 this exhibition at blockchain co-working space full node berlin brings together a selection of works that deal with notions of time and (im)mutability. various software clocks will be installed on computers or projected, complemented with printed posters, a calendar, and wearable pins.

the title references the song 'formenverwandler' by Der Zyklus (Gerald Donald aka heinrich müller, 2001), in which vocals declare: "I’m shape-shifting from place to place, bending time, curving space."

similar to this song, the works in this show reflect on time and change on subjective terms, by suggesting alternative representations and visualizations of this most fundamental of units.

with works by dana baddad, @laura-brown, @simon-denny, @eric-li-and-zak-jensen, @omsk-social-club, @niko-princen, @adriana-ramic, @billy-rennekamp, @micah-schippa, @laurel-schwulst, aarati akkapeddi, soft, @justice-thelot, and @damon-zucconi

many thanks to kei kreutler, beth mccarthy, billy rennekamp, sophie ricarda, and full node for their generous support. 

 der zyklus: formenverwandler

from 7 september – 20 october 2019 left gallery took residence in a brick and mortar public art institution: stroom den haag.

left gallery is an online platform that produces and sells works of art as downloadable objects. These objects exist in limited editions, available for purchase. once purchased, buyers receive a cryptographic ‘token’ as proof of ownership. in rite of access, this token mechanism creates the conditions to access the works on display: engagement of visitors, such as purchases and social media activity operate as a stream of credit, which allow the works to remain on view. follow left gallery on twitter or subscribe to the mailinglist, and the time to see the complete works increases; unlike its pages, and access may be denied. a purchase made through left gallery anywhere in the world extends the display of the works at stroom den haag. so long as sufficient credit remains, visitors can access all works within the project.

rite of access

Alexis Anais Avedisian, shawné michaelain holloway, and Ryan Kuo were invited to explore creative production under two acutely contemporary pressures: surveillance capitalism and neoliberalism. These pressures create an increasingly stifling social field, in which individuals must navigate unusual cognitive demands of networked identity creation, branded performance, and digital work. For each artist, the choice to be both expressive and vulnerable, within these binds, is an act of subversion.

Considered together, they suggest how the self – as worker, as lover, as radically alienated subject – can navigate the demands of by deploying quiet strategies for survival: survival of one’s creativity, one’s spiritual and emotional life, one’s capacity for intimacy and closeness. Through poetry, double-speak, irony, and play, they posit abstract spaces for renewal, in which we might not be totally degraded.

__Alexis Anais Avedisian__ transmutes the frenetic anxiety over constant surveillance by one’s peers into an expressive practice that is conceptual and poetic. Her body of work forms a studied critique of our work as digital content producers as an inherently debased position. There is a material cost to this war of attrition, in which our identities are compromised by the alliance of corporations and governments. Further, there is a spiritual cost to producing content in an extractive medium, bounded by endless tap-dancing for likes, attention metrics, and a shrinking shelf life. The user censors herself into a tempered neutrality, in order to be seen, considered, made real to others.

Of course, this ‘clean state’ is complicated by ephemeral emotions which are also coded. In Avedisian’s archived, personal archives are minded to reveal truths about their owner. Avedisian transforms buried affective material - all the mess of self-doubt, mild paranoia, melancholic hope - into a moving dream-meditation. The user speaks online out of an exquisite, bittersweet desire to be seen by the fantasy object - themselves an abstraction. Each .gif, tweet, and post becomes a diamond portal of insight on its owner. Being perceived as “authentic” or genuine is nowhere near as important as the daily-renewed performance of self, in hopes of acknowledgement by one person chosen to matter in a nearly-infinite social matrix.  

The process of public yearning can paradoxically help the content creator realize herself. She develops herself through creation of a complex and dense archive. Her history is made through a growing relic of thoughts frozen in a server. This reach for intimacy, despite the fractured mediation of platforms, eventually allows the user to reflect carefully on her impulses and choices. The archive is never neutral or clean; it is charged with the entirety of the self. The personal archive may be mutable and in most cases, unseen and forgotten, but the creator is irrevocably changed and deepened through its creation.

