Biennale Cruise

Biennale Cruise (2024)

Video, 10:20

“Biennale Cruise” was recorded at the 2019 Venice Biennale and follows the journey of the cruise boat Rhapsody of the Seas through the Canal della Giudecca in Venice, Italy, accompanied by audio of the now infamous “How Dare You” speech that Greta Thunberg gave at the UN set to death metal music. Even though large cruise ships were banned in 2021, this has not totally been enforced. These ships are a pharmakon that, on the one hand, provide jobs and income for the city of Venice, while at the same time stress its fragile ecological system. Cruise ships are heavy polluters and a factor in global warming. The video finishes with a rolling list of environmental offenses caused by these ships.

password: hello


DIS-SOLIDARITY

March 4, 2023 – Fuhrwerkswaage Kunstraum, Cologne, Germany

DIS-SOLIDARITY

We live in the moment of cognitive capitalism in which the mental worker or cognitariat is sequestered alone in front of multiple screens, desktops and iPhones, swiping to the right and left and scrolling up and down as well as clicking a mouse. These swipes and clicks are recorded and collated to become what is referred to as Big Data. Big Data is then bought and sold to corporations, policing agencies, and governmental bodies to help track their subjects’ likes and dislikes creating, in the end, an algorithmic dividuality used to generate profit and surveillance. It also has a secondary effect of emphasizing certain patterns of choices which generate self-initiated digital feeds that reinforce attitudes and beliefs – in the end creating information silos that separate us. We are further isolated sensorially by the use of earbuds with which to listen to music and podcasts but which also disengages us from the outside world. A gaggle of politicians, well versed in the dispositifs of the new digital attention economy and social media, utilize these digital outcomes to further elaborate new forms of tribal warfare and extremism. As we all know, we are certainly in a very precarious moment. This condition is what Neidich calls dis-solidarity in contradistinction to solidarity, which has a long history of nurturing human bonds and comradery between individuals and workers as a form of emancipatory politics. According to Neidich, we are in a moment of degenerative solidarity.

The artwork DIS-SOLIDARITY uses the institutional structure of the Kunstverein to push back against this alienating condition. DIS-SOLIDARITY embraces and enhances the underlying institutional condition of the Kunstverein for supportive engagement, camaraderie and cohesion. A Kunstverein is constituted by a group of people or comrades who come together to support cultural institutions and dig deep into their own pockets to do so. This work elaborates new forms of togetherness to overcome the conditions of DIS-SOLIDARITY. It engages with their sense of companionship as a reaction against the reigning digital and algorithmic governance. Each member of the Kunstverein purchases one of the letters of the neon artwork and takes it home with them. Each letter has an individual backing and its own transformer. The process requires negotiation as it is probable that one letter or some letters will be preferred by more than one member. It requires kindness, generosity, and flexibility to agree upon the final outcome: the purchase of all letters. Each member takes one letter home and cares for it there until the time comes, to be decided by the group, to reconvene and assemble the work once again in their Kunstverein. It is this annual social engagement and form of togetherness that it generates that constitutes the real meaning of the work. —Warren Neidich, 2023


