Other Publications: Agnieska Kurant

VARIABLES
Agnieszka Kurant
VARIABLES
July 23, 2016 – October 30, 2016
Agnieszka Kurant
The End of Signature, 2016.
Glass tubing, ink, water, pump, Autopen machine.
Engineering : Mason Juday
Photo: Jean Vong
A.A.I. (System’s Negative), 2015.
Hot zink poured into abandoned termite mounds in the African desert.
Collaboration : Dr Paul Bardunias, Dr Rupert Soar
Agnieszka Kurant:
Logically Unbridgeable Gap
My first encounter with the work of artist Agnieszka Kurant (b. Poland, 1978) was at a visit to
Kurant’s solo exhibition, Variables, at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in October 2014. There was a
scientific precision and mystery in these works that immediately provoked my curiosity to know the
ideas driving the work. As an architect deeply interested in the overlapping zones of science, art,
philosophy, music, and architecture, I sensed a kindred spirit in Agnieszka. With positive enthusiasm
we look forward to her work presented July 23, 2016 at our ‘T’ Space gallery.
As Steven Holl Architects is currently in design development for the
new Rubenstein Commons at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey, I have been rereading Albert Einstein’s Ideas
and Opinions (Crown, 1954). When Einstein reflects on the evolution
of philosophic thought throughout the centuries he asks: “[W]hat
knowledge is pure thought able to supply independently of sense
perception? Is there any such knowledge?”.
In regards to the gulf between the world of concepts and ideas and
the world of sense perception he sites “An almost boundless chaos of philosophical opinions…”
He also writes:
Hume saw that concepts which we must regard as essential, such as, for example, causal
connection, cannot be gained from material given to us by the senses… If one reads Hume’s
books, one is amazed that many and sometimes even highly esteemed philosophers after
him have been able to write so much obscure stuff and even find grateful readers for it.
Einstein’s sixty-year-old reflections are still provocative and make me feel that Agnieszka is doing
philosophy rather than writing about it. The logically unbridgeable gap between concepts and
ideas and the world of sense perception persists, but it is bridged by great works in the arts. I
believe this chasm can be spanned by articulate works of art, music, poetry, and architecture. It is
the science / art / philosophic structure of this bridge that attracts me to the physical manifestations
of Agnieszka’s ideas and it is an honor and pleasure to share these with the ‘T’ Space community.
Steven Holl
June 23, 2016
A.A.I., 2014.
Mounds built by termite colonies from colored sand, gold and crystals.
Collaboration: Dr. Paul Bardunias, Dr. Leah Kelly
Photo: Jean Vong
Above and right: Currency Converter, 2016.
Various objects, pegboard, steel, wood, pigment print on paper.
Production: Madeline Hollander
Photo : Jean Vong
Capital Objects
Agnieszka Kurant and Sanford Kwinter Dialogue
Sanford Kwinter: What first struck me in your work is how it gives expression to what many in the
design world find most revealing these days: a consistent materialist vision of the human universe.
Of course there are very explicit “dialectical materialist” components in your work—your primary
interest in making historical process sensible, for example, and the often hidden operations of
subdivision and exclusion that determine how forms emerge. But more importantly, it is in how
you conceive of the landscape in which we live and of all the things with which we interact as
endlessly connected from one level to another. From language, to capital and forms of exchange
of all types, to form itself and to all instances of organization as if each was but a variety of energy
and matter without barrier or distinction of any kind between them. . . You see physical reality as a
moving system of complex economies.
Agnieszka Kurant: Yes, indeed. My point of departure is an interest in complex systems in
nature and in culture, and in the complex economies that these systems produce or display.
I was particularly interested in the crystallization and stratification of civilizations, societies
or social movements, which could be compared to the processes of rock sedimentation, or
the ways in which crystals, glass, or ice are formed. This position derives from Arthur Iberall’s
homeokinetics and was further developed by Manuel de Landa. More recently the concept of
social physics has been elaborated by Alex Pentland as well as by complexity scientists such as
Sorin Solomon, Steven Strogatz, et al. Crystallizations of civilizations are said to have begun
with extensive trade and flows of goods among dispersed populations of hunter-gatherers,
turning these loose structures into more dense forms. Subsequently three kinds of fictions that
emerged—money, gods, and laws—allowed the self-organizing systems of human species to
create overarching narratives
in order to form larger
societies of people who
never met.
