CURA.

JAMES BRIDLE: The Inert Gas Series was a series of works done in 1969, in which Robert Barry went out into the area around Los Angeles to various sites, quite near the city and also way out in the high desert, and he released a series of noble gases: helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon. These were actions documented only through a plain poster without images, which just said: “This was done.” The documentation isn’t the work, the work is the gas itself. He released a set quantity of this gas from a compression canister which will expand infinitely: the atoms of that gas are in the atmosphere and will expand constantly until they fill the entire atmosphere. The way he always talks about the work is as a single volume expanding into infinity, as a process that goes on forever from that point of release, and he was specifically dealing at that time with works that existed largely outside the human sensorium. The piece that he’d made for the exhibition January 1-31 1969 in New York earlier that year was the Carrier Wave work, where he set up two radio transmitters, sending out radio signals from a closed cupboard in the corner of the gallery. There was no way to perceive that work, but it was travelling through the space that you were in at all times, and so the work had become completely dematerialized but was everywhere. For me these works really take everything that was promising about land art, this semi-utopian engagement of the individual working on a much larger scale, but by using these immaterial aspects it removes a lot of the macho elements of control that are involved in them. You’re not leaving a permanent trace, you’re not trying to compete with nature, you’re recognizing that you’re part of a constantly evolving and vast system. That’s what seems to me the key thing about those works.

JB: One of the starting points for thinking about this stuff was the work of the Dredge Research Collective in the US, who’ve done a lot of really interesting analysis of humankind’s institutional engineering of the planet, particularly the work on the Mississippi River Delta, where Rob Holmes talks about the US Corps of Engineers as the greatest land artists on Earth, the people who’ve most affected materially and very artfully a huge swathe of the US, canalizing and dredging the Mississippi River and the effects that that would’ve had, and this idea that land art really dramatized the scale of engineering that was being performed, particularly post-war. Whether that’s the building of huge highway systems, whether that’s the immense growth of cities in that time, highlighting the fact that we’ve institutionalized that kind of mastery of the Earth’s surface, so that the gestures that were possible in land art pale in significance. And a lot of those artists knew that. Smithson’s work with airports was very much engaged with measuring, for me, the ability of art to compete with large state, institutional, and governmental efforts to create monuments on the same scale. And then you have someone like Barry, who’s slightly on the outside of those discourses, who’s taking a very different approach to it and is not trying to compete in the same material terms, and is using a lot of similar gestures, talking about sites, but really removing them entirely from even the possibility of them being memorialized or made useful.

JB: A lot of those environmental movements and a lot of the anti-nuclear movements start from very strong spiritual positions. Both pieces of the environmental movement start not from a position of opposition to something that’s happening but from a clear moral position that is under threat from these newly-emergent environmental destructions and new forms of warfare, and over time that viewpoint has not won through. The environmental movement now is largely a reactive one, it seeks to push back on technology, it just feels like the only way to go is just to do less in every possible way, and they’re efforts of mitigation, and I see a complete mirror of that in a lot of the critical discourse around technology. One of the things that we see happening, particularly in critical technological art, is ways of working out how we do what state surveillance does essentially, so one thing is to expose or reproduce the actions of the state in order to critique it. If you want to demystify the Internet as a way of exposing its power structures, then what a lot of artists, myself included, have done is to point at a physical thing, to say, “Look, behold – a data center! Here, beneath the beach, a cable.” This is a very material approach to exposing the physical functioning of it. Or in the surveillance responses you have both artists reproducing the functioning of the state, which is basically to do more surveillance on people, to write their own face detection algorithms, or to make artworks that gather data and show it back to people in a kind of expository way. And at the highest possible level you have the approach of leaking, which is itself a form of exposure. The concern for me is that all these processes operate on the same epistemological level. They all think that if we could only gather and release more information, then this magic pulling back of the veil will reveal some kind of deeper, underlying truth, when really these are just two opposing forces fighting on the same level, they operate with the same set of discourses and models of the world, and that just feels like an increasingly helpless position to take. Because ultimately, if you’re fighting a foe with the same worldview, then the person with more material power is going to win that argument. Rather we need to reconceptualize the very foundations of how we’re using these worldviews to construct our ways of thinking and acting in the world.