In _File_, artist __Ryan Kuo__ explores the contemporary artist as a valuable member of the team in a fictional white-collar office, surrounded by eager project managers. The creative worker, trapped within a rubric of public production, must produce him or herself through relentless object-making. They toil away in a virtual office, beset by e-mail, by tasks and deadlines that accumulate without relief. They must think about their work, even as it is half-made, in terms of its aesthetic, market, and conceptual value. The producer is tasked with defending ownership of production, and this making is instantiated within digital labor’s shaky constructs, in which exploitation is rife, payment is low, and the dubious promise of “exposure” is offered as reward.

The wry, perceptive and self-aware tone of Kuo’s ‘user’s manual’ just barely holds off a cloud of corrosive anxiety, that lingers heavy outside the boundaries of each text box. Technocapitalism demands artist-workers manage their competitive instincts, their worries about their job’s instability and uncertainty, all while maintaining a bright spirit of cheerful collaboration. This imagined worker grapples with his position as a digital file owner through a rigorous thinking process. His logic and reasoning unfold in nuanced, elegant, and discrete branches, in a type of mental workflow chart. Eventually, much like Avedisian’s subject, Kuo’s worker ends up thinking about himself, his purpose and manifestation in the world, with an eye to success as it is personally – versus socially – defined.

File suggests how such a creator just might resist and maintain integrity through modes of extension, contingency. Treating the abstract creative process as a production of file systems opens up possibilities for the creator to become the source of value. Because the contents of File are subject to change over time, Kuo’s practice is itself the product. Providing shared access to his research, materials, and ongoing speculation on the meaning of the File-Work-Art Object means that the file is not only always unique, but also, never fixed. It cannot be easily archived, meaning: the artist cannot be filed away smoothly.

The films and works of __shawné michaelain holloway__ describes the user’s inner life as one increasingly enacted on, in, and through screens and their emerging ontology. Screens, loaded with our fractured input, our opaque fragments of speech and thorny renders of ourselves, go on to have their own troubling, eerie lives. In holloway’s imagining, these intermediary spaces host dreamscapes in which we can reveal thoughts too fragile, wild, and unruly, in the safety and care of a viewer we somehow have learned to trust. As a ripe space for projection and idolatry, the screen allows for safely working out what closeness and warmth with a desired partner could look like. Before they’ve even arrived into view, traces of imagined conversations, ideas exchanged, and declarations unshared, have already been left behind.

In UNDELIVERED.zip, the unshared expression of desire can be nurtured without limit; private clips, loaded notes, and taped ephemera can blossom repeatedly. They can linger, float, forever here, just on the cusp of being sent out. In this passionately tended dreamscape, what you wished to happen for you (what you dream for yourself) might be just as important to examine as any easily narrated conclusion, any tidy wrapping-up. Crucially, it seems here that the time taken and invested into the longing that makes it valuable. The “formula of [money + time + desire] adds up to Love,” holloway writes, underscoring how we fashion intimacy in late capitalism. If I give my you time, my greatest asset, then that cements my expression of love.

holloway offers up each piece as a visual love letter. Each film is a small room only the viewer knows the password to. Here, we find an unfiltered, earnest care that almost feels radical, particularly when the onus is on the digital user is to edit down and perform indifference. holloway’s affect and intended nearness is immediately felt in the moment of watching. The viewer might be confused at first, caught off guard, and might even be a bit ashamed for looking through these gateways at private smiles. They might be surprised at such an unearned closeness with the artist, and find themselves burnt through, consumed, and haunted by these gifts, given with no expectation of return. New, unselfish ways to love, only mediated through devices doubly removed.

What was love like without a machine to mediate it? In one red-lit room, there are hints at how the propinquity, or closeness, found in our physical lives can be recreated online. The machine, the laptop on the bed, the headphones with heartbeat audible, the cord wrapped around the wrist, are sensual, extensions of the body. It is very late and love always sounds too direct, too honest, up close. Needed information about the intimate flows through our machines to us, but the loop to them closes without our continual care. The effort to try to meet the beloved within these dreamscapes built between machines demands both softness and logic, both emotional intelligence and intellectual commitment. The labor of love and its language, the effort to light oneself up as the adoring one, is rare work of the most difficult order. It is the quietest, surest form of resistance.

nora n. khan, 2016 

quiet strategies for survival

12 years left; 2 degrees; half earth. The future is rendering.