I found it interesting that
experiments with simulations
of growing artificial societies
were partially inaccurate
and limited. For example,
applying the models of
artificial societies to already
extinct civilizations did not
necessarily replicate the
results we know from history.
The desire to use computers
as civic thermostats and
Living Currency, 2014.
Supercapacitor, battery, aluminum, steel.
Engineering: Eric Humphreys
Photo: Jean Vong
program societies, as was already imagined by Marshall McLuhan, is partially realized through
“reality mining” and feeding data to statistical modeling programs, the terrifying consequence
of which is the increasing surveillance of our lives. At the same time interesting work is being
conducted by some physicists using computer simulations for modeling e.g. political conflict
resolution.
I also started to analyze the crossover of the assembly line of nature and of culture. The
exchanges between the economy of organic, non-organic, and cultural machinic phyla, or some
sort of universal phylum for all forms. For example, in the contemporary world when energy
becomes a new currency, it turns out that the ultimate form of capital is the sun which now not
only powers nature, but also can be mined for energy. Energy eventually turns into information,
and information into capital. Recent discoveries of the extra-terrestrial origins of gold, oil, and
tantalum make us imagine that the future will be linked to extraterrestrial, alien capital. At the
moment, traditional mining of fossil fuels and minerals is accompanied by the mining of bitcoins,
Ethereum block chain—the currency of which was significantly named “gas”—and massive scale
data mining by corporations.
I started to explore the process of
emergence which happens in exactly the
same way in nature and in culture. Various
phenomena and forms emerge the same
way in organic ecosystems, the urban
fabric of society, and on the internet. An
emergence of a single human thought
in the brain is governed by principles
similar to the emergence of a political
movement, a stock market crash, or the
self-organization of a slime mould or
termite mound. All of these are forms
produced by complex systems. And the
economies of these systems are similar
too. To give a simple example: the termite
colonies not only evolved into a labor
society with class divisions, but some groups of termites within each colony often become idle for
periods of time, so there is even the notion of free time of sorts embedded in that system even
though presumably termites do not have consciousness.
Another example of the overlapping of different systems is the emergence of the new
geological formation recently named plastiglomerate appearing on the shores of Hawaii, created
out of melted plastic trash, lava, and broken shells at the crossover of nature and culture.
What I found most fascinating was the inability to predict the non-linear behavior of these
complex systems. All these phenomena inspired me to explore the crossover between collective
intelligence and artificial intelligence which some of my recent works relate to. It becomes
apparent that artificial intelligence as imagined by science fiction may remain a fiction for many
more years, since simulating the complexity of the human brain seems nearly impossible.
Meanwhile, however, we can simulate and evolve phenomena resembling artificial intelligence
on the basis of collective intelligence via crowdsourcing. This is what I will be concentrating on
during my collaboration with the MIT AI Lab and Anthropology Department, which I’m bringing
into a dialogue to produce some new works. I started using emergence to develop new ways of
creating and evolving forms. For example, I outsourced a series of sculptures to termite colonies
to create models of a dispersed and completely unaware social factory. I also produced collective
signatures morphed for various communities since it has been observed in both biology and
The End of Signature, 2015.
Site-specific projection, Autopen machine.
Collection Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Photo: Kristopher McKay
Right: The End of Signature (detail), 2016.
Glass tubing, ink, water, pump, Autopen machine.
Engineering : Mason Juday
Photo: Jean Vong
social sciences that colonies of bacteria or insects, civilizations or various communities can be
perceived as collective persons or characters with distinct personality traits. That project – The
End of Signature – reflected also on the obfuscation of singular authorship and on the looming
end of handwriting replaced by typing on technological devices.
What is fascinating for me is the fact that now we are abandoning the attachment to financial
capital and realizing that it’s social capital that is going to be the much more important factor in
the economies of the future; we realize how social energy becomes a currency on a par with other
energies that are also becoming sui generis currencies. Take the renewable energies or even
the fossil fuel energies and their gradual abandonment—both are currencies. It is interesting to
watch the abandonment of the gold standard in 1971, the emergence of alternative currencies
which followed, and now the beginning of the abandonment of the fossil fuel-based energies
and the emergence of new ones including the increased role of social energies harvested though
crowd sourcing. These are the different kinds of energy that are the new emerging currencies
of the contemporary world. We naively thought that automation would decrease exploitation,
but the extraction of machinic surplus
value with computers is simply a more
perverse and concealed process. I think
these things become apparent when
we look at games such as Minecraft
where almost anything can become
a currency expressed in cubic units.
