Organic – Memory of the Posthuman

The undercurrent that runs behind our exquisite organ of composing words into mental shape is images.

In actuality ‘images’ are the metaphors of any language usage, so that, in order to infiltrate a process of change we need to have new images. With this in mind I enter the studio, to develop, maybe, threads of works, lines of images that I need in order to pass, to transmigrate unto difference.

Through these lines of works I set out to search a new creative view; to find new frequencies and forms that can transform the abstract and far un-known of the future – that which evokes anxiety – into an organ of humanness.

At the onset of the 21st century the thought of migrating beyond our current humanity becomes more relevant than ever. The concept ‘Post-human’ stands for a metamorphic process that absorbs and entwines both our biology and our technology into a new platform of becoming. The eventuality of which is no longer part of the current scope of sense making.

I am using the concept, ‘posthuman’, as an opportunity to depart form the present into unknowns; a substantive opportunity to embody, here and now, the aesthetic action of re-installing man. In such an act, the post-human might lifts itself away from the hardware of violence and the ingrained attitude and code of control, by correlating uplifting and augmentation with a ‘Tsunami of Compassion’.

I began the creative process with a series of small works on paper, exploring the formative space within which the metamorphosis does land neither into a utopian vision nor into a dystopian fate, but rather entices vulnerable and deep communication.

This initial series of works opened my quest for a procedural corridor weaving technology to actualize the fractal quality of the image. The process continued with a combination of high resolution techniques of scanning, framing, blow-up and printing.

The range of images which emerge, explores the aesthetics embodied in the sensitive tension between the alien and the very intimate, longing, and again longing, for intersection. This is the space that to my understanding characterizes the new installation of humanity.

This body of works stands for a transition into a new creative state, in which I progressively migrate between languages, mediums and technologies. Like a nomad, I am traveling between processes and images, substances and information, mental-emotional states and action. The creative I in this sense becomes a dynamic archipelago of singularities.

In this state technology is absorbed into the creative flesh that loses no grain of spirit. It is a state in which the motion from analogous to digital language empowers matter; where the development of creativity is actualized by the passage between mediums; where the creative event can become an organic memory of the posthuman future.

I wish my art as a passageway, a corridor into the dynamic ambivalent line between self and ‘other’, between intimate and ‘alien’, between certainty and the unknown; to mark through aesthetics the possibility of transition toward a new perspective.

‘Matter’ becomes soft. It is the softening of matter, of ourselves, of our genes, of our beliefs, the softening of our mindset and base-images, which is distributed all over as the voice and signal of the 21st century. It is the softening of ‘matter’, of the concreteness of our precincts and restrictions that allows us to choose our identity, to shape it as malleable substance. Fundamentalism, the historical mindset of fundamentalism is becoming obsolete. (From notes in black and white)

Migration into the Soft

When we speak of the “middle” in a hard medium, what we see is the center in a structure, an a-priori privileged location, a unique point of view, like the control tower in a panopticon, or like reason in rationality, like good in morality or the truth in validation. It is the center from which to behold the symmetry of architectural virtuosity.

When matter becomes soft, ‘middle’ loses its structural image while sustaining the potency of relation. Where is the ‘middle’ of flowing minds? The ‘middle’ of imagination? Where is the middle of an evolving phenomenon? Even the middle of a living town… and we are in the middle of each one of them. A shift in meaning, the middle in a soft medium depicts a state; it is a within, a between, an un-pictured touch-like equidistance from everything reaching from the inside out.

Letting oneself into the “middle”, the solid concreteness of restrictions is re-examined anew and projected into possible tensions that generate change. The structural stability of the hard yields to the dynamic potential of the soft, giving play to corridors of yet unexpressed opportunities, momentary shapes, endless reshuffling of landscapes.

In a momentary crossing over from a world of definite restrictions toward the wilderness of dynamic tensions, mind learns to morph singular states in soft matter.

The ‘middle’ is an aesthetic attitude of mind.

