Bloodchild. Scenes from a Symbiosis
./づ~ 🍓 On Saturday, October 5, 2024, one year after the launch of Fondazione Spazio Vitale, the exhibition Bloodchild. Scenes from a Symbiosis opens to the public. The third project I curated for the newborn exhibition space in Via San Vitale 5, Verona, Bloodchild features works by Ivana Bašić, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Oliver Laric and Sahej Rahal. The exhibition will be open until November 16, 2024.
︶꒷꒦︶ ๋࣭ ⭑ During the 20th century, the advent of the information age and the process of digitization of society further radicalized dichotomies inherent in Western culture: between existence and essence, between things and information, between body and soul. More specifically, the human is translated into streams of electricity and data, giving up the physical dimension of the body, thus engendering pain. Yet is a less dichotomous and more organic view of the human-technology relationship possible? According to information theorist Giuseppe O. Longo, the relationship between human and technology is a symbiotic one, and the homo technologicus that emerges from this relationship and co-evolution is a symbiont. Longo does not deny this imbalance but proposes that we address it from a finalistic perspective, inviting us to consider what steps are necessary to build a functional and constructive relationship where we, as hosts, have to set the limit.
₊˚ʚ ᗢ₊˚✧ ﾟ. In her visionary short story Bloodchild (1984), African-American writer Octavia L. Butler tells of a group of human refugees who, in order to survive in a hostile environment, bend to an invasive, disturbing and dangerous alliance with an alien species; similarly, in the here and now of an environment turned hostile – biologically, socially and spiritually – by its intervention, the human-technology symbiont finds itself in the need to redesign a long-standing relationship that has dramatically accelerated in recent decades, in order to recreate the conditions of its own survival.
ᵕ̈ Bloodchild. Scenes from a Symbiosis is a group exhibition that compares the positions of four artists (Ivana Bašić, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Oliver Laric, Sahej Rahal) regarding the forms that this relationship has taken: investigating its weaknesses, delving into the reasons for contemporary discomfort, and proposing, at times, perspectives on healing, not promoting a return to a hypothetical pre-technological human nature, but rather trying to restore the balance between the two actors in the relationship. In the exhibition’s narrative, the “bloodchild” is the human to come, the fruit of a difficult and troubled marriage; but it is also the humanity we already are, or have always been, since it was precisely in its relationship with technology that humans defined themselves as a species. After all, the challenge we are facing is the same one we have been fighting since we first turned a thing into a tool.
(๑ᵔ⤙ᵔ๑) On Saturday, September 14, artist and pioneer precursor Rebecca Allen was awarded the DAM Digital Art Award 2023/24, and honored with a small retrospective exhibition at DAM Projects, Berlin. Wolf Lieser, founder and director of DAM, invited me to give a laudatory speech. A full transcript is available on my blog - here a short sample from the final lines:
In art, being a pioneer is worth nothing, if the pioneering art is stuck in the past – if it’s not lively. In digital art, unfortunately this happens very often, as the languages and tools, hardware and softwares, possibilities and trends evolve so fast that obsolescence – technical, aesthetic and conceptual – is always around the corner. It would be an overstatement to say that this never happens in Rebecca Allen’s work. Yet, if some of her works have aged (quite well, indeed), in the best ones she was able to reach a level of autonomy from the limits of technology and the taste of a specific moment, to make them timeless and lively despite the passing time. Works like Girl Lifts Skirt (1974), Swimmer (1981), Music Non Stop (1986), The Bush Soul (1997-1999) or Life Without Matter (2018) are relevant today not just for their pioneering role, but for what they have to say on the virtualization of the body, on the simulation of life, on the relationship between mind and matter, on our life in an hybrid environment, on identity and gender, and for how they say it. They do not preserve, like a time capsule, a point of view from the past; they are not historical, or vintage; they can engage an effective conversation with works by artists from different generations and times. And this is, in my opinion, Rebecca’s best achievement.
༘⋆✿ While I was working on the exhibition A View from Above, Francesco Ragazzi invited me to contribute with an essay to the upcoming issue of the academic magazine JoLMA, published by Foscari University Press and focused on The Art of Mapping Between Land and Mind. “A View From Above. Vertical Perspective in the Age of Total Images”, which offered me the opportunity to extend my research beyond the limits of the exhibition, is now available in open access. Check it out!
⋆⑅˚₊ Last year, Daphne Dragona and I spent the summer processing the amazing archive of projects and text that Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana put together in 13+ years, under the label PostScriptUM. The PostScriptUM Anthology (2010–2023). Essays on Art, Technology, Society and the Environment is the result of this effort of re-reading, selection and contextualization of a body of texts that followed the present, and that now document the past. Beautifully designed by Federico Antonini, the book features a list of contributors that speak by itself: Aude Launay, Bojana Kunst, Clémence Seurat, Daniela Silvestrin, Dušan Kažić, Eva & Franco Mattes, Felix Stalder, Florian Cramer, Geoff Cox, Ida Hiršenfelder, Inke Arns, James Bridle, Jaya Klara Brekke, Jon Lackman, Lev Kreft, Marc Garrett, Martin Zeilinger, Matthew Fuller, Mojca Kumerdej, monochrom, Nika Mahnič, Paolo Ruffino, Primož Krašovec, Régine Debatty, RYBN, Silvio Lorusso, Steve Rushton, Tomislav Medak, Trevor Paglen, Valentina Tanni, Vuk Ćosić. Here you can order the book or download a sneak preview. On my blog, you can read a short postilla I wrote to fill up the final pages. I called it The Lot's Wife Syndrome.
⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡ 🤌 My two Italian readers may be happy to know that a long edited excerpt of my essay “Informational Ghosts. Arte e (im)materialità dell’informazione”, written for the catalogue of the exhibition Salto nel vuoto. Arte al di là della materia (GAMeC, 2023) - and reprinted in my anthology Net Art. Scritti sull'arte nell'era dell'informazione - is now available for free online, thanks to the magazine Artext.