Another example is Goldfarming where
virtual currencies and minerals can
be exchanged for real cash. People
in several developing countries and
at Chinese labor camps work as gold
farmers in online games to acquire
in-game fictional currency that other
players around the world purchase in
exchange for real-world money. Another
interesting phenomena is Click Farms,
which simulate online popularity, are
another interesting phenomena.. They are a form of click fraud, where a large group of low-paid
workers is hired to click on paid advertising links. These fake clicks are essentially different from
those arising from computer bots. The workers are paid, on average, one US dollar per thousand
likes or per thousand people followed on Twitter, but then the companies are selling their likes
and followers at a high cost of 250 Google+ shares for $12.95. $200 million a year is earned from
fake Facebook activities. I would risk a theory that pretty much everything, including human life,
freedom, creativity, etc. can be expressed in units that can be converted into measurements of
another currency. Contemporary economy, driven by the energies of social capital, makes it even
more apparent that everything in the world is based on circulation and conversion of energy
into and out of form. And my works are often based on circulation and conversion of energy.
One of the versions of The End of Signature is based on the circulation of water continuously
drawn from the museum’s water system, constantly washing away the black ink resembling oil.
Living Currency is based on the harvesting of kinetic energy generated by the audience and its
conversion into electrical energy constantly charging a battery-sculpture. I know that you are also
working on problems of energy in relation to form and formation—what practices or forms have
you identified in contemporary use? SK: Well, my concerns are at once a bit different and deeply similar; I too am pretty wedded
to the framework that considers all modalities of storage—including that of Capital, but of
information as well—as consistent with and as extensions of basic materialist frameworks and
agents, such as physical energy or heat (Georges Bataille). But I also see transformation as the
basis of all salience in the world—far more than “things”—and hence I see the world itself as a
metabolic continuum of emerging and receding saliences (and since only these movements and
changes register to perception and experience, their logic of appearance also extends to both
aesthetics and neurobiology). The language that best permits description of these phenomena—
that is, that best permits the isolation of significant meanings within what presents itself to us—is
arguably thermodynamics. It tells us where batteries (accumulations) exist—reservoirs that can
produce changes and forms, and where gradients of flow need to move to recede into the
invisibility of equilibrium and thereby to transform their environment in turn. Like you, I see the
world as populated by demons, the kind Clerk-Maxwell spoke of, and I see it as our job to ally
ourselves creatively with them, in concept, attitude and practice.
Above and above right: Untitled, 2014.
Conveyor belt, motor, mirror.
Production: Alexander Benenson
Middle and bottom right:
Minus One Dollar, 2012.
1000 metal alloy coins.
Photo: Wojciech Olech
In many of these same senses I also
recognize an almost sensual exuberance
in your plastic work, shall we say a
propensity for, and a cultivated attention
to, the life of forms and their attributes:
colors, textures, shapes, controlled
developments, behaviors, even flow,
etc. This gaiety at times belies the
nightmarish vision of multiple invisible
tyrannies that you just described, or, if
I can say it another way, the necessary
vision of the new machinic rationalities
that control not only the conduct of
our lives, but of our thoughts and
affects as well. In the design world,
digital and social-generative forms of
labor overwhelmed nearly all other
concerns and approaches for nearly
three generations, ignoring much of
the curious animism we are speaking
about here, and descended into an
almost pure form of what Marx called
commodity fetishism. How do you
reconcile your own role as producer of
sensations and “things” with the fetish
culture with which they are bound to be
integrated in our market universe?
AK: I’m both horrified and inspired
by the speculations of financial
capitalism where artworks become yet
another currency and their content
becomes often irrelevant. Meanwhile, mass computation of the 21st century
creates an illusion that almost anything can be computed, from the algorithms
of taste to the global happiness index… from climate change to high
frequency trading… to nature. So my response to that has been to search for
the uncomputables.
