interesting for me. Haptics was just a straight desire to reproduce this technology that I’d heard about, which was this touchable hologram, which I thought was potentially quite beautiful: that you could touch something that was a simulated object hanging in the space of a gallery that wasn’t actually there. I found that more poetic and emotive and moving, in a more personal sense; something that would be touching, VRPHKRZ��7KH�SURPRWLRQDO�YLGHR�IRU�WKDW�WHFKQRORJ\�FRQWDLQHG�RQH�OLQH�WKDW�ZDV�³D�ÀRDWLQJ�LPDJH�LQ�PLG�DLU�is no longer just a dream.” There’s this desire to give technology a physical form so there’s at least there’s something that will push back at you. I think I found that profound, in a way, because it means that people still desire each other, even if it’s so mediated that they just desire to create some kind of holographic repre-sentation of something. It still speaks to a genuine desire for conjunctive social experience.
Human Resolution’s a bit more negative, saying “look at you here as nothing but data”. There’s that Ash-bery poem we were reading the other day where he says “much that is beautiful must be discarded so that
we may resemble a taller impression of ourselves.” There’s a constant aspiration toward this image we’ve created of ourselves that we can’t ever quite get to which is this, I suppose, want or desire: the “big other.” You FDQ¶W�HYHU�JHW�LW��\RX�FDQ¶W�WRXFK�LW��$QG�GDWD�DQG�&ORXG�FRPSXWLQJ�SHUIHFWO\�¿WV�LQWR�WKDW�DV�DQ�LGHRORJLFDO�IRUP�because it’s completely inaddressible.
7KH�ZRUN�LV�DOVR�FRXQWHU�QDUUDWLYH�LQ�D�ZD\²LW¶V�QRW�D�¿QLVKHG�ZRUN��LW�UHTXLUHV�WKH�SUHVHQFH�RI�VRPHERG\�WR�EH�WKHUH��LW¶V�QRW�D�¿OP��LW¶V�QRW�D�VFXOSWXUH��LW¶V�QRW�D�WKLQJ��(YHQ�LI�ZKDW�LW¶V�H[SRVLQJ�LV�TXLWH�D�GHKXPDQL]LQJ��digitizing process, it’s still an artwork that’s activated by the viewer’s presence. The desire to make machines instantly responsive to the body plays on a strange sort of humanism, which is so close to digital property SURWHFWLRQ��:H�KDYH�WKHVH�VZLSH�VFUHHQV�DQG�¿QJHUSULQW�VFDQV�XQGHU�WKH�UHPLW�RI�SURWHFWLQJ�RQHVHOI�DJDLQVW�identity theft, but it’s also the protection of private property, which is inseparable from force in some sense.
,Q�WHUPV�RI�WKH�LPDJH�XVHG��LQ�ERWK��WKH\¶UH�DJDLQ�SOD\LQJ�RQ�WKHVH�LGHDV�RI�WRXFK�DQG�FRPPXQLFDWLRQ��,�¿QG�LW�interesting because it references what you’re doing with the object as you try and get the image to come out of it. You’re kind of implicated in the image as well.
Age: 26
Location: London
How/when did you begin working creatively with technology? Started making websites when I was 15, be-cause of getting an internet connection, and so taught myself HTML by copying and pasting stuff from other websites.
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What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? I’ve worked in shops, a petrol sta-tion, the Tate Modern, and right now in a pub.
What does your desktop or workspace look like? I just work wherever I am / I don’t have one. Right now I VKDUH�RQH�ODUJH�GHVN�ZLWK�P\�ÀDWPDWHV�DQG�ZH�KDYH�VRPH�SODQWV�ZKLFK�LV�JUHDW�
Have you ever wondered why light shone on a drinking glass produces not only a shadow but also a curved region of bright light on the very same surface as that shadow? !is is just the start of what caustics can actu-ally do.
