Lecture by Magdalena Wisniowska
29.11.2018
Tag: speculative realism
elements
Lukas Hoffmann, Andrea Zabric
16.12.2018 – 11.01.2019
elements, 2018, installation view
elements, 2018, installation view
Andrea Zabric, Pigment sculptures (Berlin red and Naples Yellow) 2018, pigment, dimensions variable
Andrea Zabric, Pigment sculptures (Berlin red and Naples Yellow) 2018, pigment, dimensions variable
Andrea Zabric, Pigment sculpture (Berlin red) 2018, pigment, dimensions variable
Andrea Zabric, Pigment sculptures (Naples yellow, 43870,) 2018, pigment, 12 x 10 x 10 cm
elements, 2018, installation view
Lukas Hoffmann, o. T., 2018, Series of 4, each in edition of 10, Stainless steel, dimensions variable
Lukas Hoffmann, o. T. and o. T, 2018, stainless steel, various textiles, pvc, plastic fittings, steel, aluminium bronze, German silver, 150 x 3 x 3 cm and 50 x 15 x 3 cm
Lukas Hoffman, o. T., 2018, various textiles, pvc, plastic fittings, steel, aluminium bronze, german silver, 150 x 3 x 3 cm
Lukas Hoffmann in elements, 2018, installation view
Lukas Hoffmann, o. T., 2018, bronze, 15 x 4 x 4 cm each
Lukas Hoffmann, o. T., 2018, series of 5, stainless steel, 9 x 1 cm each
Lukas Hoffmann, o. T. and o. T., 2018, stainless steel and various textiles, pvc, 9 x 1 cm each and 65 x 35 x 8 cm
Lukas Hoffmann, o. T., 2018, various textiles, pvc, 65 x 35 x 8 cm
The show elements, featuring new work by Lukas Hoffmann and Andrea Zabric, is GiG Munich’s first collaboration with Klasse Pia Fries, Akademie der bildene Kunst, München. Klasse Pia Fries is well known for its focus on abstract painting, especially in its material aspect. Both Andrea Zabric, a recent graduate (2018), and Lukas Hoffmann, a student at the class, incorporate material elements in their practice, but in a strongly conceptual rather than a painterly fashion.
Carbon, aluminium, iron, copper – basic chemical elements are at play in the work, often in their purest form. These instead of being manipulated by the artist’s hand are left in their natural alien state. Matter is subject to its own internal logic not the artist’s touch, and the method of production incorporates industrial, mechanical, and printing processes. While this is obviously human in origin, technology as much a product of man as any painting, when combined with the emphasis on materiality, lends their investigations a scientific rather than artistic quality. As an attempt to think the world outside of the personal relationship we have with it, the work relates to speculative realist concerns currently present in art and philosophy. It shares with speculative realism a taste for the dogmatic, the formal and the mathematical.
Zabric’s signature pigment sculptures, quite literally, take centre stage. Painting becomes reduced to its primary components: space, ground and pigment. The pigment is not mixed with medium and spread across the ground in its customary way, but is compressed at high pressure to form unusually perfect cuboid shapes. This gives her colours an uncanny density, a new found depth that recalls the violence of its making. For GiG Munich Zabric has produced three new pieces in pigments she had not used before. The work is also more experimental than previously, in that she allows the pieces to crumble, thus exposing their innate vulnerability.
For all its implications of aggression, Hoffmann’s work is curiously invisible, scattered around the room, sometimes disguised as items of furniture. Instead of paintings, we encounter clothes hooks, a javelin is placed against the wall ready for use. Bullets (or are they exercise bars? maybe dildos?) lie waiting on the floor. The casual method of display serves to highlight the works tactile qualities, drawing us in. In a moment of masochism, we want to touch the sharp points with our fingertip and wait for the skin to break. Yet simultaneously we feel that to do so would be an imposition, we would enter a space that its not for us, that belongs to someone else, or indeed to the work itself. Quietly, the work turns away from us and withdraws into its own realm.
Magdalena Wisniowska 2018
elements
Lukas Hoffmann, Andrea Zabric
26.11.2018 – 18.01.2019
Vernissage: Freitag 16. November, 18 – 21 Uhr,
16 November 2018 – 18 Januar 2019
Bitte nach Vereinbarung unter contact@gig-munich.com
Finissage: Freitag 18. Januar 2019, 19 – 21 Uhr
The exhibition elements, showcasing new work by Lukas Hoffmann and Andrea Zabric is GiG Munich’s first collaboration with Klasse Pia Fries, Akademie der Bildenden Künste München.
What connects the two young, upcoming artists is a shared interest in materialism, where their version of materialism belongs more to the philosophical developments centred around Speculative Realism than to the handmade, expressive variety traditionally associated with the activity of painting. Operating at the intersection of materialism and realism, they submit to the view that the primacy afforded to matter necessarily demotes the importance of the human understanding of it. If matter is all there is, then its reality must be encountered for itself. In their quasi-scientific, quasi-magical approaches, they reject the emphasis on the multiplicity of interpretations that art borrowed from dominant modes of contemporary critical theory (post-structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis) in order to pursue an almost essential, almost dogmatic, grounding of reality. With this comes a violence, whether this is manifested in the high pressure Zabric submits her pigments to, or the highly polished weapon-like quality of Hoffmann’s metal work. They show that the material world, the inhuman one, is intense, forceful, elemental.