Speculation became a mode of production in both finance and art. My
work analyses the speculations and fictions as well as the hidden exploitations
of social energies and social capital. Looking for alternative quasi currencies
is typical for post-Bretton Woods capitalism where the value of money is no
longer guaranteed in the gold standard. The transformation of artworks into mere
currency can be clearly observed in Freeports—such as the Geneva Freeport—
which are warehouses storing art and other valuables and collectibles in the areas
or territories at international airports with no customs duties. Artworks held in
Freeports are kept in closed crates which are rarely, if ever, opened. Artworks
are used there by corporations and wealthy individuals to merely store value in a
manner similar to stock market bonds or gold. Very often transactions between
these corporations and individuals happen through trade or exchange of these
sealed crates containing multi-million-dollar artworks.
Paradoxically the dematerialization of the art object proclaimed by conceptual art
is realized in cognitive and financial capitalism. We live in a paradigm of the economy of
the invisible. While the allegedly immaterial conceptual artworks are in reality turned into
easily commodifiable and often fetishized certificates of authorship and documentations,
contemporary capitalist production is based to a high degree on immaterial, virtual products
such as patents, copyrights, strategies, debts, air rights, virtualization of money, and the
immaterial and invisible labor. In fact, the underpinnings of conceptual art can be traced to
the same moment in time as the beginning of cognitive capitalism, when people started
to use ideas as a kind of coinage / currency. Since then, money and labor are becoming
increasingly immaterial and invisible.
What is particularly of interest to me is the fact that the same way that co-creation of
products is currently often outsourced to customers, the co-creation of value of artworks is
outsourced to audiences. Duchamp’s idea of the viewer completing the work should currently
be rephrased as “the viewer completing the value of the work.” Not paying for a museum
ticket or gallery entrance fee does not mean they are free. The visitors contribute to the
increase of value of artworks exhibited at various institutions by merely Instagraming a photo
from a given exhibition or liking an image of an artwork on Artsy or Facebook. Contemporary
production is mixed with circulation and is based on crowd creativity when almost everyone is
an artist. We live in the times of circulationism which is not about making images, but about
circulating and accelerating them.
One of my main areas of interest is the erosion of singular authorship. Digital culture has
accelerated the production of memes, which are examples of works without authors. The
internet memes circulate and mutate, constantly evolving and dispersing. The development
of the crowdsourcing platforms, currently used mostly for commercial and often exploitative
purposes, will probably lead in the future to new collective ways of producing experimental
artistic content in a similar manner to how Wikipedia is used for producing knowledge.
It becomes increasingly apparent that the concept of the author is, to a large extent, a
construct created to appropriate the labor of the multitude of the dispersed and networked
creative process.
Meanwhile, the artist became the paradigmatic economic actor of our time. For example,
the process of gentrification is often using the social capital of artists who turn out to be
important players in the game of the real estate market although they do not participate
in the profits. Urban gentrification often begins by artists bringing symbolic social capital
to wherever they move. As soon as the artists transform industrial ruins into commercially
attractive “creative” spaces, developers and investors immediately come in to capitalize on
the artists’ resourcefulness. We all participate in these disguised exploitations; it is yet another
example of invisible exploitation of social capital.
So in my practice I’m trying to critically and subversively play with these phenomena. The
piece Mutations and Liquid Assets, for example, is a quasi alchemic fusion of four existing
works by different artist: Joseph Beuys, Richard Prince, Carol Bove, and Carsten Holler, which
I bought and subsequently melted together into one form. The idea was to create a sort of
mutation of four ideas—or four memes merging into one—an alloy of four works made of
different metals, or four minds. This fusion led to the emergence of a hybrid new form. The
four artworks were physically liquefied like other forms of capital, in that case through their
literal melting.
SK: You have identified a second universal acid at work in our economic and cultural
world, one that operates alongside, often just like, yet in some ways even beyond traditional
Mutations and Liquid Assets, 2014.
Original artworks by Joseph Beuys, Richard Prince, Carsten Holler and Carol Bove melted into one form.
Steel, silver, bronze, brass and the artworks’ certificates.
fiscal currency: that modern substance par excellence that we refer to as money. You refer to
these as memes, but seem to acknowledge that they are at bottom no more than artificial
modes of monetized form that has somehow hijacked the production of cultural meaning.