Harry Sanderson is a new media artist whose practice ranges from sound performances to interactive so"-ware sculptures. His work investigates ways of displaying images which goes beyond digital projections and monitors, delving into the emergent #eld of ‘caustic imaging technology’ that uses algorithms and cloud computing to produce a digital image from refracted light.
During his residency at Blitz, Sanderson will further investigate and re$ect on his work to date, by looking at how algorithms are used in the caustics project and how that relates to historical and cultural constructs around the role of representation.
“Out of an interest in the raw energy and labour consumed in the production of digital images, I wanted to pursue ways of displaying them that foregrounded their materiality instead of continuing to rely on digital projections and monitors. In order to do this I began working on an emergent #eld called caustic imaging technology, which uses algorithms and cloud computing to determine the contours necessary to produce a digital image from refracted light.
“!e process of producing these works has been technically and intellectually intensive, and the Blitz resi-dency would provide an excellent opportunity to consolidate and re$ect upon my work and think about ways of moving forward… My idea for the residency right now is that I would use it to produce an essay on per-spective and algorithms as they are used in the caustics project, but also on how they relate to historical and cultural constructs around the role of representation.”
!rough this research process, Sanderson is bringing together text, images and performance, which are docu-mented and presented to the public in a #nal exhibition.
Sanderson will be in residence at Blitz in St Lucia Street, Valletta, until July 15.
During this time he is also engaging with local practitioners, professionals and audiences though a series of public programmes and events.
• Sanderson will be giving a talk at Blitz in St Lucia Street, Valletta, on Saturday at 7.30pm. Doors open at 7pm and entrance is free.blitzresidency.com
Virtual reality in art and design
SOLID STATE: SUNLIGHT, interview with HARRY SANDER-SON by BOBBY JEWELL
Harry Sanderson is a British artist based in Berlin who is currently exhibiting Solid State: Sunlight, presented by Arca-GLD�0LVVD��DW�%UXVVHOV�JDOOHU\�/HY\�'HOYDO��+LV�¿UVW�VROR�VKRZ�LQ�WKH�FLW\��LW�XWLOLVHV�FDXVWLF�LPDJHU\�WR�SUHVHQW�SK\VLFDO�& digital depictions of computation and coding, as part of Sanderson’s ongoing work and research on technology and means of production. )RU�+DUU\�6DQGHUVRQ¶V�¿UVW�VROR�H[KLELWLRQ�LQ�%UXVVHOV�KH�ZLOO�SUHVHQW�ZRUNV�ZKLFK�DUH�WKH�FXOPLQDWLRQ�RI�D�ORQJ�SHULRG�of research and development of both caustic imaging technology and the aesthetics and ideologies that permeate and inform the visual representation of techno-capitalism. Art circles and parties have been stuffed with conversations that pronounce the fact of there being a dematerialised and constantly circulating digital image. The moment that these conversations are of any relevance is when the topic moves beyond assertions of (another) dematerialisation and onto understanding the material infrastructure of industrial exploitation that creates the intangible and consistently repro-ducible image.
$�³FDXVWLF´�LQ�LWV�XVH�DV�D�ZRUG�LQ�RSWLFV��PHDQV�WKH�UD\V�RI�OLJKW�UHÀHFWHG�RU�UHIUDFWHG�E\�DQ�REMHFW�RU�VXUIDFH��DQG�or the projection of these rays onto something else/another surface. This concentration of light can burn (think of a magnifying glass harnessing light to burn a piece of paper), hence its description as “caustic” (to corrode). By using FDXVWLFV�WR�¿[�D�GLJLWDO�LPDJH�RQWR�D�ZDOO�WKURXJK�DQ�DQDORJXH�&1&PLOOHG�SODVWLF�VFXOSWXUH��6DQGHUVRQ�FUHDWHV�D�moment of pause and recognition to material facts of the image’s genesis. This is furthered by the almost-impossibility of us, the viewer, capturing and circulating the image produced by the sculpture to a degree of likeness that we have come to presume to have to hand (when you try to photograph and Instagram the work, an image is created, yet it is not the image that your body stood in front of at the moment of capture).
