Object Relations

 

Ways of seeing are never purely aesthetic—there are always hidden assumptions and forms of power built into perception. As computer vision and artificial intelligence systems become ubiquitous, I have been exploring the assumptions built into these technical systems.[i]

Trevor Paglen.

What constitutes advantage when considering the encounter between capitalist systems of extraction and the boundaries of experience.

Imminent Things

The most significant gap one could probably imagine is across time and space. As a construct, time gives us order, incrementally structuring our lives. Time and space happen across dimensions, space exists in three dimensions, and then the 4th dimension is time. The directionality of time cannot be reversed or changed. Our most recent attempt to bridge gaps over time and learn more about our existence comes via innovation and technological advancements. The recently launched James Webb Space Telescope is just the latest example of positive human endeavour and may provide new truths about our origins.

This monumental engineering task aims to inform the future. This technological staging of our place now depends on precision and perfection. Requires that tools perform in their function. Precision, in its form, is the hammer. Yet, we also need to break the hammer. We want the artist to employ the stresses that will produce this break. Epistemologically the redshifted light formed by the first stars - now soon to be detected on Webb’s primary mirror, acts as a justified representation. Each travelling photon informs the now and creates a mass that brings about an ‘“ontological consequence” that is transcultural and transhistorical in value.’[ii] But, the break, too, has value as well. It’s in the break that we discover what wasn’t there before. A new way of viewing is now upon us. And this view has taken on the form of the critical.

So, what is material in this new broken representation ahead of us? In an essay on becoming, Hito Steyerl attributes materiality to the image in the gap between the represented (things out there) and the representation (how these things take on other meanings). Yet as a thing, this image does not “represent reality. It is a fragment of the real world; it is a thing just like any other– a thing like you and me.”[iii] So, our viewership of the material fetishises the image that takes on the role of witness. We gaze out into the fore to see our emergent selves informed by the past.

The James Webb Space Telescope, as captured using onboard technology © NASA

Simultaneous objects

For artist Trevor Paglen, the night sky is something looked toward for “tens of thousands of years, if not since the beginning of humans themselves.” For Paglen, this “charged landscape” is not the emergent hidden image but what the image captures in representation once uncovered. Satellites, hidden in plain sight, are the mechanisms that metaform new cultural associations by creating subtle technological shifts in perception. Their passive presence is made only material through their use. Therefore, our relationships within things, whether ethical or political, racial or societal, are open to influence by capturing our perceptions.[iv] Paglen further elaborates on his concept of viewership and how the object we see now – which was not there before, will tell us something about where we are and “how to interpret that particular landscape.”

Again, Paglen’s work fixes seeing something that would otherwise go unnoticed. The richness of evidence we uncovered before – a chance to metaform a critique of modern value systems - when viewing the leisure centre underpins that even space, stars, distance and time are commodifiable.

Trevor Paglen, Discarded Rocket Body Approaching the Disk of the Moon (SL-8 R/B), 2012. C-Print. 48 × 42 in.

Latency of the Object

The concealed nature of a techno-system of orbital objects that facilitate our advancements as a species is a miracle. The same algebraic language chalked upon the slate boards of research centres created systems as delicate and as diverse as the chalk dust that floats around the scribbling hand, almost like a maquette of space, a space in miniature. Each particle takes on the role of a stellar mass, each mass coalescing to have an effect. It is only upon questioning that we can calculate the possible impact of such machines. Now, let’s use Harman’s ‘OOO’ approach again and investigate how the leisure centre and satellites come into contact. The leisure centre and the satellite both act as a warning. Whether seen or unseen, the object in its being brings about an aesthetic confrontation. Here we create a term as given through a psychoanalytical approach—that which is absent yet found with a present object and future outcome. The leisure centre stands in for the spoils of war, victories over others and the assurance that all is well, “go back to bed, America, your government is in control”, Bill Hicks protests.[v]. The satellite assures the imminent violence of violation. Sometimes elliptical, a satellite's orbit tracks the mobility of others via the quantum world of atomic clocks. 9,192,631,770 cycles per second, oscillating within the frequency of Caesium 133, is an unobservable force yet felt through other forms. Absent technologies map where cultural and social tensions lay. For Paglen, critique of technological advancements which produce individual or societal disadvantage is what metaforms out from the gap. The unseen orbital threat from above embodies centuries of knowledge and understanding. The technological and the distanced merge and confront the natural and the intimate. Precise operations come to metaform a geographical spectre connected to withdrawn technologies that we never embrace yet are with us in real-time. So, “In between these two areas of conflict [we get] ‘the absent object as a present persecutor’, that is, the space where the object used to be as a ghost of its former existence.”[vi] For our objects, the forms in which they exist and what those forms represent now harness a potential force. Science is about getting things right and making things more efficient—no more broken hammers here, there is nothing to be apprehended, only a latent force behind power.

