Artificial Bloom; Fluid Archives
Melih Aydemir
‘’As the people here grow colder, I turn to my computer and spend my evenings with it like a friend.’’
Kate Bush’s ‘Deeper Understanding’ (off her album ‘Sensual World’, 1989) starts with these lines, and builds up as it turns into a conversation between the computer and the artist. The computer says ‘’Hello, I know that you’re unhappy, I bring you love and deeper understanding” and she accepts this offer - a sensual communication between the human and the machine. The offer that Bush accepted resonates with Donna Haraway’s pioneering essay “A Cyborg Manifest” on merging these two dimensions and embracing techno-communication tools in order to re-craft our bodies. As the song progresses computer sounds mix with an ancient choir singing, Bush neglects her bodily need and sinks into a pleasure she had never felt before.
As the line between our IRL (in-real-life) and virtual existence blurs, we find new ways to reconstruct ourselves and to expand our material limits. The field of digital covering our experiences, memories and identity allows the emergence of self-documentation and archiving methods that transcend linear narratives. Our presence is continuously transformed on the ever-expanding Internet by means of collecting and storing our memories. The utopian dream that we are real-time memory collector cyborgs creates transparent archive spaces where these memories are collected. The exhibition seeks possibilities in this field, beyond the linear narratives constructed by a certain gaze. It also considers the expansion of virtual networks as spaces where feminine and queer memory can find itself a nest, while reflecting on the cyber-feminist context of the documentation tools that have become extensions of ourselves.
Artificial Bloom, which gives the exhibition its name, is taken from the 2018 song ‘Faceshopping’ by SOPHIE, standing as an acceptance of the reconstruction of one’s body. In the album ‘Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides’, where SOPHIE embraces the trans identity and presents it with fluid visuals, the piece takes the virtual and physical interventions that one makes to find their own reality as a way of opening a door to the construction of queer bodies. The blossoming and transition here is not only physical, but also refers to the identities that change between the virtual and the real. The capacity for simulation by media systems that we embraced, reminds us that we humans, too, are performative entities.1 Bloom is also the name of a computer graphics effect that softens details by adding intense light to images. Fluid Archives fragments those memories judged worthless to document, perhaps “unreal”, yet transmitted and disseminated through body memory.
The photographs that Christiane Peschek manipulated in the ‘POSE’ series show bodies scattered like a flower blossom. These artificial bodies, distorting the linear visuality created by the classical female pose/representation and the masculine gaze, are the continuation of the post-cyberfeminist narrative2 that defines only what it is not. Visuals, where identities and body parts fly freely and fluidly, are the digital photographs of a physical deconstruction. This stands for the transformation of both culturally constructed and contextually determined identities into spaces of formation by constantly changing over space and time.3 Peschek imagines a future archeologist digging our digital ruins, and creates a virtual cave of digital paintings, where ever-changing flow accumulates. The technique Peschek uses to produce photographs presents analog silver gelatin prints of digital images, which inverse the process by converting digitally manipulated photographs into negative films. Choosing this technique, which is accepted as archival through the reproduction of frozen light on the surface, from pixels to grains, the artist touches on the fact that body transformation does not make the person less genuine. The images that depict the transfer in reverse, from family albums to data clouds and the self-archiving nature of Instagram pages, are turned into documents of non-bodies. As Peschek’s installation expands, the light-reflecting material on the walls and sculptures invites the viewers to use the light on their smartphones, questioning our current means of observation behaviors.
The moments that were first photographed and then painted by Zeynep Beler, document the female experience in the post-internet era. The bodies accumulated on her phone, the surrounding bodies and other non-reactive surfaces turn into textures. The artist’s painting technique resembles the contact of hands with the screen, the marks left by the sliding fingers on the screen are reflected in the paintings. Smartphone-holding hand and body parts melt and dissolve into each other, and the desexualized body becomes a surface carrying other bodies. Beler’s self-documents, the images she shares on Instagram are the material of her production and become increasingly fluid/liquid. Bodies are a field of subjectivity and a platform in which political imagination becomes materialized, while one becomes their own subject of experiment.4 Physical manipulation is accompanied by installations that visualize hybrid realities. In the installation, using hardware store materials, the phone parts and false nails placed on a ghost net that is removed from the sea show the physical remnant of our extensions, while also offering a present nostalgia of the seapunk movement5 that emerged in networks like Tumblr in the early 2010s. The memory cards placed in the seashells, while appearing as found objects, heralds a Cyborg Venus rising through the shell. As layers get connected with cable zip ties, it becomes a body for a techno-system.
Luz Blanco’s works, based on the dialogue between erasure, memory and forgetting, reflects on the electronic transfer processes and possible missing elements. Separating the pixels in the photo one by one and processing them by drawing on paper, Blanco depicts the fragments where bodies and memories are separated. The transition between layers presents an archeology of the body memory. The transformation of collective memories in the electronic field traces the narratives formed by the fragmentation of memories through various images.
1 Lee Mackinno, 2016, Love Machines and the Tinder Bot Bildungsroman, e-flux Journal #74 - June 2016
2 Old Boys Network—an international coalition of Cyberfeminists established in 1997 in Berlin—agreed to intentionally keep the term undefined in order to keep things as “open as possible as consensual.” They published ‘100 Anti-Theses of Cyberfeminism.’ on web, in order to make a list of definitions that don’t define cyberfeminism.
3 Julie Tilsen, David Nylund, 2010, Heteronormativity and queer youth resistance: Reversing the discourse
4 Paul B. Preciado, 2013, Testo-Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitic, e-flux Journal #44 - April 2013
5 A mostly Internet-based phenomenon birthed out of the Tumblr and Twitter universes as a means to describe a lifestyle aesthetic that is all things oceanic and of the sea.