by Dena Kopolovich
Screenshots from How to Grow Plants in Prison, Hito Steyerl
My research is an intentional mess of thoughts and ideally, I’d like it to keep evolving. This semester, I latched onto Hito Steyerl’s essay “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” where I learned about how our traditional sense of orientation, based on the horizon line, comes from a period when colonial explorers knew mainly what they could see with their own eyes. Instruments were used to gain orientation by the horizon and the stars, but we know now that a stable horizon has always been a projection, or an approximation. How?
Because the Earth’s surface is neither flat nor perfectly round. The grounds traversed were never stable to begin with.
We know this by looking at the tectonic plates, where volcanic activity deep in the ocean is constantly changing the landscape. Earthquakes shift the land and now, due to global warming, ice caps are melting, and sea levels rising at accelerated rates. This planet is in a state of constant movement and evolution.
And with the introduction of commercial flight, plus space and deep-sea exploration, some of us might even become privileged enough to access the visual pleasures of the Earth’s surface from astonishing heights while sipping on a refreshing glass of tomato juice on a flight to Mars.
We can flip through Netflix and find programs about the visual perceptions of animals, if you’re like me and you believe that animals have perspectives that are valuable. My guilty-not-guilty pleasure includes David Attenborough documentaries on animal visuality. I’ve been falling asleep to Life in Color and Night on Earth.
But even though new technologies allow us to see from new perspectives, this does not erase the colonial history of orientation.
If linear perspective fell in line with an epoch where the ground was falsely perceived as stable, what’s perspective in a time when we know the ground isn’t? Is linear perspective a kind of colonial artifact?
“This space defined by linear perspective is calculable, navigable, and predictable. It allows the calculation of future risk, which can be anticipated, and therefore, managed. As a consequence, linear perspective not only transforms space, but also introduces the notion of a linear time, which allows mathematical prediction and, with it, linear progress.” —Hito Steyerl, In Free Fall
I’m looking at certain media-based artists who may demonstrate my speculation that, by taking inspiration from the natural world, an inherently multi-channeled phenomenon that is constantly changing, artists can create new visual languages that may generate more cooperation with nature, or maybe just more cooperation with multiple perspectives. Maybe this kind of cooperation can open opportunities for thinking beyond Earth and culture-destroying capitalism, beyond top-down domination.
Side note: Multiplicity is a natural phenomenon, and its relational
In her book Staying with the Trouble Donna Haraway proposes tentacular thinking to remedy a kind of hopelessness that comes out of people like me, admittedly, in phrases like “what’s the point? the world is ending anyway.” She proposes instead, to stay with the trouble, which I think Hito does as well by the end of “In Free Fall”.
To me, tentacular thinking suggests that stories are situated in a tangle and that people all over the world are caught in that historical mess. Globalization and mass migration due to colonization and war make for more placelessness, more tangles of identities, culture, land and so forth. Human history is less like a chronological timeline and more like a network of interrelated events.
The Social Life of Forests, NY Times, 2020
I was looking for an analogy for this and came up with forests. Healthy forests are connected through massive Mycorrhizal networks where an enormous variety of creatures communicate with one another and help each other continue to exist. This is productivity without depletion. It’s community without competition. Here’s a great interactive article about the complexity of old-growth forests.
How might you connect disparate elements in the global relational network?
Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator, 2017 Image.
To start, Mika Rottenberg does a good job of explaining her process of visualizing the connection between the U.S. Mexico border and the Yiwu market in China in her video piece Cosmic Generator. The piece explores global capitalism and how objects can move through time and space more quickly and easily than people. Rottenberg makes a connection between two places that seem to have no relationship to one another.
How might you visualize that many things are happening at the same time?
Sarah Sze, Timekeeper, 2016. Image.
Sarah Sze’s work is what it could look like if one was interested in working in non-cinema spaces. Timekeeper is a sculptural work that uses a combination of video, image prints, and simple materials you might find in Staples to create sculpture with sprawling perspectives. The work toys with the idea of images as debris, reminding me of Robert Stam’s ‘From Hybridity to the Aesthetics of Garbage,” although I’m not so sure that Sze’s debris were not freshly purchased, as opposed to being actual waste. In either case, I’m looking at this work for how it uses chaos, resembling nonlinear time and nature effectively.