Magdalena Wisniowska 2018
Spekulatives Design – Körper des digitalen Geistes
Eva Leonhard und Lisa Käsdorf
with text by Dr. Betti Marenko
as part of MCBW 2018 and supported by Bayern Design
Speculative Design. The body of the digital mind
A central tenet of techno-utopianism, the desire of living outside and eventually beyond the body’s own finitude, lures us with its promise of immortality – a techno-alchemical version of the elixir of eternal life.
Cinematic imagination shows this desire as a dark and doomed one, the counter-natural, ennui-rising, vampiresque harbinger of an abject deterioration of society – cue a caste of immortals presiding over the world (from Transcendence to the current Netflix series Altered Carbon).
Can this well-rehearsed scenario be imagined otherwise?
What if future humans could successfully transcend their earthbound limitations by accessing full neuro-cognitive uploading? Leaving aside the implications of who would be entitled to the procedure and at which cost – not just for those who can afford it but, critically, for the rest of humanity – it is easy to see how persuasive the idea may be: digital optimization is the future.
A consciousness that becomes entirely digital gives us two conceptual paths to consider.
Either the body is obsolete – and total digitalization signals the absorption of body matter into a flow of codes, bits and algorithmic sequencing – the computational equivalent of the Cartesian body-mind split, with bodies turned into downgraded, disposable, replaceable ‘sleeves’ whose materiality becomes terminally second-rate.
Or else, what appears to be a cognitive externalization must be understood instead as the co-evolution of human minds with techno-digital machines. Here the human body-mind assemblage becomes machine becomes intelligence – whether this intelligence is deemed ‘artificial’ or ‘natural’, it no longer matters.
Maybe it never mattered.
The real challenge is to be able to speculate on this scenario of possible (present?) human-machine co-evolution without necessarily swerving to embrace the theocratic narrative of the singularity – the idea that a super-intelligence will emerge (or for some is emerging already) from the exponentially growing recursive process of
automatic machine learning.
Co-evolution means something else. As French philosopher and mechanologist Gilbert Simondon said exactly 60 years ago, we humans are always already among machines. Likewise, there are no machines without humans. Both evolve. Indeed, they co-evolve, to the point that the boundary between technology and humanity is vague, uncertain, slippery. That is why Simondon also wrote, enigmatically, and rather splendidly: “The robot does not exist”. 1
One day, humanity will wonder why decades were spent feeding irrational fears of AI when there is no artificial intelligence as such, but only one intelligence constantly evolving, mutating, incubating its own difference.
Brain uploading, then, is the tangible expression of this metamorphosis of intelligence which is already happening in a milieu that is at once machinic and corporeal, human and non-human, synthetic and organic. With each search, each click, each update, our cognitive capacities are already uploaded, encoded, some may say ‘evolved’ – in the whirring of a silicon-carbon merger.
Whether humans are conscious of this process or not, perhaps no longer matters either. Evolution is just another word for the manifold hybridizations moulding us and pushing us to the edge of tomorrow. Some may call it intelligence. Just don’t call it robot.
Cinematic imagination shows this desire as a dark and doomed one, the counter-natural, ennui-rising, vampiresque harbinger of an abject deterioration of society – cue a caste of immortals presiding over the world (from Transcendence to the current Netflix series Altered Carbon).
Can this well-rehearsed scenario be imagined otherwise?
What if future humans could successfully transcend their earthbound limitations by accessing full neuro-cognitive uploading? Leaving aside the implications of who would be entitled to the procedure and at which cost – not just for those who can afford it but, critically, for the rest of humanity – it is easy to see how persuasive the idea may be: digital optimization is the future.
A consciousness that becomes entirely digital gives us two conceptual paths to consider.
Either the body is obsolete – and total digitalization signals the absorption of body matter into a flow of codes, bits and algorithmic sequencing – the computational equivalent of the Cartesian body-mind split, with bodies turned into downgraded, disposable, replaceable ‘sleeves’ whose materiality becomes terminally second-rate.
Or else, what appears to be a cognitive externalization must be understood instead as the co-evolution of human minds with techno-digital machines. Here the human body-mind assemblage becomes machine becomes intelligence – whether this intelligence is deemed ‘artificial’ or ‘natural’, it no longer matters.
Maybe it never mattered.
The real challenge is to be able to speculate on this scenario of possible (present?) human-machine co-evolution without necessarily swerving to embrace the theocratic narrative of the singularity – the idea that a super-intelligence will emerge (or for some is emerging already) from the exponentially growing recursive process of
automatic machine learning.