7KHVH�DUWZRUNV�DUH�ERWK�VFXOSWXUHV�DQG�LPDJHV��LW�LV�GLI¿FXOW�WR�GHVFULEH�ZLWK�ODQJXDJH�DV�WKH�ZRUGV�SUHVXPH�FHUWDLQ�GLIIHUHQWLDWLRQV�WKDW�DUH�QRW�HPERGLHG�KHUH��)RU�ZDQW�RI�D�EHWWHU�ZRUG�ZH¶OO�FDOO�WKHP�VFXOSWXUHV��7KHVH�VFXOSWXUHV�inhabit the space between digital representation and physical form, as put by the artist, “a painful intermediary zone
between a purely ideal imaginative space and the physical world digital representation models and simulates.”
Just as language presents problems of expression and representation around the artwork, the visual representation of digital infrastructures, systems and surfaces has continued to be impoverished so much so that representations both deliberately and unwittingly reinforce mantras of global capitalism. Often water, air, various nods to nature and evolution sit as metaphors in media and advertising for a digitally connected and accelerating world, a world where VRPHKRZ�WKH�IDFW�RI�FRQQHFWLRQ�LV�DQ�HTXDOLVHU�RU�ÀDWWHQHU�WR�WKH�LQFUHGLEOH�GLVSDULW\�EHWZHHQ�ULFK�DQG�SRRU��JOREDO�QRUWK�DQG�VRXWK��SRVW�)RUGLVW�DQG�FXUUHQWO\�LQGXVWULDOLVLQJ��:H�FDQQRW�VHH�RU�UHSUHVHQW�D�VFUHHQ��LW�LV�D�FRQGXLW�IRU�UHSUHVHQWDWLRQV�RI�VRPHWKLQJ�HOVH��-XVW�DV�WKH�VFRSH�RI�ODQJXDJH�WR�GH¿QH�LV�OLPLWHG��WKH�VFRSH�RI�UHSUHVHQWDWLRQ�WR�enable Cognitive Mapping of a world whose governance and institutions are not only biopowerful but also digitised, is impoverished.
A concurrent feature of Sanderson’s work is to pull open the means of the work’s production. Harry Sanderson’s prac-tice is about putting its labour at the forefront. Rather than the digital being a veil over the layers of work and imbal-ance such as it is used for within the type advertising researched by the artist, Sanderson instead uses digital technol-ogies in his work to push into view the labour, the materiality, and thus the physical imprint and scarring inherent in the world we live in.
*Read the conversation bellow:
Bobby: How did Solid State: Sunlight come about with yourself, Arcadia Missa and Levy Delval? I know re-search plays a big part in your work, how did your ideas begin and change compared to the end result?
Harry: I’ve been working with Arcadia Missa almost since I’ve been making art and Levy Delval have been interested in doing something for awhile. We planned the show several months ahead so I was able to make 3 new sculptures and a 3-channel video work documenting their production.
!e show represents the current state of development of the technology for caustic imaging that I have been working on for the last two years. Its half a so"ware process carried out by algorithms I have developed with programmers, and half a hardware process which I’m just beginning to experiment with having had more access to materials and resources whilst living in Germany.
!e process I’ve developed produces transparent physical objects that cast digital images in place of their shadow when illuminated by a light source (torch, sunlight etc). Its interesting to me because it creates an ob-ject that sits between computation as a digital process and computation as a physical object. Its also about the problems of trying to realise a digital #le as a real object, and producing an image in a modality that is more permanent than a digital #le to be transferred and displayed on-screen.
For the most part the work is simply about getting the technology to the point where images appear as recog-nisable, so choices of what to represent in this new medium have been curtailed by its limited capacity for de-tail. !ese new pieces are at a much larger scale than previous works, and for the #rst time I’ve had access to the manufacturing stage, so I started introducing more subtle visual elements like putting water drops on the screen before processing the images to try and gauge how well the system handles them. !ere’s an element of blindness in the process as I never know how well an image will be reproduced until the piece is #nished, so these water drops act as markers as well as introducing another layer or trace of physicality in the images.