Screenshot, Etsy, Bill Hicks, Go Back To Bed America Tee-shirt.

 Gravity

Richard Serra is an artist who relies on the dis-jointed coalition of gravity cancelling out gravity. In Hal Foster’s assessment of Serra’s orchestration of the tectonic masses that occupy their space “endowed with a new critical force,”[vii] we come to bear witness to the joins that “conceal more than they reveal.”[viii] Where the leisure centre asserts itself in the gap, Serra’s work walks a more delicate line. Some forces exert themselves on global citizens more than others if we consider power. Some citizens are free of the effects of globalisation, and others must bear the pressure so that others do not. Bringing about the end of rampant, uncontrolled consumerism, for example, is not in everyone's interests yet. And especially the commercial high-end art markets. Systems of production are putting a strain on the resources our planet can provide.[ix] Globalisation likes it here, and it has settled. In Legal terms, ‘to settle’ means there has been a dispute, so things are not fixed and brush up against each other. Yet the very meaning of colonising has “created […] interests” [x] that produce weight and interrupt any failure to navigate the tensions of a “traumatic reality that cannot be assimilated.”[xi] Commercial interests, devoid of social assimilation, critically reduce the other to a corporeal mass that is in the way of progress and out of balance.

Art Historian Dr James Romaine observes that “If the pieces are equally balanced, the weight is cancelled out; you have not thought of tension nor of gravity. Defeating gravity by using it against itself, Serra transposes the dense materiality of lead to seeming immateriality.” Serra’s masterly neutralisation of “the tension within and between each part is the activating force that stabilises the whole.” Serra’s work commits itself to a weightless performance that demands that the viewer find the gap to engage with the outcome. Without the gap, we are forced around the mass, and the chance to engage with the object elapses critically. This kind of artistic engagement doesn’t hope for the existence of the gap and perceives the gap as a chance, as a way through. Metaforming a critical stance requires that you alter your course and work with the things manifest in the gap.  Therefore, as we encounter hegemonic masses through matter and form, we can experience the convenience of space and embrace the strange apprehensions open to critical analysis.

Richard Serra, Torqued Ellipse II, 1996. Dia Art Foundation; Gift of Louise and Leonard Riggio. © Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Dirk Reinartz

i] Trevor Paglen, “A Thousand Flowers’, Pace Gallery, (June 2021) <https://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/trevor-paglen-2/> [accessed 19/03/2022]

[ii] Hal Foster, The Art and Architecture Complex, (London: Verso, 2013) p. 150.

[iii] Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), p. 52.

[iv] Trevor Paglen, ‘Trevor Paglen Interview: Moving Through the Night Sky’, Louisiana Channel, YouTube, 4 September 2018, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yflWjGKUSq0> [accessed 19/02/2022] 04:38 secs.

[v] Bill Hicks, Bill Hicks: Revelations, dir, by Chris Bould, (Comedy Dynamics, COM585, 2017), Track B2.

[vi] See Donald Meltzer and Meg Harris Williams, The Apprehension of Beauty: The Role of Aesthetic Conflict in Development, Art, and Violence, (London: Clunie Press, 1988), p. xxiv.

[vii] Ibid, p. 155. 

[viii] Ibid, p. 153.

[ix] Jason Hickel, The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, (London: Random House, 2017) In his book Hickel, makes apparent the average demand globally is 2.2 hectares per person (5.4 acres). In contrast, globally there are currently 1.8 hectares (4.5 acres) of biologically productive land and sea area available per person. Maintenance of biodiversity also depends on this area. Comparison of supply and demand shows that humanity’s Ecological Footprint exceeds the Earth’s biocapacity by over 20 per- cent (2.2ha/1.8ha = 1.2). In other words, it now takes one year and more than two months to regenerate the resources humanity consumes in one year. Source Global Footprint Network. <https://www.footprintnetwork.org/content/documents/Ecological_Footprint.pdf> [accessed 23/04/2022]

[x] Chin-Tao Wu, Privatizing Culture, (London: Verso, 2002), p. 292.

[xi] Hal Foster, p. 158.