From the Society of the Spectacle to the Consciousness Industry

From the Society of the Spectacle to the Consciousness Industry

September 30 – October 10, 2022
Digital Art Festival Taipei 2022

Gallery Page

INTERVIEW: “Post-Truth Society and Activist Neuroaesthetics” by Hsiang-Yun Huang

We are transitioning from a knowledge and information economy to that of the neural economy. Just as the knowledge and information economies subsumed the industrial economy that predated it so too will the neural economy, referred to as neural capitalism, subsume the knowledge and information economy. This new form of capitalism is focused upon the networks of the material brain, using it as a source of data. Through new immanent technologies, like Neuralink and Optogenetics, it will act to normalize our perceptual-cognitive faculties through a process of called neural subsumption. As such all our thoughts conscious and unconscious will provide data for Big Data and what Shoshone Zuboff refers to the Big Other. As she states in “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization, “False consciousness is no longer produced by the hidden facts of class and their relation to production, but rather by the hidden facts of commoditized behavior modification.” With this transformation will come a complex rearrangement of techniques of power of which neural surveillance is one. This is where Neidich’s beautiful yet critical, suspended neon light sculpture takes off. His speculative sculpture uses flashing words, which appear and disappear to create linked phrases all connected in a three-dimensional lattice of relations which are at the heart of what he calls the consciousness industry. One notices that the sculpture is historically traced in a vertical direction from bottom to top with years directly following the Second World War at the bottom and our present-day situation at the top. The spectacle as a tool of alienation, as was first described by the artist Guy Debord in his book The Society of the Spectacle, was the source of despotism in that period of time, especially in the ways that it organized visuality and created perceptual-cognitive normativity. One might say that it constituted a high form of modernist governmentalization which still depended upon the senses and the distribution of sensibility. In our new chapter of civilization, the idealist suppositions it depended upon had been substituted by a more direct interaction with the material brain and its partner the pseudo brain elaborated in deep learning neural networks. These deep learning neural networks provide an artificial connectome, or totality of all the brain’s connections, which rivals the simulacrum or the pseudo-world, Debord wrote about. As such the Society of the Spectacle has become less important in suppressing agency and social media and googling have become more important. This is what Byung-Chul Han has called Psychopower in which cognitariats happily give up their freedom. Neidich’s understands that this psychopolitics will transition in the coming years to a neural politics or neuropower as the result of direct action upon the brain and mind by a omnipotent Consciousness Industry using the new apparatuses of brain computer interfaces and Optogenetics just to name a couple. But this work is not simply an explanation of these immanent conditions but a reaction against them. He disperses words such as REDISTRIBUTION OF THE SENSIBLE, BRAIN WITHOUT ORGANS, VARIATION, COGNITIVE ACTIVISM, AYAHUASCA in flashing green neon inside the interior of the networks as saboteurs to the subsuming rationality of the Conscious Industry.


A Proposition for an Alt-Parthenon Marbles Recoded: The Phantom as Other

Warren Neidich. A Proposition for an Alt-Parthenon Marbles Recoded: The Phantom as Other, 2021.

A Proposition for an Alt-Parthenon Marbles Recoded: The Phantom as Other

May 18 – August 21, 2021
Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz e.V.
Berlin, Germany

Gallery Page

In this diagram of a complex assemblage of AIs the psychic energy generated by the phantom limbs is the dominant input through the input layer which sculpts the efficiencies of the connections and synapses of the ANN. But in this case this input is modulated by another source of input from the combined choices made by individuals interacting with the entity through the use of VR-Brain Computer Headsets as well as Eye Tracking Software. Their attention to the various components of the entity also produces data that sculpts the ANN and is responsible for its changing patterns. You notice that some of the words and stringy like structures are black and others are becoming intense in time. That the organization of the Virtual sculpture is constantly changing. The structure is an emerging and generative structure created by the  combined psychic data emanating from the subjects interacting and making choices about what to pay attention to and  the immersive environment and the psychic energy of the phantoms. In the end the subjects are on the one hand looking at the self-reflexive entity they are together producing and the artwork makes visible and opaque the usually invisible and transparent quality of mindedness.


Specters of the Acephalous (2020)

Specters of the Acephalous (2020)

Something Between Us at KAI10 | Arthena Foundation
Exhibition: March 6 to August 2, 2020
Curators: Ludwig Seyfarth and Harriet Zilch


Untuning Three Black Steinway Pianos at Three Times During the Day

Untuning Three Black Steinway Pianos at Three Times During the Day (2019)

Video, 22:24

In “Untuning,” three piano tuners were asked to untune the same Steinway piano at the three times during the day to what they considered maximum entropy. The soundtracks of the three videos were then mashed.

Biennale Cruise

"Biennale Cruise" (2024) follows the journey of the cruise boat Rhapsody of the Seas through the Canal della Giudecca in Venice Italy accompanied by the speech that Greta Thunberg gave at the UN set to death metal.

