The attention economy metric of ‘Likes’ and ‘Views’ obscures alienation from the inner workings of the platform as well as its entanglements IRL. On the one hand, User Experience Design (UX) proposes a simplified relation to the system. It is the liminal zone where reality, fantasy, and power come together; a space of ideology. Additionally, the weightless flux of ‘content’ represses the material circumstances that underpin the image. Indeed, the elements that comprise it are extracted from very specific locations, at great ecological and social cost. Contemporary life is significantly conditioned by things that take place out of sight. This exhibition probes the tension between the visible and the hidden in Internet culture.
Since the 1990s Eva & Franco Mattes have kept a close eye on the Internet and its IRL entanglements, establishing a provocative body of work that runs the gamut from virtual reality to sculpture. In a long-overdue homecoming, the Net Art pioneers stage their first Italian institutional solo show at (FMAV). This exhibition presents a spectrum of artworks from their recent oeuvre, apparently selected by a mysterious algorithm. These are laid out in sequence from most to least viewed. As ever with the pair’s art, which holds up a mirror to information society, things are not what they seem. For the duo, the contrast between surface effects and deeper conditions provides fertile ground for imagination and critique.
The central feature of the exhibition design is the raised floor that recalls a stage or extended podium for the majority of works in the show. Monumento Connectivo (Raised Floor) (2022) is partly inspired by the utopian architectural schema Monumento Continuo (1969) by the Italian group Superstudio, updating the concept of a worldwide edifice through reference to the global network of cables and data centers that make up the Internet. Recalling the raised floors that are ubiquitous in the latter (a schema designed to accommodate the complex wiring of cloud servers), it hosts artworks on its surface, as well as others that emerge from beneath it. Set in the middle of the gallery, it also serves as a timeline running from earliest to latest creation.
Also running through the space, Golden Age (Yellow Tray) (2021) handles all of the electricity and data used in the exhibition. Additionally, like a fence or maze, it influences how visitors move throughout—offering a sculptural analogy for the bio-political influence that tech infrastructures wield; ‘reprograming’ movement and mirroring what the artists call ‘the assimilation of the internet’s operations into everyday life’. Hung, at times, at waist level, the tray also interacts with the raised floor—variously disappearing into the space beneath; elsewhere, emerging from it like a high-visibility snake. Modular in appearance, and including several holes in its surface that would appear to facilitate the porting of new work, the structure appears to be a work in progress that is capable of endless expansion and augmentation. Painted yellow, the sculpture’s hue quotes the functional color-coding of cable trays in data centers— symbolising circulation (as opposed, for instance, to red which signifies an emergency facility; orange for progress, and so on). While on one level alluding to the almost unfathomable network of cables that make up the Internet, the sculpture also reveals the intensely local nodes of the The Cloud.
Everything posted to social media is screened and surveilled, subject to ‘community guidelines’ and ‘content restrictions’. While algorithms do some of the work policing content, human input remains an important component. Somewhere, people sit behind screens in drab office buildings, deciding what stays and what goes. The Bots (2020) are forbidden to talk about their work. However, the artist’s managed to speak to some of them. Working in collaboration with writer Adrian Chen, the videos in this series are based on the confessions offered by Facebook content moderators. These videos borrow the aesthetics of fake make-up tutorials, which are sometimes used on social media to bypass censorship. Speaking to their smartphones, from their apartments, actors perform versions of the interviews, combining the mundane levity of dressing up for one’s followers with the everyday horror of online hate. Throughout, serious discourse—addressing topics such as violence, sexual abuse, hate speech and terrorism—is constantly interrupted by makeup tips. Makeup is a way of concealing facial imperfections, in some way it not so different from content moderation, which beautifies the surface of the internet by removing unwanted content. The Bots are true accounts, using words from the ‘ghost workers’ that social media keeps hidden. Each video is installed on the back of a customized office desk of the same brand used at Facebook’s Berlin moderation center, where the interviewees worked.
“Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally, it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes part of the ceremony”. Kafka’s vivid aphorism turns the mind to wild intrusion; to the threat that exotic arrivals pose to order, by draining the cup of repetition and renewal (ritual). Also, to the process whereby a proliferation of outliers tip over into the establishment of a new regime. Panorama Cat (2022) appears to be a totem for a new world in which the unexpected is a matter of course. The work is a taxidermy sculpture based on the meme genre of “panorama fails”: With the introduction of the panorama photo feature to smartphones, a flood of surreal mistakes were produced and shared online. A few of these went viral, becoming some of the most viewed pictures in history. Panorama Cat is based on one of these photos, and features a ginger tabby with eight legs. Transferring the two-dimensional motif from online space into a three-dimensional representation, using actual fur and so on, the artists insist on the strange phenomenon’s tangible reality. Panorama Cat is a contemporary sphinx, marking a threshold where understanding and nonsense converge; an icon for the digital distortion of both nature and culture, and the new life that this situation entails for everything living today.