Now these new forms circulate with little or no distinction between high and low; indeed they
are indifferentiable as art and commerce, and indeed may represent a new amalgam. Their
status is indifferent to the labor relations embedded in them because social media has reduced
market friction—and hence measurable entropy—to zero. In other words, art has found an even
more efficient market than fiscal markets and hence has begun to achieve its expropriations,
to continue the Marxian model we seem to have adopted today, invisibly and in an almost
completely diffuse state. It would be hard, indeed dishonest, not to see this as an even more
rarified—and insidious—form of alienation which deprives humans ever more from access,
not only to unregulated, volatile physical sensation, and experience, but also diminishes our
capacity to achieve what Nietzsche called untimely meditation, or what his French followers
called “thought from outside”—the power to imagine and engender what is not currently
sanctioned by the organized forces around us.
I unreservedly side with your systems’ approach to understanding how forms arise in our
world, but I wonder to what extent you may too strongly rely on a version of negative dialectics—
the belief that art is doing something by simply staging a social antagonism—that no longer finds
traction in a fully abstracted flow world, and in actuality confirms and affirms some of its most
pernicious effects by further naturalizing them (and that this imputation might apply to nearly all
art practice today. . . ).
AK: I have always been very skeptical of overrating art’s agency in general and its ability even
to stage social antagonisms. I think that if art succeeds to work as a catalyst for people to ask
questions about the status quo then it is already a lot.
I think we should not be naively positivist about any systems. Information networks are often
assumed to be democratic because they supposedly exist without central command but in reality
networks produce their own forms of control, governance, and hierarchy. Mass computation of
the 21st century subjects our decisions, movements, tastes, and feelings to the invisible action of
arbitrary political algorithms. The internet is completely surveyed and monopolized by copyright
and control. Even knowledge is being privatized. The internet of things will further reinforce the
rule of the few monopolies or the siren servers, as Jaron Lanier calls them, such as Google or
Facebook. Right now the economics of networks is such that only these central servers make
money from the flows of free information. At the time of its sale to Facebook, Instagram
had exactly 13 employees. It is not because those employees were so extraordinarily
valuable but because much of its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to
the network for free.
One thing is true though; in a world in which more things are potentially nearly free, social
capital is going to play a far more significant role than financial capital and that’s what interests
me in my recent research… How can we think about new ways of making, emerging, evolving
artworks based on social and not financial capital. Architecture and urbanism have obviously
been investigating these problems for a long time. It is particularly interesting to look at how
societies or social groups, emigrants etc. who found themselves in situations of profound financial
crisis and various calamities start operating as societies without money or without traditionally
understood architecture; they find the way to build out of literally nothing without any master
plan. In a way I am trying to apply this thinking to my recent works by looking at other ways of
producing forms that could emerge as results of collective intelligence. I’m trying not to be naïve
about it. As I said, each complex system soon starts to produce some form of hierarchy and
control. This concerns for example the emerging system of the so-called sharing economy and
it would probably also concern the proposed system of guaranteed minimum income economy.
But perhaps understanding the mechanisms governing these systems could allow us to try to
circumvent their logic, and art is an interesting laboratory to do that. In our contemporary flow
world, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to “do things with art” so I am glad if my work
becomes a catalyst triggering some questions.
SK: It is heartening to encounter these ideas in an art and form maker today, because the
trenchancy and provocativeness that these ideas held for architects only a generation ago—when
they appeared in more technical guises like ”self-organization” and ”automata theory”—has
been nearly completely lost. The study of these assembly mechanics by designers seems to
have been abandoned at just the historical moment, as you imply, that their social penetration
has made them all the more urgent and critical insofar as they may be contributing to the eclipse
of fiscal capital itself as the primary shaper of material reality and public forms. Furthermore,
this new category of action may well be presiding over the transition from a money and private
initiative economy to that of
a social dynamo that relies on
diffuse and integrative processes
of energy extraction that taps
the widest field of resources ever
accessible in order to concentrate
ever greater value within ever
smaller holds. Whether it really
differs from the proverbial
“invisible hand” remains an
open question. . . Is it possible
then that social participation
is the most naïve of political
movements and battle cries, a
Trojan Horse that is plunging us
into ever more obscure processes
of subsumption, and subjugation,
that we mostly don’t even know
how to think simply because we are them? Your own strategies seem curiously to acknowledge
this with a kind of pervasive irony. . . I find this as well in your flirtations with objects, as if they
were somehow autonomous and magical when the wider evidence of your project claims
otherwise; that they are never other than artifacts of systems relationships. . .
