Foreword to the Czech edition Poetics of Encryption

Foreword to the Czech edition

In early 2020 I was about to start a new job at an art institution in Berlin called KW institute for Contemporary Art. I had some concerns about my new role, specifically the title: Curator for the Digital Sphere. I had been operating as a curator for a decade already, on all kinds of projects, from exhibitions in project spaces and museums, to site-specific installations in unusual locations including Antarctica. In that time I had worked with everything from conceptual art to live animals and fire. I certainly didn’t consider myself a geek. Now I was to become one of only two persons in the country with the word ‘digital’ attached to their curatorial work. I needed the job, but I was irritated.

Curating contemporary art involves being prepared to deal with all the media that artists have at their disposal in the 21st Century. And curating at a kunsthalle usually implies a general creative remit. Was I supposed to make websites now? I had never done that before, and I didn’t want to. Why should my colleagues get to dip in an out of digital topics and emerging media while I must stay stay put? I felt stitched up. Obviously, the title came into being because extra funding was available from the government for increased ‘digital’ activity in the culture sector, in line with policy. What did Kafka call it?—a cage, looking for a bird. I quickly realized that I needed to make my case for disobeying orders. I needed to get writing, and quick. Ideally, I would have a manifesto ready before anyone could ask me to curate an NFT show—something I had no intention of doing.

You are probably wondering how I ended up in this position, protesting a little too much. Ironically, I believe it is because I registered my reluctance during the job interview. What I said, then, was that there is simply no reason to ring-fence the topic of ‘the digital’ when it comes to contemporary art or culture. Why? Because doing so both oversells it—in terms of distinctness from everything else—and undersells it, in terms of ghettoizing (or atomizing) the subject. It is networked, after all. And what might the word ‘contemporary’ mean, anyway, when applied as a qualifier for art? If you are looking for structural conditions then, arguably, digital change is a good one. The effects that emerging tools have on the way we experience life on this planet, including our extant forms of culture—and ecology—cannot be overstated. For this reason, I told them, I had long been interested in artists who were addressing this change through their uptake of new media in practice and (critical) theory. I also told them that gadgets like VR goggles were not cool for their own sake. The cage door closed.

Even kept birds sing. I began to write. And even though I began unhappy with the image of ‘the digital’ I realized that I had been given a gift in the form of the sphere. Eventually, its platonic character was apt to stimulate a meditation on volume; something much more workable, in terms of developing a rhapsodic architecture, than nebulous unending ‘space’—itself, a more direct translation of the last part of my title in German (Digitaler Raum). The digital sphere was a planet unto itself. It contained imaginative space within. I suppose I made a nest in it.

I began to think of this sphere as a metaphorical key. A useful image that allowed me to access something much less familiar—the bad infinity of the digital. At the time, I was reading Gaston Bachelard’s Earth and Reveries of Repose. In that book’s beginning the philosopher invokes another vision of enclosure by Prague’s most famous son: ‘I am thinking of those nights, at the end of which, having come out of sleep, I awakened with the sensation that I had been shut up inside a walnut shell.’ One morning, while coming out of a dream, I awakened with a sense that I was not going to work on a manifesto, but a book.

The sphere allowed me to plot other familiar figures—embodied concerns, from people to animals, and plants—as correlates of its volume. It was a gateway drug. One that set me on a path through a morass of metaphorical particulars. Quickly, my meditation took up residence in a knobbly husk, before sloughing it off for a hermit crab’s shell, a cave, a camera, and more besides; cycling through container after container. I had begun to dream from the inside. Eventually, this parade of figuration brought me to a crypt. And inside this crypt, I was sure, there was a body—locked in. One that might wish to escape, or at least map its surroundings. And outside this crypt, like orbiting moons, other bodies too—locked out—working for the release of all things interred; drawn towards its center by the gravity of the situation: a state of affairs in which we always already find ourselves within planetary computation. There is no outside to this edifice, as it comprises everything from the pipes beneath our feet to satellites in the sky; Wi-Fi signals, moving unseen through the the air, and more.

I began to understand that imagining embodiment in relation to the digital was crucial for linking human concerns, including politics, with the current of environmental thinking important to my curatorial work. Anthropocene ecologists had long asserted that ‘there is no outside’ when it comes to dispensing with certain forms of pollution, such as nuclear waste. A similar claim can be made when it comes to data—which may also be viewed as a kind of pollution. Everything within the technosphere stands to be datafied. Indeed, this process seeps into every body, every thing; our DNA, even our cognition. As it does so, it effects mutations. Once familiar frames become othered; chimerical. Within the sphere, total datafication unleashes a host of undead agencies—from the composite monsters of generative AI to the denaturing of ‘truth’ in public speech.