JB: I don’t think that discourse has run its course, there’s plenty more work to be done. We now have a map of how things work, but it’s not changing their actions in any way, it just levels us up to the point where we can actually start to talk about it in more of a literate way. But it also tends to have the implication that this is what these technologies were meant for, that surveillance is a kind of natural, unstoppable aspect of the technologies themselves, so it leads to this huge disillusionment with the possibilities of these technologies, as though these powers that we’re opposed to have already won, which I don’t think is the case. It’s important to remember that no one designed the Internet, no one set out to explicitly build this technological communication system that we are entirely embedded in now. It was the product of all kinds of different intentions, all kinds of different technologies, and it remains so. We must work very hard to avoid only using the kind of metaphors and models of those who have colonized those systems for their own power.

JB: I’ve always, always believed that the network – by which I mean the Internet and our technologies and us, all connected as a very large, complex and emergent system – hasn’t changed us as individuals very much, but what it has done is bring into focus very clearly a lot of behaviors that were either latent or unconscious before its emergence. So, a lot of the stuff that you hear is simply not true. We just haven’t been able to see it before, because we haven’t had this kind of planetary-scale awareness, and what that planetary-scale awareness does is reveal how really quite messy everything is. It’s very easy when you have a limited bandwidth view of the world to make very broad generalizations; it’s simply not possible to make those generalizations anymore, because our ability to gather data is so extraordinarily vast. But we’re continuing to use this approach of gathering data, even though this is a problem of the infinite. The more data we gather, the more you see that data gathering is not the answer to understanding the world. It’s a model of gaining mastery over the world through understanding some apparent truth about it, and that mastery is not possible without some form of violence. Because its precepts are wrong, it assumes that there is something to understand at some kind of formal, constructive level, as a scientific result of observations.

JB: Yes, its analytical possibility, and that doesn’t exist. And we’ve spent the last 50 years building a technology which we thought would allow us mastery, and it has actually proved the complete impossibility of doing that; it’s an ongoing experiment, and we’re ignoring the results of the experiment. We thought we were building a model of the world, but it’s not telling us the thing that we’re expecting it to tell us. We’re expecting it to tell us how the world works, when it’s actually telling us that we cannot know how the world works.

JB: I think that’s a broad kind of curiosity question. It really is just some of us wanting to know what all of the things are in the sky, it’s just that kind of broad curiosity about how the world functions. And that is tied to agency: if you want to be able to function, then you need to be able to map and understand these things to some kind of end. So to me it just seems like the most obvious and natural thing to try and understand what these things are. Whether it’s satellites, whether it’s drones, whether it’s deportation planes, you want to go outside and you want to see these things for yourself, or I do, and by encountering them personally you gain some kind of potential understanding, but hopefully also the ability to weave them into coherent narratives, ones that make sense to oneself. What we need to communicate is the essential desire to go outside and look for these things oneself.

JB: That obsession comes from a total curiosity in these things. But I’m always interested in the fact that there are many explanations for all of these things, and that’s where the really fascinating thing comes from for me. Our newest ability is to see those extra layers down or up, that because of the network we’re no longer presented with solid, singular truths. And that is not something new, that there are multiple explanations for things or that there are multiple narratives crisscrossing, but what is new is the fact that those things are now radically visible to us in a way that they weren’t before. This is the Wikipedia historiography process. The mode in which we’re constructing knowledge now is an attempt to build a collective knowledge base. That responsibility for learning and participating in those arguments is really now in all of our hands. And for me, it also destabilizes totally that final truth that we’re supposed to get out of this. This is why I am slightly obsessed with the metaphor of the cloud, because all this work, as I said, that I and other artists have been doing in the last few years to materialize the computing cloud, to bring it from this distant, abstract thing into something concrete and rational and mappable, feels like it might be the wrong approach. The cloud might actually be a really good and useful metaphor. Because there are always going to be things that we cannot see. The Internet is a product of the contemporary situation where we no longer operate as individual auteurs but operate as a huge accumulation of different techniques and different skills. But the same modern technology and science, including political science, which has led us to this point doesn’t have a language for talking about that, and neither does our world organization in terms of nation states; it still tries to contain and embed these things within discrete groups working within a larger whole that is more and more visibly interconnected. So the language that’s historically been used around the cloud becomes incredibly interesting again, because the cloud has never been – in mystical, artistic language – something to be bounded or contained, it’s always contained those elements of mystery, and for a long time, always as sub-currents and countercultures within history, the admittance of mystery has been the central truth of the world, rather than this desire for mastery. For me that – what has always been a fringe, strange, mystical belief – is being brought back to us again by the technologies that we thought were going to conquer all of that. That seems to me incredibly significant and not very well-understood.