We are in migration; we are migrating into the soft; first generations to step into a soft universe, to cross over into softening selves and softening “matter”. And migration, this new form of migration, is reshaping our minds, our perception and intelligence.

Between mathematics to imagination

The works of Diana Al Hadid are to me a window into the Soft, a private window into the indefinite opportunities hidden in the ‘middle’ of ‘Matter’. The works occupy the infinitesimal space between construction and deconstruction, between emergence and entropy and between mathematics and imagination.

Her unique ability to walk these shifting lines, to operate intuitively membranes between construction and deconstruction, is reflected in her inspiring manipulation of shapes. It seems as if matter in her hands is indeed becoming soft, enriched with undomesticated opportunities for re-viewing.

The works are like a descriptive poem of the gradual coming into existence, a poetry of poiesis – the bringing of a ‘form’ into the light, layer by layer, time after time, process after process, a becoming, a long becoming, a very long becoming that resonates with a million years.

Yet there is a discernment between natural evolution and conscious poiesis, there is a difference between nature and culture, and between the processes through which forms are produced. A conscious catalyst that interferes with becoming (of form) becomes in its turn intimate with the process of exceeding itself while in the ‘middle’. Thus opening doors that are disengaged from the natural.

The difference, where manifested, is not a matter of perfection or imperfection as in the world of Plato, rather it is an aesthetic probe, sensing where to make the difference visible, harvesting its power to un-domesticate form. From cracks on the surface of the familiar into the liquid streams of possibilities, emerging as the singular.

At the inexistent heart of soft matter, aesthetics is rumbling, probing new grounds for thought, portraying the “middle”, not as locus nor as subject, but as a new intelligence within the flow of human minding.

Aesthetics, the ‘Middle’ of Minding

“When the lines of distinction between Matter and Mind are fading, that is when an artist begins to work. When matter is soft and mind is clear, when matter and mind become a ‘Brain’ that thinks, then thought begins to move in alternative paths.” (From notes in black and white)

It is this state of affairs that I call the ‘middle’ of minding, and the ground of aesthetic thought. The intense and singular emergence in which mind and matter forge a ‘Brain’ that thinks and exceeds. A virtual ‘brain’ that moves and emotes along the line of tension, stretched between the intimate and the alien.

Like those moments in which a sculptor merges with the substance she is working with, and a painter migrates into color and a photographer blends with light, it is not the union that matters but the kind of ‘brain’ that emerges.

It is with the emergence of these virtual ‘brains’ that we realize; we are not ‘caged in matter’ as much as we are not ‘caged in selves’, rather, we have just begun our journey into flows of concrete potentialities that unfold through and emerge within the amalgam of ‘mind’ and ‘matter’.

‘While going to a condition’

“I want the audience to experience the space” – Hiroaki Umeda

“While going to a condition” was the first work of Hiroaki Umeda, performed in 2002. It is an enlightening work, brilliant in its simplicity and elegant and modest in its use of technology.
It ventures away from the standards of perception into an alternative phase-space, into being intimate with an alien mindset of sight. It is a reminder, so to say, of the endless opportunities that constitute the space between forms and language.

Hiroaki Umeda 梅田宏明 “Holistic Strata”

The elements from which the work is composed are brought to a plane of equivalence – body movements, sound, light and technology – so that, the basic unit, the ‘Atom’ from which the performance is made, is an alien composition of multiplicities.

The hard distinction between the elements is replaced by soft distinction. Making clear that softness is not about a collapse into one amorphous substance, but rather it is pointing to endless relational opportunities, existing in the space that enfolds between the elements.

Sound, light and movement are as if physical substances, materials that he strips from melody, text and continuity; so that the relation with them and between them is a flesh of direct contact.
Once the index of patterns is cracked open, and softness fills up the fractures, space is exposed as an eruption of unpredictable spatial opportunities, the ‘middle’ of undefined possibilities becoming tangible.