Circuits (2022) is a pink cable tray hosts two microcomputers and a coil of Ethernet wires. These transfer image files back and forth, constantly, throughout the assemblage. Its color recalling interior flesh, this infrastructure sculpture is located in corner of the gallery on two walls—like an empty picture frame that has been pressed into position by some giant thumb. Circulating within its cables are a day’s worth of photos shot by the artists, taken from their personal archive. But, of course, these photographs are invisible to gallery visitors. Circuits dramatizes the issue of translation, and—in musical terms—transposition. It shows how something can be present in one mode and absent in another. This has a bearing on our wider relation to cultural and informatic goods: The vast majority of images do not exist in the form of printed photographs, hung on a wall or featured in books. Instead, they obtain as files that are constantly copied and transferred between devices and data centers. In this sense, Circuits is a display of contemporary images in their most common form. It points to the perceptual difference between image(s) and reality, providing the former with body.
Everyday life is shot through with encryption: a host of technologies which both enable and circumscribe our existential potential, but whose inner functions are opaque—whether by virtue of their complexity, their proprietary schema, or—as per usual—both. It is not that these systems cannot be known, but instead that most persons have no clue about them. And yet, they must live with them. Like it or not, we find them in our personal space. We also find ourselves making special intellectual accommodations. Indeed, the interface turns out to be the place where faith and reason are negotiated—coming into conflict, or fusing in a devil’s bargain. Untitled (Server based work) (2022) consists of a server connected to the the open internet, sharing a video work via torrent on a peer-to-peer network. This server has no output/monitor, and so the register of the data artwork is limited to blinking lights and the noise of the server’s cooling fan. And yet, this artwork is distributed across many locations in a network. Eschewing the passive receptivity of the gallery audience, the content (as opposed to the container) is accessible to those who are actively sharing the material with others on the torrent. It is a network located artwork.
What Has Been Seen (2017) is inspired by the adage “What has been seen, cannot be unseen”—which occurs frequently in meme culture, and which commonly relates to viewers’ reactions to surprising or disturbing content. The work consists of a taxidermied black cat whose bulging eyes suggest an intense emotional reaction to something observed, sitting atop three microwaves—each containing an erased hard drive. But what is the thing observed? And, if the cat is a symbol, then who or what does the seeing? The outsourcing of memory to silicon has fundamentally changed society, enabling not only more powerful calculations but the suggestion that almost every piece of data—a stupid photo, a status update, a misjudged email—permanently enters the archive. The consequences of this situation are not yet fully understood. However, the example of China’s social credit score contributes to a sense of urgency in some quarters. Indeed, in a hedge against future abuse by the data-collection gorgon, there are growing calls for laws that ensure a ‘right to be forgotten’. But can we really forget? Can we unsee? These are questions that relate not just to curious individuals, but to the very prospects for civil society in the new age of all-seeing technology.
Portraits (2006-07) are screen-shot ‘photos’ of avatars, captured inside the virtual platform Second Life. Slick, emotionally flat, colorful yet somewhat empty, they appear to reflect something about online self-representation. Qua mirror, the screen may propose a human image—representative of a familiar world. But a sous-face obtains beneath it. Code and logic do not have any color, or sweat. Through the looking glass, their coded agency counts, but may not always account for a life that one might hope to live. Most of us are adrift on the screen. Its constantly changing skein, the façade, dazzles as it occludes a travesty of unified subjectivity. Users delight it the way it refracts; the way it seems capable of producing a panorama of selfhood. Its glittering mutability hints at proliferation and rebirth—a billion selfies. Within this image matrix (and here we use the term in its traditional sense, as womb) we discern our twin: A real yet foreign body. A digital portrait, or shadow, is not a photograph or a status update, much less a manifestation of playfulness or open possibility. It is a cluster of instrumental functions that would collapse the person into its own image: one’s ‘real’ body is at risk of becoming the avatar of this virtual twin. In this sense, we are living the emergence of machines in the areas we once thought our ghosthood—(sub)consciousness, memory, desire and more. Under the circumstances we must ask, again and again, what is portraiture today?