AK: The idea of social participation may well be a fiction, but the problem of audience labor
is important. I like to set traps for the audience and subvert the naïve idea of participatory art into
soft exploitations since in the digital media realm we are all constantly being slightly exploited
through the sales of our personal and behavioral data to advertising companies. Many of my
works are about audience labor. I’m interested in situations of energy and work harvested from
the audience unbeknownst to it and this happens pretty much all the time online, but also with
audiences visiting museums and Instagraming pictures.
Within my exhibitions I’m trying to re-create the systems or relationships of things from the
real world, so some works parasitize or exploit other works. For example, the battery charged by
the audience entering the museum is powering the levitating meteorite. This summer it will be
used to power a perpetual motion machine, a utopian dream. I started thinking about artworks
and exhibitions as living intelligent organisms, as forms of artificial life. Many of my works behave
like organisms, viruses, or memes, constantly evolving and dispersing because they are inspired
Previous Page: Air Rights, 2014.
Electromagnets, wood, foam,
powdered stone, pigments.
Fabrication : Krzysztof Smaga
Photo: Jean Vong
Above: Quasi Object, 2014.
Animatronic soccer ball,
robotic mechanism, motor.
Engineering: Eric Humphreys
Photo : Jean Vong
by the unpredictable behavior of systems such as the internet or a revolutionary movement. They
are like living organisms. I was also inspired by the fact that nowadays in the US, corporations
have the status of humans and corporate personhood allows a company to claim some of the
same legal rights as an individual. Some of my works such as Quasi Object seem to have their
own agency and agenda. This work turns upside down Michel Serres’ and Bruno Latour’s idea
of a quasi object, which circulates between people in a network. In this case, Quasi Object is an
animatronic soccer ball circulating between invisible players and moving around the museum. Its
movements are derivatives of actions of unaware online workers and players. Minus One Dollar
consists of slightly altered quarter dollar coins which I introduced into wide circulation as spies in
the system. Part of the work is always at the museum and part of it circulates in the real world.
In our era we are surrounded by objects that have hybrid, transitory, and shifting status, value,
or meaning…Connected objects, inherently unstable objects, and speculative products, and I am
constantly investigating these relationships between the objects’ value, authorship, production,
distribution, circulation, and ownership. I find Bruce Sterling’s notion of a spime very useful. It
describes a situation where “an object is no longer an object but an instantiation. ”Spimes“
begin and end as data: they are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means and precisely
tracked through space and time throughout their earthly sojourn.” We are also surrounded by
what Timothy Morton calls hyper objects which exceed the time scale of human civilization. They
are so massively distributed in time and space that they transcend spatiotemporal specificity.
The isotope of Plutonium-239, which is the byproduct of nuclear reactors, has a half-life of 24,000
years. That’s close to the age of the Lascaux cave paintings. What humans tried to achieve over
the centuries with the creation of monuments of various kinds—namely some form of eternity—is
paradoxically achieved with the byproducts of our industrial era. A styrofoam cup, for example,
has a half-life of thousands of years, so it has some qualities of a monument. My works mix very
serious problems with very playful forms because I’m reflecting on the relationship of fiction and
magic with economy, and politics. I am trying to draw attention to the fact that the speculations
and exploits of capitalism often happen around fictions and phantoms.
Part of the irony in my works addresses the naiveté of the concept of the alleged autonomy
of critical art practices. There is absolutely no autonomy, no escape from the art system, to which
also the critical and activist art practices are subjected so the only way is to embrace it and play
with it.
SK: Aren’t some of the ideas you are drawing on here—spimes, hyperobjects, etc.—
actually mistaken understandings, default half-concepts that fail to think beyond the limits and
commonplaces of noumenal objecthood? Or to put it more parochially, do they not represent the
same essential conceptual failure, now five decades later, that led art theory to misapprehend the
breakthroughs and transformations of time-based, or ecological art, perception, and thought—
i.e. Minimalist exteriority—that we saw so sloppily managed in Michael Fried’s 1967 essay?