The volume of possibilities

“It’s not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it, you’ll see that everything changes”. — Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Both intelligence and evolution operate upon multiplicity of options; our tendency to anchor an understanding to a single point of view or a specific form is a bias of linear perception. Moving into softness we need a metaphor expanding awareness to unexpressed multiplicity and parallel waves of possibility; together with the accuracy of calibration we need corridors into the ‘middle’.

In cinema the set of coordinates in space are defined by the location of the camera, the motion of it and the kind of lenses that are selected, together coalescing the type of perspective. These are the vectors mapping the phase-space of sight (the volume containing all possible perspectives applicable to a given cinematographic moment, whether actuated or not).

The question of where and how to operate the camera is an exploration of such phase-space and any shot is in fact a particular state within the volume of optional perspectives.
The evolution of technology in relation to cinema did change profoundly the volume of possible sights and the set of restrictions operative in it – thus altering the way to navigate and create within a phase-space, which is itself in change.

The matter of cinema progressively becomes soft, but this is not necessarily enough in making greater cinema; on the contrary more often than not it reflects a gap in speed, between the growing freedoms of technology, reducing restrictions, and the fragile freedom of our minds in being able to extract singular states out of equivalent multiplicities.

It is not that it is less easy or more difficult to make movies today; it is a different task altogether in terms of operative intelligence.

The great masters of the medium indeed begin with softness of ‘matter’, they transform restriction to tension, and then when Mind and Matter, sight and observer, co-forge a ‘brain’ that thinks, they move to a new path in the phase-space and bring to fruition a singular state of sight.

Much like the first moment of “The consequence of love” by Paolo Sorrentino (2004). It is a still shot, an airport landscape, a long and empty conveyor belt, in the very end of it, far in the depth of the frame a human enters moving towards the viewer. Step by step, as the human figure is approaching and closing the distance, the sense is almost transforming into a thriller.
The thriller though is about the viewer migrating into the world of the movie.

Great Movie Moments – The Consequences of Love

Just before the human figure is about to leave the frame, the camera begins to move. But now the camera is very tangibly loaded with the viewer mind and emotion, as if the ‘mind’ of the viewer and the ‘matter’ of the close-up co-forged a brain that emotes; the gap is engulfed into a new corridor of possibilities, and bravely gliding to a new and singular path.

For a blink of a second time stands, space opens, the seeking of a new encounter and the apparently bland first contact with the movie is suddenly overwhelmed by information.
From then on the viewer remains in longing for that kind of moment, while the story of the hero of the movie is exactly the same, longing for that kind of instance in which matter is soft, and contact produces different versions of ourselves, even if the consequences are deadly.

The magic of art is in the accessibility to singular states of sight and emotion, which provoke deep and inexhaustible observation. So that it allows us, while being no more than a case in evolution, to sustain corridors of observation upon matter becoming soft.

Matter loosens its grip

The becoming soft of matter is riding multiple ruptures in technology, science, society, subjectivity, philosophy and art, if just to name some of the realms in which it is gathering momentum. It is this network of ruptures that makes matter soft, or differently put, makes matter pregnant with new clouds of opportunities and sights.

It is connectivity, hyper connectivity and the incoming interfaces between the physical and the virtual, between brain and machine that make matter soft. These coordinates in which domains overlap, oscillate and gently seep into each other are corridors into the middle.

Matter loosens its grip, its hardness and rigidity, becoming malleable, pliable, a quasi-solid stream of opportunities.

Yet, we do know how to operate in a hard world, and we are only now gathering the intelligence and speed that fit softness. The softness of matter calls for the softness of a new aesthetics, to fit the radical ongoing change.

We need to rethink intelligent operation in a soft universe, extraction of singular states out of flowing streams, instantaneous processes of reconstructing mindsets together with the art and science of curating becoming.

It is Aesthetics that provides us the grounds to a new system of navigation.

Image 1 – Santa Cruz – Cueva Manos

Image 2 – Diana Al Hadid – In Mortal Repose, 2011
Image 3 – Diana Al Hadid – Self-Melt, 2008
Image 4 – Tara Donovan – Untitled, 2003
Image 5 – Neri Oxman – E,X,Y,Z,S,S,T