!e images themselves are all stills from a video I made in 2013. It uses eye tracking to detect the parts of an image that draw focus and then deletes the rest of the image. So the parts of the image that are still visible represent the responses that image is designed to elicit, and also have a physical and temporal referent linking back to the physical movement of a human eye. !ey’re all from data plan and mobile phone ads, so the idea is that these images are taken out of circulation and turned into objects that will still be able to produce these images even if the technological infrastructure that we have now is no longer in place.
!ere are three stages to producing the objects. First the so"ware processes the image and generates a 3D #le, then this #le is sculpted from a block of acrylic by a computer controlled mill, a"er that the object is polished by hand until its clear enough for the image to be transmitted through it. Its a painstaking process, because going too far in the last stage can destroy the contours in the surface and with them the image. !e video
documents these three stages in one projection and two video screens. !e idea is simply to show the produc-tion of the objects on the same level as the things themselves, and hopefully provide a context to understand them as they can be quite opaque on their own.
B.: Regarding the production of the installation how much research/experimentation was there in creating the #nal piece?
H.: !e project as a whole is an ongoing process of research and experimentation. !ey cost a lot to make so there hasn’t been room for anything that doesn’t also have to be exhibited. I was working almost entirely on understanding the physics and coding for the #rst year, and have only recently begun experimenting with physical fabrication. !e project is about starting from scratch with an imaging technology at its nascent stages, and following all the steps from its #rst barely perceptible images to the more con#dent and de#ned representations its able to produce now. Its a di%cult process to bring something from being a #le to a real object in the world, and I like that they have some scars as evidence of that transition.
B.: You’ve exhibited many times now both in group shows and on your own, how do you think you’ve devel-oped as an artist in your approach to presenting your work?
H.: I think I’m getting better at letting the works breathe more. !e #rst shows I did I would try and throw everything I had into one space mostly out of a sense of anxiety. But as I get more used to the concept of showing work as an individual artist I’m also getting more comfortable with allowing the works to just occu-py a space and explore what happens in the intervals between them.
B.: Analysing Capitalism and systems of labour & production feature a lot in your work. Do you think online economies/systems/communities o&er any valid alternative to that?
H.: Current online systems and economies are capitalist, so I don’t think that the Internet o&ers any alterna-tive to it, as its essentially just the consolidation of and most contemporary form of its power.
I do however think that the kinds of algorithmic processes that are emerging in computation – which the caustics project makes use of – are much less determinist and predictable than previous forms of technology, and shouldn’t be automatically theorised as forms of control that mirror and reproduce the power structures that put them in motion. !is analysis is important, but something much more complex is happening too.
Communities of people, whether they’re online or not, are another thing altogether. If we’re looking for an alternative I think it would be good idea to start there.
B.: What plans do you for the rest of 2016?
H.: I’m moving from Berlin to London to spend a few months in residence at Somerset House, then spending a month in Malta at Blitz residency, and a"er that taking up a studio residency in Sweden.
‘SOLID STATE: SUNLIGHT‘by HARRY SANDERSON
presented by Arcadia Missa @ LEVY.DELVAL, BrusselsJanuary 21 to March 12
Interview by Bobby Jewell forO Fluxo, Feb. 2016
www.levydelval.com
Uni#ed FabricARCADIA MISSA, LONDON, UK
‘Uni#ed Fabric’, a collaboration between the London-based artist Harry Sanderson and Arcadia Missa, was the latest exhibition in the latter’s ongoing research into the economy of the digital image in its post-internet incarnations. Since opening in 2011, Arcadia Missa has established itself as a proli#c gallery and publisher with a strong investment in an emerging generation of digital artists. With ‘Uni#ed Fabric’, Sanderson, who graduated recently from Central Saint Martins, returned to the gallery for the second time.!e exhibition title was borrowed from a service o&ered by the American multinational Cisco Systems, which claims to sell ‘connectivity across physical, virtual and cloud environments’. !e reference betrayed an ambiguous fascination with the corporate world that has become familiar in much recent art – think of the self-proclaimed ‘company’ LuckyPDF, with which Sanderson has collaborated in the past. But it also provid-ed the context for a critique of the marketization of human connectivity online and o'ine. ‘United Fabric’ claimed to present an alternative network, which, though not exactly divorced from the market, is committed to exposing the invisible economy of data transmission.