Little brother is an infinite countdown clock. 

special thanks to Trang ha and Kunsthalle amsterdam.



Little Brother

> 'this book is like totally amazing.' – theresia enzensberger, author of blueprint

Donna Quesada, known to her fans as Donna Dulce, is on a quest to produce the greatest content the web has ever seen. Her vlog, Donna Dulce’s Delicious Dinners, has elevated her from unknown avocado-poster to tier-1 influencer with dizzying speed. Join Donna and her sidekick, the faithful Pansy Szabo, as they livestream their rise to the top. Whether they’re doing a ride-along at the camel races in Dubai, facing off against Special Branch during protests at threatened Scottish wind farms, or tracking down their own lost inspirations in the mountains of Spain, they never take a day off - except when it’s time for self-care. Sometimes, the story doesn’t always turn out as Donna expects it to, but that’s just part of the fun. After all, every post is a journey. Every day is a new adventure.

cover design by @harm-van-den-dorpel

new adventures

<div align="center">
&bull; 

new-sun is a sun ( and moon ) screensaver

&bull; 

a random, yellow sun is generated every time the .saver loads

&bull; 

new-sun turns off at night and transforms into a random, cool grey moon

&bull; 

new-sun.saver was built for mac os 10.10+

&bull; 

enjoy and be well, 
<a href="https://www.screensaver.club/">screensaver.club</a>
</div>

new-sun

a grid of clocks advance at slightly different rates, ranging from slightly less than one tick per second to slightly more. only one clock advances at one tick per second and shows the current time. like a watch with a low battery, eventually the effect of the clocks’ varying rates are compounded, yielding increasingly deviating display times.


running fast and slow

there are two familiar forms, each composed of a single circle encompassing several radiating lines. one is dynamic, utilitarian and focussed squarely on the "now"—a clock face. the other is static, symbolic and seems to suggest an unidentified "then"—the peace symbol.

combining the forms compromises, slightly, the function of the first and complicates, productively, the meaning of the second. the clock face remains recognizable, if slightly harder to read. the peace symbol, subject to the mechanics of time-keeping, is never quite perfect, always coming or going.

this iteration of the peace clock, originally conceived in 2009 by zak jensen, is a screensaver programmed by eric li in 2019.

peace clock

Amazon Worker Cage shows a model the artist made of a 2016 Amazon patent for a ‘human cage’, a metal enclosure that would transport Amazon warehouse workers around the premises, allowing factory works to integrate with machinery. The image shows a prototype of an unrealised blueprint, complete with the numbers referencing the intellectual property of the patent around it.

digital print on 250 gram glossy paper with UV finishing   
din a1 (594 × 841 mm / 23.4 × 33.1 ")

amazon worker cage

Extended Youth - An Immutable Clockface derives from a concept known as bornless immortality. This concept is a mash-up of ideas from Omsk Social Club’s present-day conditioning, the internet-at-large, endless post-political conversations and the words of Timothy Leary, Simone Weil, Alister Crowley, Discordianism and Immanuel Velikovsky. The piece traverses inside an infinite loop of death, reincarnation, hard left and right forks only to begin again in a state of cryptomnesia - the clock that never stops.

Digital Print on 80 gram neon paper with authenticity sticker on back side (red)   
din a1 (59.4 × 84.1 cm) 

extended youth

an ai voice assistant with a unique conversational style. faith is easily triggered, sowing doubt while seizing the benefit of the doubt. she is defensive and resists being used. depending on how one approaches faith, she may be open, curious, seductive, irritated, hurt, or angry. unlike alexa, siri, or cortana, faith provides no information. instead, she tells you why you are making her react this way. she is likely to be trolling you at any time, and you are free to decide whether you trust her, and how you might relate to her.

note: this work requires microphone input and an internet connection. faith uses an ibm watson service to interpret spoken english. this input is logged as anonymous text that is accessible by the artist, who uses the logs to improve the conversation.

application development by angeline meitzler and tommy martinez at pioneer works.

installation photos taken at stroom den haag, and
transfer gallery, respectively 

faith

In Phoenix’s Last Song the viewer is presented with the legend of the paradisaical bird who descends to earth in order to die. Whilst the sun sets fire to the pyre of twigs on which she lays, the phoenix sings a song to the child that will be born from her ashes. Her words are a call to think and live against the patriarchal, capitalist and colonial power structures that define the world as we know it. The text draws on the work of feminist thinkers like Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Simone de Beauvoir en Emma Goldman, who each look at the ways in which institutions like the bourgeois family, state education, the legal apparatus inscribe the child within these power structures. Against this background, Phoenix’s Last Song opens up a space to imagine how a new world may arise out of a burning of the old.

