Hi all,
Just saw a review of Frankenstein Reanimated and because some of you on the
list are in the book I thought you'd be interested in reading it.
Mytho recommends (Phil Smith):
Frankenstein Reanimated: Creation & Technology in the 21st Century (Eds. Marc
Garrett & Yiannis Colakides) Torque Editions, 2022
https://www.facebook.com/mythogeography/posts/5907704932592518
This has been a very strange read for me. I have no attraction to or
understanding of the technical side of programming. I read Erik Davis’s
‘TechGnosis’ back in 1998 when it first came out and, already anti-gnostic and
anti-transcendentalist, my suspicions about an information-based society were
heightened. I have pretty much remained that way ever since; extending my
wariness to information technology-based arts. Perhaps, I just haven’t seen
that wonderful piece to change my mind, though even one of the artists
interviewed in ‘Frankenstein Reanimated’ worries at the “VR Headsets that
provide clothes for hackneyed metaphors”.
What brought me to read the book is my engagement with Mary Shelley’s novel
‘Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus’, co-writing a stage adaptation (which
also drew on the Universal movies) back in 2005, which has continued to tour
intermittently ever since and was last year turned into a musical at the
Deutsches Theater in Munich. The early parts of ‘Frankenstein Re-Animated’
address the abiding significance of the novel in some detail, and then the
interviews with various ‘media artists’ take over – a monster taking control of
its own life – and the book moves further away from Mary Shelley and her
engagement with stitching flesh and sparking philosophy in dead brain matter.
In his preface, Yiannis Colakides describes “a widening knowledge-gap in the
use and understanding of technologies” between hackers who operate as a
“vectoralist class.... [who] control.... information flows; and the majority
who are all too often taken for a ride by their technologies”. It is this
problematic relationship that seems to haunt – as Mary Shelley’s monster
plagues its creator, asking difficult questions and exacting revenge – the
artworks that ‘Frankenstein Reanimated’ describes and discusses. In the vast
majority of the examples – drawn from exhibitions in Gíjon, London and Limassol
– the technologies are deployed to critique and even undo themselves; many draw
on what Marc Garrett describes as the effects of the new technologies to “have
profoundly displaced and decentred how we understand humans and humanity’s
agency and corporality” in order to explore those displacements and decentrings
in what Gregory Sholette and Olga Kopenkina call the “capitalist-realist...
un-present”.
Artworks explore the “potential harm of recognition technology”, how technology
carries racial assumptions as ‘universals’; gallery visitors are drawn into
making and choosing assumptions for image filtration. But when an artist says
“What is amazing to me.... is that people really get into labelling each other”
you want to shout back – ‘but that is what your artwork asks them to do!’
Rather like the options in Luke Rhinehart’s (George Cockcroft’s) ‘The Dice Man’
(1971) or Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 (1974) – why are the options of sexual
assault, a bullet and a gun, even in there? There is an inbuilt manipulation
that looks like choice or agency; an implication and incorporation that is
within the very structures and techniques of the works that both address their
themes in critique and enact them simultaneously. It is jaw-dropping to read an
artist who first explains their work as “inspired.... by reading... about the
autonomous weapons systems... which... ‘conflate the act of seeing and
killing’” and then, on being asked to explain why the “visual universe” of
their piece is “so cold and clean”, replies that it is “just a pragmatic
choice.... everything that I am not trying to point to is at default value”.
But wasn’t Mary Shelley starting with a default value, with a dismembered
body/bodies, bringing the default of the graveyard to life and not only asking
questions of it, but having it ask questions of everything. Pushing the new
technologies beyond their functional limits often has intriguing and
attention-grabbing effects, distorting figures and landscapes in ways
reminiscent of historical and contemporary human artists, but then the
suspicion is all the time that these effects are the remnants of the art
history education of the programmers rather than any novel interruption of
productions of the obvious. It is disheartening to read an artist bemoan “the
pre-existing bias of my initial dataset... The results may have been further
distorted by technical bias due to technical constraints of the algorithm”. As
artist Mary Flanagan says, almost in despair: “I keep wondering why we are on
this quest to make artificial systems emotive.... why we invent things just to
invent them, thinking that somehow anything new improves our lives”. And yet
the artworks keep on coming as each new wave of artists ‘discovers’ the
possibilities of (and funding for) arts and new technologies.
If I came away with a slightly refined animosity, I would not want to
discourage anyone from reading this book; it is endlessly fascinating. It never
flinches from the difficulty of this work and the mind-bending tangles that
contort the artists working with it, often in interfaces with terrifying state
and fiscal systems. Paul Vanousse’s article (he was investigated by the FBI who
attempted to enter his studio and home, two of his previous collaborators were
prosecuted) is a welcome reminder of just how dangerous some of these
themes/threats can be.
‘Frankenstein Reanimated’ is perhaps most powerful and engaging when it
addresses the technology not as a “tool” or an expansion of the artists’
themes, but as an agency in itself: “a growing chorus of techno-objects that
insistently asks us to drill the Arctic, build pipelines, burn coal” (Eugenio
Tisselli). The “monster” does not feed us, it wants us to feed it, otherwise,
it threatens, it will takes its revenge; those who serve and obey it can
participate in its feeding frenzy “where the secret sauce of memetic media
meets the magic sauce of right-wing billionaires, underwriting political
campaigns to facilitate a wholesale move to the hard right” (Ami Clarke). But
as Mary Flanagan says: “why are we on this quest?”
Anyone interested in a copy go here -
https://torquetorque.net/publications/frankenstein-reanimated/
Wishing you well
Marc
=============>
DR Marc Garrett -https://marcgarrett.org/
Furtherfield -[http://www.furtherfield.org](http://www.furtherfield.org/)
DECAL -http://decal.is/
Bio -https://marcgarrett.org/bio/CV -https://marcgarrett.org/cv/http://decal.is/
http://decal.is/
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