I like that the stability of the sculptures themselves are questionable, too. I once worked as a facilitator for an opening of Sarah Sze’s work. Objects that were part of the sculpture were sprawled onto the floor, and I recall being told to ask people not to walk over, and unintentionally kick parts of the sculpture. I decided it was nearly impossible to prevent people from interacting with the sculpture in this way.
But maybe that’s the point? Sze’s sculptures change every time they’re re-installed, so they move from location to location and there is a sense of constant evolution. The work kind of embraces impermanence in this way, which I do believe goes against colonial taxonomic thinking.
Sarah Sze, Timekeeper, 2016. Image.
How do you make hybrid worlds by blending past, present, and future?
Hito Steyerl, Power Plants, 2019
This semester, we watched “How to Plant Flowers in Prison,” a discussion between Hito Steyerl and Kurdish actor Heja Nitirk. The discussion tells the story behind Heja’s Garden, a video in Hito’s Power Plants installation.
Heja tells us of her time as a political prisoner in Turkey and how she and other imprisoned women tried to grow plants from used tea bags and chewed paper. But the prison guards would continuously destroy the plants, claiming that the plants would grow into a tree and eventually she would be able to climb to her freedom. So, she says, “we tried to plant them in the future.” For Heja, this means the prison guards determined her future.
As Hito sees it, the future is manufactured by systems of power. So, Hito uses AI software to predict what these future plants would look like if they were not destroyed. The plants of Heja’s garden are built for resistance. They have imagined medicinal properties–ones that protect against ailments such as political propaganda and hate speech, while also curing social media addiction. One plant is poisonous, but only to autocrats. They are also inspired by plants that commonly grow on debris and do particularly well with human intervention, again bringing me back to “Aesthetics of Garbage” where Stam mentions “these alternative aesthetics revalorize by inversion of what had formerly been seen as negative” and how “these aesthetics share the jujitsu trait of turning strategic weakness into tactical strength.” By way of her future garden, character Heja is a kind of avatar, a hero who appropriates the force of domination, and does it with the help of plants.
The shape-shifting flowers in Heja’s garden are predicted by algorithm. In a way, they symbolize how the present is more unstable than the future. This struck me as a metaphor for the piece’s process, because the collaboration between Hito and Heja began before Heja’s imprisonment, and was thusly interrupted by it.
How do you imagine completely new ecosystems?
Emissary Forks At Perfection, 2015-2016. Images
Ian Cheng’s work also incorporates AI elements, but does it to refer to the out of controlness of nature through simulations. He uses video game design and inspiration from cognitive science to create self-contained worlds where the environment is ever-changing and the characters must evolve to it. The technology Cheng uses is the same kind of technology used to predict climate change and elections, but also looks kind of like The Sims.
He calls it “Art with a nervous system” and his AI creations often evolve as they travel from exhibition to exhibition.
According to Cheng’s website, The Emissaries Trilogy imagines past and future worlds and the ecological conditions that shape them. Each episode is revolved around an emissary who must grapple with past and future consciousness. In these worlds, characters are hybrids on a spectrum of human, plant, animal, and substance. Each character, even plants, are uniquely designed to avoid a homogenized visuality.
Cheng talks about his art practice as a process of freeing himself from perfection, which is in part why Emissaries looks different than a normal video game. The worlds and their characters can mutate and form without giving the viewer visual pleasure of smoothness and beauty. It embraces a not-always pleasant or perfect aesthetic which I came to enjoy while researching this piece.
What I find most important in mentioning this work in the context of decolonization, that maybe imagining alternative future/pasts through worldmaking can help us to resist the one that systems of power want to predict for us through data collection.
If the future is predictable because of data collection based on past happenings, then aren’t we consequently offered fewer alternatives to re-imagine the future? Do we then exist in one ecosystem, but get pre-coded, with little opportunity to evolve?
Just wondering, but maybe if we stick with multiplicity and chaos, we open opportunities for alternatives. As Hito says in Power Plants, “The future poses a 100% risk for human health.”