Contingency

Thinking Through Assemblages in a Posthuman Vein

Abstract

The Leveson enquiry in the UK (2011–12) made something visible that many had suspected for a very long time: that politics was caught up in far too cosy relations between the politicians, the press, and the police, pouring doubt upon anything that might amount to a free press. The drift online, though, provided further layers to this, and I followed the move from paper to digital news reportage, and the subsequent changes to not only the ‘form’ of the news, the tempo and the style, but how these combine to inflect what it is even possible to say, to whom, and by whom, in the affectual realm of social media. There’s a long legacy of art and language over the past century, probing the burgeoning relationship between language and communication technologies, that question meaning making and reason, and the concept of free will, amidst fears of control.  In this century, questions of access, privilege, and the rights to knowledge are exemplified by online flame wars amidst the distracting cries of ‘fake’ news, with access to knowledge a key driver for social and economic development as Wikimedia, Hannah Arendt, and Mercedes Bunz can all attest. Shoshana Zuboff’s fieldwork shows how the new knowledge territories emerging alongside the capacity to analyse processes and behaviours, also result in political conflict over the distribution of knowledge, as surveillance capitalists “declared their right to know, to decide who knows, and to decide who decides.”

I am interested in thinking about these ideas through the lens of posthuman theory that acknowledges that the subject emerges in synthesis with the tools or technologies at hand, and the business models that support these, within the very everyday assemblages of humans and technology that we inhabit, in order to feel out the changes occurring within these new interdependencies. The following writing comes from artists talks that I have given over the years at various institutions, galleries, and artist run spaces.  They’re a little like vignettes, in the sense that each is a standalone work, but common threads move through them. The works are often prompted by my noticing something; new phenomena perhaps, emerging from the current assemblage of humans and technology, that at the time I had a hunch or an intuition was going to be significant in the longer term.  Often, I will not have fully understood the ramifications of this at the time, and the work itself will reveal something to me further, regarding the nature of why I was drawn to it in the first place. 

The works are sites of exploration in themselves. They are ways of thinking through experimentation. They are speculative, and try to grapple with complex systems, where emergent behaviours are still emerging.  They tend to defy a logical or straightforward reading where cause and effect might be proven, or unproven, and instead acknowledge that they exist in a still emerging affectual realm, where emotions often rule the day. As such, they do not lend themselves, necessarily, to an easy reading of art as a poetic counterpoint to an axiomatic argument, made for a specific purpose of proving x, y, or z.  Yet, they also do not prove x, y, or z.

They are speculative.

And afforded me a space to think about contingency over the last decade.