!e centrepiece was a DIY render farm, a super-computer that can create high- de#nition digital images, put together by Sanderson himself. Ordered neatly on a white plinth, the processors are logo-less black boxes; the technology’s inert minimalism belies the artist’s manual work. By extension, the piece emphasizes how HD images conceal the hands-on labour involved in the global rendering industry, where huge farms operate like factories, with workers moving pixels along a production line. In his novel Pattern Recognition (2003), William Gibson compared the process to a beauty parlour, where the sta& massages the image, sharpens it, does its hair (high-res hair is notoriously di%cult). By presenting a handmade farm, Sanderson hinted at the manufacturing industry that lurks behind the illusion of seamless immateriality hailed by so many fans of the digital dimension.
‘Uni#ed Fabric’, 2013, installation view
Six $at-screen monitors were installed around Sanderson’s processors. Each was apparently selected on the basis of its conceptual engagement with the digital image beyond its visible con#guration. Perhaps ironically, though, this wasn’t always evident. In Maja Cule’s !e Horizon (2013), a young woman seems to hang from the edge of the Trump Building, as in an image of post-9/11 #nancial vertigo; the video superimposes footage of a model lying on a table in front of a green screen with looped footage of Wall Street. Takeshi Shiomitsu’s Cleanroom Study (I keep falling and falling) (2013) is a montage of spaces hinting at restricted areas of work where the eye is denied access.Unexotica (2013) by Melika Ngombe Kolongo and Daniella Russo shows a somewhat per-plexing sequence of looped low-de#nition stills and slow-motion footage. !ese artists are mostly just starting out, which perhaps accounts for the elusiveness of some of the footage they present. Clunie Reid’s !e More or Less of Miley Cyrus (2013) superimposes the recent exploits of the American pop star at the MTV VMAs with details from Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23), with tenuous bearing on the premise of the exhibition besides the reference to the master of anti-optical teasing.
Sanderson’s own video, Detail (2013), stuck to the score with a micro-motion rendering of the artist’s body. !is process ampli#es imperceptible movements, making visible normally invisible dynamics like blood circulation and pulse. !e e&ect is uncanny, suggesting a new level of surveillance of the self and others. You get the point. By showing the throbbing life of the #nest hairs and tiniest light particles, Sanderson presents a microscopic metaphor for the expanded phenomenology of the digital image. !e idea is that, as technology zooms in ever closer, we increasingly lose sight of the bigger picture. An untitled digital sound piece by Sanderson enveloped the exhibition, shi"ing according to our movements and adding another layer to the artist’s pursuit of embodied digital perception. Sanderson wrote about this project earlier this year on Mute’s website, in a persuasive essay titled ‘Human Resolution’, which laid the groundwork for this exhibition.
Hito Steyerl’s STRIKE (2010) provided the punch line for the whole show. !e most prominent of the artists in ‘United Fabric’, Steyerl featured as a kind of patron saint of a younger generation likewise concerned with the socio-economic circuits of the digital image. In STRIKE, Steyerl cracks open a screen with a stake only to gener-ate another image upon impact, as in a self-defeating attempt to boycott the ‘mere surface’ of the digital image, its optical sensuousness. !is critique of the limited agency of art beyond symbolic protest and of its cyclical subsumption (to the system, to the market) says a lot about the critical parameters within which the rest of the exhibition operated. ‘United Fabric’ knowingly took on Cisco’s ethos, countering it with an alternative network situated ambiguously between corporate parody and enforced DIY survival. As the modern management motto has it: network or perish.
Giulia Smith