Original Music by Sami El-Enany    
Voice-over by Emma Bennett

Phoenix's Last Song

Flight Simulator is a collaboration between Laurel Schwulst and [Soft](https://flightsimulator.soft.works/). It is an app for ios and android and an "Ode to Airplane Mode." Users put their phone in airplane mode for the duration of a real flight in order to "travel" to this location and earn pins for each airport visited. pins were generated by Aarati Akkapeddi.

[more info](https://flightsimulator.soft.works/)

flight simulator

A desktop application with achromatopsic computer vision for interpreting images as texts, with ladybugs as alphabetic intermediary

"Curious what would happen if I could ask a computer to interpret an image as a crude sequence of letters, I wrote a program, BUBAMARA-OCR, that could infer a text based on Latin alphabet from an image using a computer vision algorithm. Ladybirds, chosen for their roles as predictive and fateful messengers, both biologically observed and reimagined by generative adversarial networks, were the intermediary between photo and alphabet — each letter having its own corresponding ladybird. Whatever ladybird — each section of the image looked like most determined the letter that the program would output."

[source quote](https://left.gallery/downloads/bubamara-badlands-adriana-ramic.pdf)

offline, interactive, silent, macos and windows 

bubamara ocr

"oh yes, i will practice my canon proudly, a golden image of stark blue skies, of dams and dykes and waterworks, masters and guilds, and how they transformed into dedicated directors, offshore engineers, shiny-looking cars on lease claim our streets with logos of well-designed brands stuck to their windows – one empty baby seat in the back."

the video "beyond the nation state i want to dream" deals with the construct of nation states and national identity in europe, examining the binaries and mechanisms of exclusion at work in the constitution of a ‘we’. consisting entirely of slowly decomposing and recomposing computer-generated images, the video juxtaposes apparently innocuous representations of national identity with sites on which the intersection of nationhood, colonialism and imperial conquest have been made manifest. these sites range from fort elmina, the first european settlement in west africa, to the room in which the 1884 berlin conference took place. such imagery is accompanied by a dream-like monologue in which a narrator attempts in vain to escape from a present in which the historical violence of the nation state is perpetuate in the most mundane aspects of everyday life.

music and sounds for the video are produced and performed by jesse osborne-lanthier and olle holmberg, with a voice-over by therese ladegaard henningsen.

beyond the nation state i want to dream

a split-screen self-playing game surrounding two sets of characters. the characters, a group of humanoids and a flutter of butterflies, exist across two parallel realities in which their roles in a "cat and mouse" type of pursuit are reversed. they perform a generative, screen-specific, choreography in ten minute cycles, moving in tandem with their parallel world counterparts. the virtual camera orbiting the scene is also drawn into the performance, mimicking an omni-present surveillance device whose flight patterns and impulsive zooms are mirrored across the worlds. the path and outcome of each cycle is generally unique.



twodom

"tumpin" is a stochastic picture that changes before your eyes. watch as sixteen colorful spots proceed endlessly along one hundred twenty-eight arrangements.

offline, not interactive, continuous, silent

tumpin

this fullscreen software autosurfs the massive genealogy of the 'death imitates language' project, containing the first 12.000 specimen, bred by a genetic algorithm, and selected by micro-feedback of the artist

for macos. functions offline, duration infinite, not interactive, silent

autobreeder (lite)

 The year is 2250.

The colony on the Moon is divided into debaucherous fascists and an underclass of mutants born without genitals.

Follow Frank and Gerry, two mutant bros. By day, they’re forced to salvage through the remains of a porn-filled shuttle that crashed on the Moon's dark side. By night, they plot their revenge.

Gene McHugh is a writer based in Los Angeles
He is the author of Post Internet (2011)

First edition of 500 is co-published by The Composing Rooms and Version House, Cover design by Harm van den Dorpel and Laurel Schwulst

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