Just as I started really writing down my thoughts COVID-19 took hold, and we were all locked down. As the whole world was put on an epidemiological program marked by tracking systems and apps, my bedroom became an office. Life moved online more than ever before. A virus was infecting the global system—with nowhere to escape to beyond the pale of fear, the law, and their mediatization. The crypt became a prison cell, just as the virus sought entry into our cells. At this moment I felt the distinction between conceptions of inside and outside collapse. Borders, while so much an issue in politics, were also being rendered obsolete on the intellectual plane, by a conversation given over to thinking in terms of planetary-scale protocols.

Locked in, locked out, locked down. These became my master metaphors for organizing images of intelligent, embodied life in respect to the digital sphere. The selected artists ended up amounting to a survey of my curatorial engagements over the preceding decade, linking my interests in Anthropocene and New Materialist currents with the much maligned but hugely important ‘Post-Internet’ moment. Consensus has—unduly, in my opinion—coalesced around the assertion that this was a ‘movement’ built around cynicism and style. But to me Post-Internet was always a research agenda, examining how digital change is upending our experience of cultural life. Narrow sociological focus on artistic cliques ended up foreclosing critical analysis of this imperative—just as its fruit was beginning to ripen in dialogue with ecological concerns, media theory, and data politics. In remedy, the book’s first chapter (Black Site) explicates works at this intersection.

Leaving aside autobiography, the book traces a potted history of artistic trajectories expressing general disenchantment with information technologies in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations concerning mass digital surveillance, and further news of online disinformation campaigns affecting the outcomes of the Brexit referendum and election of Donald Trump to the US presidency. A disenchantment that metastasized into horror at the memeification of politics during the pandemic, a veritable deluge of rightwing conspiracies, the cult of Pepe the Frog, Qanon, etc., and the direct relation between these unlikely symptoms and the storming of the US capitol on January 6th, 2020. A black hole.

No sooner had I taken up my post, during lockdown, than the dreaded commission for an online exhibition was issued. I made the best of it, and got some positive feedback. But there is nothing so underwhelming as hitting the ‘publish’ button for a website and calling it a vernissage. Never again. Well, at least once more that same year. Still, with less production that normal to attend to, the writing continued, and I could really sink into my walnut reveries. And when people finally began to emerge from their houses, leaving all-day pyjamas behind, my esoteric book project issued its first magic outcome. A commission from KW’s Director to use its text as—in his words, without prompting—a ‘manifesto’ for an IRL exhibition. I would like to say the rest is (art) history, but in truth a whole lot more had to happen: I decided to carry over my three chapter themes, but to almost wholly reimagine the artist selection, to take stock of emerging and current positions. This served the purpose of historicizing some of the earlier works featured while—crucially—showcasing some flashy new techniques and topics, as well as at least one bona fide masterpiece almost straight out of studio: Kate Crawford and Vladan Jolers 24 meter-long diagram Calculating Empires (2023). I also allowed myself the pleasure of including some pieces that did not really further the thesis per se, but which modulated atmosphere, or else served as points of contrast to general tendencies. Ultimately, exhibitions are their own medium. Sometimes, in large group show, it is important to include things that resist interpretation; which inoculate viewers against the more overbearing aspects of a curatorial didactic.

After its Berlin debut the show went on to travel to Kunsthal Charttenborg in Copenhagen, where it picked up a couple of Danish artists. There, the director found it expedient—once again, in terms of courting funders—to append a somewhat unwelcome subtitle: ‘art and artificial intelligence’. It did not make much sense to me on various levels, but it does prove my point about the birdcage. The publication of the Czech translation of the book, now in your hands, marks the exhibition’s third and final(?) manifestation at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague, where it also features works by local artists. At least some of these artists, I was pleased to discover, had actually to read the book even before they knew the show would touch down on the banks of the Vltava. I am grateful that this text has a life of its own, wandering the earth like Frankenstein’s monster, stalking the imagination of artist comrades. Some of whom I may perhaps never meet. As the principle of lockdown would have it, we are alone together. And I am especially gratified that it should be available in Kafka’s mother tongue. It is fitting.