JB: We’re not going to get out of this model of telling stories anytime soon, but the ability to synthesize those stories rather than simply create new oppositional structures is the necessary skill. The Internet is trying to teach us something. Because if the Internet hasn’t been designed by anyone and didn’t come with a single intentionality, then what is possible to learn from it? What is it that we’re shown by its existence? And for me it’s exactly that, that everything is composed of these myriad, different intentionalities which are not directly competing but are creating a new way of seeing the world and therefore ourselves as existing within it.

JB: To talk about geoengineering, is to ask at what point are we going to pick up a new narrative of what we’re doing? Because we’ve been geoengineering for a very long time, we just haven’t called it that, and we also haven’t been doing it with intention. In the last 200 years we have radically transformed the composition of the atmosphere and now we’re at a point where we are acknowledging that we have done that and we’re trying to decide how we start to consciously geoengineer. To stop coal-fired power stations is a form of geoengineering, because it will transform the environment, so any action we take at this point is going to be a form of geoengineering, and it’s how conscious we are of our ability to act in this situation that is going to determine the outcomes of that process. What we face with the Internet cloud is a tool that is showing us that we have the potential for collective action, which is not necessarily entirely conscious. But the ability to measure and see our own effect on the world has to lead to some kind of consciousness of and willingness to engage communally and as a community with these projects, but it requires knocking down a huge number of previous myths, which is maybe where we come back to the narrative thing. So, looking – as an example, directly from the work – at projects I’ve been working on around citizenship, the major finding was seeing that our idea of the state as the ultimate arbiter of what we call citizenship is demonstrably no longer valid. A huge amount of things that we used to attribute to citizenship is no longer true because of the Internet, and it’s going to become ever and ever less true. We can either continue to pretend that the nation state is the most useful model for dealing with this stuff, or we can actually look at the situation as it’s emerging and say, “We need to be working consciously towards other forms of government, other forms of citizenship that take into account the way the world truly is.” Because this is a very historically recent way of governing through the nation state and through national-level laws, and it doesn’t need to be the only way, but we live in all these entrenched power systems that want to keep the narrative the same kind of way.

JB: I feel like I’m on the precipice in terms of my own thinking as well, you know.

JB: Yes.

JB: That’s definitely something that we’re struggling with, and acknowledging that you can’t make these grand statements, as much as I keep trying, and then you do reach a point of impasse. But you only reach that if you do try and write these grand narratives. You can also just be okay with the fact that these competing narratives exist and move towards some kind of position of equanimity and justice within an unstable system, it doesn’t invalidate any core human principles to do this. All these changes seem to be provoking very violent responses which are a product of those things being revealed to the world as being true and valid. You don’t have to take a position to fight those fights anymore essentially, that’s not the useful thing to do here anymore, but it doesn’t affect any fight against injustice and it doesn’t stop you acting in the world, it makes it all the more joyous and fascinating to delve into all these possible, different cultures. But it has very large implications for how we take forward the global processes at play today. The scientific method itself is a process that is increasingly struggling to produce new knowledge today, and that’s one of the greatest and most progressive things that we have built over the last 200 years or so. Science is struggling because it’s suffering from this state of uncertainty that we’re talking about, which is that its ability to see and gather data has grown to such an extent that it’s become either gummed up or so narrow that its reproducibility in other fields is no longer possible or of interest. But if we want to talk about the grand narrative, then look at what’s happening at the forefronts of quantum physics or genetics, where we are entering into new realms of matter which exist below and above and entangled with the realms which we’re used to dealing with, and reveal even more complexity and chaotic behaviors than we’re seeing on our own level. This uncertainty is the material nature of the world in every dimension, and we are coming to the point, as a species, where we’re going to have to start acknowledging that stuff or we’re going to die out. That is our choice, that is the position we find ourselves in as a global networked species, recognizing that the technologies we’re building around us are part of our culture, just as the development of language and the development of printing were. They affect us and our way of being and knowing in the world, and so far we’ve very bad at acknowledging that. And that’s fine, because they’ll win out over time. In the end, we can talk about this stuff as much as we like, it’s going to happen anyway. It’s just: at what level do you want to engage with it and talk about it and maybe make use of it?

JB: We’re all white noise.