By this I mean yet another naïve attempt to “save the object” by endowing it with irreducible
metaphysical qualities (the Ding an sich) or, by proceeding like capitalism itself, continually to
supplement reality with new axioms that infinitely extend its illegitimate operations into novel
contexts? Or yet again, to misapprehend what Alfred North Whitehead called the “prehensive
character” of space-time objects, which is precisely that they are occasions and events?
AK: I do not entirely agree. I completely share the understanding of objects proposed by
Whitehead and recently analyzed by object-oriented ontology as objects-events, but the notions I
mentioned do not represent a conceptual failure because they do not actually assume noumenal
objecthood. On the contrary, they can actually help ordinary people understand the event-like
character of objects beyond the philosophical discourse because these notions are describing the
concrete problems and experiences of everyday life. They refer to the transformations in economy,
Above: Production Line (Serial 1), 2016.
(in collaboration with John Menick)
Realized with the input of the online workers
of Amazon Mechanical Turk platform,
Plotter ink drawings on archival paper.
Right top: Production Line (Parallel 1)
and Production Line (Parallel 2), 2016.
(in collaboration with John Menick)
Lines drawn by the workers of the
Amazon Mechanical Turk online platform, Ink
plotter drawings on archival paper.
Photo : Jan Domicz
Right bottom: Production Line
(fabrication process, detail)
ecology, in the technosphere and social networks
that influenced the status of real objects and the
experience of their users and not art objects and
the beholder’s experience. I am talking about the
actual changes e.g. in production and distribution
of objects. It may sound as a metaphysical problem,
but it is actually a fact that humanity does not
know what to do with nuclear waste and we are
encountering problems that may sound like
science fiction, but are actually very real: how to
mark the sites of reservoirs of nuclear toxic waste
to civilizations who may find these sealed sites in
thousands of years, assuming these people may
not use writing any more? What kind of signage
should be used? In what language or system? So the
messages that are being composed now by groups
of anthropologists, linguists and physicists have a
hybrid status of atemporal objects that are trying to
anticipate the future and establish communication
with future humans. My point is that objects like
these have a higher ability to actually transform over
time than most art objects. What is more, I have
always found science and political economy much
more inspiring than art history.
Singular authorship in art may disappear or
dissolve in the future. I often imagine the evolution
of culture in a few thousand years. Perhaps the
climate and technological changes in culture,
which just like religion, emerged as yet another evolutionary adaptation, may evolve into
something else which will be more useful to humans in the future world. So art as a social
phenomenon probably also has an expiration date and will cease to exist despite its
claim of being exempt from the usefulness paradigm which is, as far as I am concerned, a
fiction. What I am inspired by is the evolutionary character of technology and of objects in
general. And so my works often change their status, form, and value after I made them. I
like losing control over the works. Simply because the internet memes and other forms of
collective or complex forms of authorship seem to much better reflect the nature of the
objects we are surrounded with. The project Production Line, which I recently developed
with the artist and programmer John Menick, is based on the crossover of collective
intelligence and artificial intelligence which we applied to art production. We outsourced
this project to the people working on online crowdsourcing platforms such as the Amazon
Mechanical Turk. The workers are being paid for drawing a single line. The forms emerge
out of thousands of simple lines drawn all over the world. The fact that Amazon allows for
digital payment of bonuses to former workers enables us to pay the workers additional
amounts after these artworks get sold, so the workers are participating in the profits, which
complicates the status and value of this work.
New York City
May 18, 2016
It was a pleasure to have Agnieszka Kurant make an exhibition at ‘T’ Space,
and to listen to the music of Frances-Marie Uitti at our July 23 opening.
We thank Jim Holl for the handsome graphic design of this catalogue,
Agnieszka Kurant, Sanford Kwinter and Steven Holl for their insightful words,
and Dimitra Tsachrelia, Javier Gomez, Jessica Merritt, Tanya Bonakdar
Gallery, Kristin Costello, and Lev Pakman for their assistance.
2016 marks the first year that our audience has become stakeholders
in ‘T’ Space. We are truly grateful to all of our Patrons, Sponsors,
Donors, Friends and Emerging Supporters for their contributions that
make ‘T’ Space a sustainable project and a vital force in the Hudson
Valley and beyond.
Susan Wides
‘T’ Space Director | Curator
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