Noise and the Possibility of a Future

November 21-23, 2019
Venice Conservatory of Music
Venice, Italy

Untuning Three Black Steinway Pianos at Three Times During the Day

Video, 22:24
In “Untuning,” three piano tuners were asked to untune the same Steinway piano at the three times during the day to what they considered maximum entropy.

Pizzagate: From Rumor to Delusion

Video, 19:19
"Pizzagate: From Rumor to Delusion" is an experimental documentary that describes our post-truth society through the Pizzagate fake news story.


Scoring the Tweets

Scoring the Tweets (2018)

Rumor to Delusion
9.05.2019 – Opening performance
Zuecca Project Space, Giudecca 33, 30133 Venice
58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Italy

First exhibited at PRISKA PASQUER (Köln, DE).

Gallery Page

On Cognitive Capitalism

Interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist

Rumor to Delusion

May 5 – November 24, 2019
Zuecca Project Space
La Biennale di Venezia, Italy

Scoring the Tweets

Rumor to Delusion
9.05.2019 – Opening performance
Zuecca Project Space
La Biennale di Venezia, Italy

Pizzagate: From Rumor to Delusion

Video, 19:19
"Pizzagate: From Rumor to Delusion" is an experimental documentary that describes our post-truth society through the Pizzagate fake news story.

Scoring the Tweets

Rumor to Delusion
9.05.2019 – Opening performance
Zuecca Project Space
La Biennale di Venezia, Italy

Scoring the Tweets

12.05.2018
PRISKA PASQUER Gallery
Köln, DE


Pizzagate: From Rumor to Delusion

Pizzagate: From Rumor to Delusion (2019)

Video, 19:19

“Pizzagate: From Rumor to Delusion” is an experimental documentary that describes our post-truth society through the Pizzagate fake news story. The Pizzagate scandal was a conspiracy theory that went viral in which Hillary Clinton and her associates at her campaign offices were accused of running a child sex ring out of the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor in Washington D.C. It also uncovers the reasons for the madness that motivated Edgar Welch to drive up from North Carolina to free these girls.

password: hello

On Cognitive Capitalism

Interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist

Rumor to Delusion

May 5 – November 24, 2019
Zuecca Project Space
La Biennale di Venezia, Italy

Scoring the Tweets

Rumor to Delusion
9.05.2019 – Opening performance
Zuecca Project Space
La Biennale di Venezia, Italy

Pizzagate: From Rumor to Delusion

Video, 19:19
"Pizzagate: From Rumor to Delusion" is an experimental documentary that describes our post-truth society through the Pizzagate fake news story.


Conversation with Noise, 2018

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PRISKA PASQUER
Cologne, Germany
www.priskapasquer.art


Book Exchange: The Hollywood Blacklist

Book Exchange: The Hollywood Blacklist

January 30 – February 1, 2015
Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair 2015

“Book Exchange: Hollywood Blacklist” is a performative sculpture project whose mode of operation and purpose changes in each venue where it is displayed. For this occasion books authored and about Hollywood authors and actors suspected of being communists who were censored by the House Committee on Un-American Activities led by Joseph McCarthy were first bought off the internet and installed on the shelves of this rotating Modernist bookcase. During the fair visitors are asked to purchase a book from any vendor presenting with which to then make an exchange for one of the books found in the bookcase. It is hoped that by the end of the event all the books will have been distributed from the bookshelves to a heterogenous group of participants who will install them in bookshelves in their homes. Their act and participation refutes the essence of censorship which is to make unavailable to the general public certain forms of information. The bookshelf itself will contain the residue of the experience of the exchange as well as expressing the vast diversity of books being sold and exhibited at the fair.