Co-evolution means something else. As French philosopher and mechanologist Gilbert Simondon said exactly 60 years ago, we humans are always already among machines. Likewise, there are no machines without humans. Both evolve. Indeed, they co-evolve, to the point that the boundary between technology and humanity is vague, uncertain, slippery. That is why Simondon also wrote, enigmatically, and rather splendidly: “The robot does not exist”. 1
One day, humanity will wonder why decades were spent feeding irrational fears of AI when there is no artificial intelligence as such, but only one intelligence constantly evolving, mutating, incubating its own difference.
Brain uploading, then, is the tangible expression of this metamorphosis of intelligence which is already happening in a milieu that is at once machinic and corporeal, human and non-human, synthetic and organic. With each search, each click, each update, our cognitive capacities are already uploaded, encoded, some may say ‘evolved’ – in the whirring of a silicon-carbon merger.
Whether humans are conscious of this process or not, perhaps no longer matters either. Evolution is just another word for the manifold hybridizations moulding us and pushing us to the edge of tomorrow. Some may call it intelligence. Just don’t call it robot.
Betti Marenko 2018
1. Gilbert Simondon. 2017. On the mode of existence of technical objects. Minneapolis: Univocal p. 16
German translation of text: Spekulatives-Design_deutsch
Contract: wren_Vetrag
Spekulatives Design – Körper des digitalen Geistes
Eva Leonhard und Lisa Käsdorf
with text by Dr. Betti Marenko
as part of MCBW 2018 and supported by Bayern Design
Opening: Thursday 8th of March, 7 – 10 pm
8.03. – 22.03.2018
A central tenet of techno-utopianism, the desire of living outside and eventually beyond the body’s own finitude, lures us with its promise of immortality – a techno-alchemical version of the elixir of eternal life. Betti Marenko
With its latest exhibition, “Spekulatives Design – Körper des digitalen Geistes,” GiG Munich is excited to be participating in Munich Creative Business Week for the first time. Supported by Bayern Design two young local designers, Eva Leonhard and Lisa Käsdorf, will be presenting new interactive work, which addresses the ontological, epistemic and ethical implications of the digitalisation of the body.
Head of Design at Central St. Martins, London, Dr. Betti Marenko, has written a text especially for the exhibition and this will be included as part of the work on show.
Lou Jaworski
“Nothing” 10th Nov – 15th Dec 2017
Lou Jaworski, Nothing, 2017, installation view
Lou Jaworski, Nothing, 2017, installation view
Lou Jaworski, Nothing, 2017, installation view
Lou Jaworski, Presence, 2017
Lou Jaworski
“Nothing” installation view
Lou Jaworski, Nothing, 2017 installation view (Hyper body standing, Hyper body lying, Presence and Untitled (needle)). Photo: Johannes Wende
Lou Jaworski
“Nothing” work list
Lou Jaworski, Hyper Figure standing, 2017, ferrite magnet, dimensions variable
Lou Jaworski, Hyper Figure lying, 2017, ferrite magnet, dimensions variable
Lou Jaworski, Untitled, 2017, iron meteorite, brass pencil. 14 x 0,8 x 0,8 cm
Lou Jaworski, Untitled, 2017, iron meteorite, brass pencil. 14 x 0,8 x 0,8 cm (detail)
Lou Jaworski, Untitled, 2017, sewing needle, gold 7 cm
Lou Jaworski, Presence (silent version) 2017, vinyl 12 inch, edition of 2+1 AP
All images courtesy of the artist.
Lou Jaworski
“Nothing” exhibition text
The work Lou Jaworski shows at GiG Munich operates in a context, which could be understood in Speculative Realist terms. The “Nothing” of the exhibition title refers not so much to the sparse, almost minimal quality of the work, nor to the commonplace understanding of nihilism as the questioning of the worth of existence, but rather to the definition given by Ray Brassier. He presents nothing as a consequence of the realist conviction that there is a reality independent from us, oblivious to the values and meanings we ascribe to it. In Jaworski’s work, “nothing” is taken as a speculative opportunity, to show thinking has other interests than those circling ceaselessly around man.
For the exhibition Jaworski presents a number of small objects, all of which refer to the otherworldly – to something outside the bounds of human experience. The human hand is absent from the magnet sculpture, which has formed from its own accord. A pencil has filling made of meteorite dust, first formed together with our solar system, well before the beginning of man. These objects act as indexes for the non-relational, in that they contain elements, which we, as the thinking human subject, cannot experience. Quentin Meillassoux would describe these as “arche-fossils,” in that they contain traces, not of past life forms, but of a time prior to the emergence of life.
As such, the work welds the same power the arche-fossil has, in that it questions the kind of correlationist thinking characteristic of critical philosophy, where reality is considered never in-itself, but always in relation to us. To begin thinking reality in-itself Meillassoux proposes the principle of absolute contingency, meaning, the arbitrary and radically unpredictable of transformation of things from one moment to the next. Likewise, all the objects in the exhibition feature this radical sense of transformation. What is ever slightly so wondrous about Jaworski’s work is that one does not know where it might lead. Beyond the human, yes, but also beyond what can be expected. The gleaming structure of a display unit is disrupted by spilt water; a pencil contains traces of the early universe; gold can be found in the eye of a needle. Contingency is approaching an object and not knowing where it might take you.
Magdalena Wisniowska 2017
