Cartography of the Mind’s I
“The diagram or abstract or abstract machine is the map of relations between forces, a map of destiny, or intensity, which proceeds by primary non-localizable relations and at every moment passes through every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another.” (Deleuze and all. 2002)
Meow Gallery: The gallery is empty.
Deterritorialization, Reterritorialization, Territorialization are terms of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari invented to describe a process(es) through which fields or maps whether political, social, historical or mental undergo transformations. Their borders become fuzzy and porous and their shapes and relationships become arranged, deranged and at time anarchic. As the introductory quote infers the etiology of this kind of thinking emanated from their interest in non-linear dynamic systems linked as they are to developmental embryology when the immature body has not been specified or is without organs. We know later that even in the early stages of extra-uterine life the newborns brain is also unspecified, as the visual cortex of the congenitally blind can become inhabited by an immigrating auditory cortex. This borderless and a-territoriality becomes a generalized condition of brain in which there is constant switching and transitions and, as such, a model for thought itself. Models of thought which become externalized in painting, sculpture, video and installation. Thoughts not constituted to modules of mind but deterritorialized non-linear, dynamic and distributed entities, which build contemporary cultures of umwelten or webs of interconnectedness. But in our accelerated technological world, the so called Era of the Anthropocene in which human activities dominate everything, abstract information is no longer hierarchically arranged but rather arranged in closed and open autopoetic systems in which like a fly in a spiders web human are entangled.
Many artists in the twentieth century utilized diagrammatic logics in their works. The list is long: Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, 1915-1923, Francis Picabia’s Machine Turn Quickly, 1916, Alexander Rodchenko’s constructivist illustrations, the sculptures of Jean Tinguely, Homage to New York, 1960, George Maciunas’ The Learning Machine, 1953-1973, Andy Warhol’s, Dance Diagram, 1960. More contemporary examples include Jeremy Deller’s History of the World, 1997-2004, Jenny Mehretu, Citadel, 2005 and Mark Lombardi’s sociograms his so called Narrative Structures from the late 80’s. In viewing these artworks one sees an auto-externalization of the ontogeny of thought itself from a liner, hierarchical of the early century to a progressively more intensive linear and weblike character.
The artists in this show continue to respond to these new forms of mutating representations of thought itself in variety of media.
Warren Neidich, September 2014
Presstext
Barbara Seiler is proud to present its most recent group show titled Cartography of the Mind’s I featuring works by Cécile B. Evans, Melanie Gilligan, Warren Neidich, Alexandre Singh, Ante Timmermans. The exhibi-tion is concerned with different forms of epistemological configurations as represented through aesthetic me-diums like film and drawing and installation. Thereby, it focuses on the mind map as both topic and cognitive technique as well as on other forms of networks in the so-called post-internet era.
Warren Neidich is a Berlin and Los Angeles based artist and theorist who exposes the interfaces between socially engaged cultural production and its interrelationship to the brain and cognitive capitalism. His interdis-ciplinary anarchic experimental works combine photographic and video elements, Internet downloads, scotch tape, painting and noise installations. Neidichs neon installation Duende Drawing , 2014 is a diagram or carto-graphic map of the different flows that constitute his theories of a becoming cultured brain and the internet’s involvement in this endeavour – more specifically how noise and improvisation through their bringing about difference and variation in the cultural landscape producing other neural architectures and the possibility for alternative forms of thought. While the neon diagram’s content is marked by complexity its materiality evokes pop-culture; neon as popular fixture in outdoor advertising.
The French multimedia artist Alexandre Singh concocts artistic situations that intermingle the forces of logic and the occult—via collage, video, texts, performance, and installation—to question the ways in which we acquire knowledge and understand the world. Since 2008, the artist has been presenting his work in the for-mat of academic lectures as part of Assembly Instructions, a performative series consisting of hour-long talks on such topics as childhood memories, dreams, Jewish mysticism, and TV soap operas. Singh illustrates the-se lectures with a multitude of collages that he connects by drawing dotted lines between them, by hand, on the wall. The patterns of cause and effect are central in Singh’s object-centric work, as unexpected connec-tions are made between disparate events, people, and places, exposing the fanciful array of possibilities that exist within logic-driven association. At Barbara Seiler, Singh presents a fragment of said associative collages, a framed inkjet ultra chrome archival print titled Assembly Instructions (The Power of 100), 2010.
Cécile B. Evans is a Belgian American artist based in Berlin and London. The work How happy a Thing can be, 2014 features three everyday, mundane personal items – a comb, a screwdriver, and a pair of scissors. The 3D-printed sculptures of the objects are set next to a screen depicting moving and alternate locations for the objects. The corresponding video work shows the objects in digital form performing a choreographed arch, implying that they have an emotional life of their own and are being pushed to their very limitss. The three sculptural objects have been chosen for their static nature; they are immune to updates and upgrades, with a design that has gone unchanged for many years. Inspired by personal breakdowns and disasters as seen through the eyes of the media, the path these objects take in their ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ forms explores the transi-ent nature of spirit in both humans and our apparatus, each seemingly burdened with the overwhelming thirst for something more. Currently, Evans is working on a long-term project with the Serpentine Galleries (UK), AGNES, which is the first of a series of digital commissions. AGNES is a spam bot that lives on the website trying to reach out and share information with the user.
Melanie Gilligan’s multi-episode drama Popular Unrest,2010 is a set in a future much like the present. There, however, all exchange transactions and social interactions are overseen by a system called ‘the Spirit’. A rash of unexplained killings have broken out across the globe. They often take place in public but witnesses never see an assailant. Just as mysteriously, groups of unrelated people are suddenly coming together everywhere, amassing new members rapidly. Unaccountably, they feel a deep and persistent sense of connection to one another. The film explores a world in which the self is reduced to physical biology, directly subject to the needs of capital. Hotels offer bed-warming servants with every room, people are fined for not preventing foreseeable illness, weight watching foods eat the digester from the inside and the unemployed repay their debt to society in physical energy. If on the one hand this suggests the complete domination of life by exchange value do the groupings offer a way out? Gilligan currently lives in London and New York and works in a variety of media including video, performance, text, installation and music.
The drawings of Ante Timmermans, based in Ghent and Zurich, are critical as well as poetic reactions to or reflections of his environment. Particularly fascinated by routine, (hidden) systems, the banality and absurdity of society, Timmermans contribution to the exhibition is a drawing – chalk on blackboard – depicting a mind map featuring the word SYSTEM connected to the terms Ordnung, Sicherheit and Kontrolle. The drawing points out the tension between the rigidness und seclusion of both the combination of words and the possibility of a rupture of the mind map’s order by a simple modification and extension of the drawing on the blackboard. Timmermans drawing serves as a kind of homecoming to the an original simple form of the mind map in a world that I overwhelmed by joined-up thinking and the vast technological progress.