i can’t even see the lines i used to read between
This Might Just Pass The Time
MADA Now 2022
Curator: Annabel Brown
Artists:
Amalia Lindo
Christina May Carey
Marcus Ian McKenzie
Consider a future in which AI has adapted its own highly idiosyncratic, esoteric, language(s) known as “plexicons,” leaving humans the task of trying to learn and interpret them as the gulf between human and machine rapidly widens. A step further and we might imagine an even more distant future in which biological humans have died out and been superseded by AI completely. Furthermore, AI, proving no better at navigating planetary history than their predecessors, undergoes a series of Great Forgettings - corruptions of shared memory across soft-, hard-, and cloud-ware fronts. This circular trajectory ends with AI’s attempt to “reincarnate” their forgotten ancestors by tapping into the ancient wisdom of the Old Ones. However humans are now but a distant, abstract myth, survived only by fragmented swathes of data copied, compressed, edited and modified many thousands of times over so as to bear no resemblance to their original context. And even if they did, how would AI comprehend it through its unfathomable plexicological framework? The story ends with AI suspended in an endless epoch of tragic and futile sifting through the detritus of human data, searching desperately for a pattern, a meaning, a sign. An infinite apophenia.
This Might Just Pass The Time is an exhibition that reflects on the current difficulty in conceiving the nature of the present. Drawing on the film theorist Leo Charney's notion of drift, this exhibition explores the experience of being unable to locate a stable sense of the present moment. Technology is the framing for this exhibition and guides the resulting experience of disorientation. Bring together three artists, This Might Just Pass The Time examines what constitutes the present in a state shrouded by uncertainty, governed by technologies of surveillance and screen-based distraction.
Photos: Andrew Curtis