Press

Los Angeles Art Book Fair 2015
in Flash Art by Noura Wedell


Body-Wall Maple Cottage (2005)

Body-Wall Maple Cottage

2005

In this work a false wall made out of plywood wound its way around an abandoned cottage first blocking the staircase, then creating a false passageway that began at the original door and continued until the front wall of the house itself. This new space created a hybrid space in-between the original house and the new wall and thereby set up a dialectic between past and future with the spectator mediating between the two. The visitors were transformed into performance artists and actors and were made aware, by a small light, of a viewing device through which they were meant to look to see an enclosed domestic space reminiscent of the places of inspection so often used by Sherlock Holmes. The optical pathway for this inspection was a hole cut out of the eye of an old portrait painting that hung on the inside of this simulated do­mestic space. This opening in the painting was lined up on one hand with a hole in the wall itself and on the other with the viewer’s eyes. Together they created a machinic assemblage that was aligned with a mirror hung directly across the room which reflected the antique painting, mentioned above, and the eye of the viewer that through his or her participation was now part of. The viewer’s eye, as it looked through the painting from behind the wall, now became part of the paint­ing itself. The hidden passageway became an uncanny space in which the fragmented viewer through a transformational process of the experience of becoming an actor in this architectural scenario became a whole body again not as himself but as a painting with all the meanings pertaining to the nature of portraiture itself.


Shot Reverse Shot

Shot Reverse Shot

The histories of cinema/photography and neuroscience mirror each other and are both essential for the understanding and production of our contemporary subjectivity. Shot Reverse Shot is a cinematic method of displaying two people while conversing and is in this case used as an apparatus to produce situations between actors. There are five different couples enacting five different situations, first with a video camera, then with a prisma bar –a neuro-opthalmologic instrument normally used to measure defects in ocular gaze but in this case creating dynamic movement of images through ever increasing lateral displacements.


Black Square, Triangle, Circle

Black Square, Triangle, Circle, Warren Neidich Studio, Berlin, Germany, 2007, view of front wall and entrance to the wall
Black Square, Triangle, Circle, Warren Neidich Studio, Berlin, Germany, 2007, view of front wall and entrance to the wall

Body-Wall Black Square, Triangle, Circle is a performative sculpture, determined by a set of questions raised in a specific architectural context. The pieces in this series investigate the inbetween hybrid states of architecture where the body can obtain new orientations, kinaesthisiologies, and new becomings. Each site-specific piece uses the found space as a vehicle for the realization of this work.


Black Square, Triangle, Circle

Black Square, Triangle, Circle, 2007, front view of the wall
Black Square, Triangle, Circle, 2007, front view of the wall

Body-Wall Black Square, Triangle, Circle is a performative sculpture, determined by a set of questions raised in a specific architectural context. The pieces in this series investigate the inbetween hybrid states of architecture where the body can obtain new orientations, kinaesthisiologies, and new becomings. Each site-specific piece uses the found space as a vehicle for the realization of this work.


Black Square, Triangle, Circle Fragment 2

Black Square, Triangle, Circle Fragment 2

2007

Black Square, Circle, Triangle Remnant (2007) is the most recent manifestation of a series of performative sculptures that reenact the memory of itself as a fragment of a once enacted performative space. It is made up of two pieces that face each other. The first section to confront the viewer is the wall fragment. This 1.5m wide piece of drywall was taken from an installation called Black Square, Circle, Triangle, (2007) that I did in my studio which had been inspired by other works I called Body-Walls which are shown in this folio later on.

These walls are performative sculptures made over time that can be made in any space whatever. In the case of Untitled Program, 2006 a hybrid space measuring 60cm wide was created by building a mimetic wall that followed the contour of the already existing wall inside the gallery. Produced over a two-week period in the space itself this work was the result of a series of decisions made there. The work is a testament of that decision making process. Embedded in the wall were a number of viewing opportunities that ranged from a simple hole from which one could view the rest of the gallery to that of an opportunity to witness Catherine Deneuve looking through a peephole in the now famous scene from Belle de Jour. As such the visitors to the gallery became actors in a back stage scenario in which they enter the hybrid space of architectural memory to reenact the history of cinema itself through a series of transitional apparatti that produce new chances for observation. At the end of the exhibition this wall was cut up and undone and re-installed as Untitled Program, Remnant, (2006).

This same scenario created Black, Square, Circle, Triangle but in this case a wall was built in my own studio as a laboratory Merzbau in order to be able to experiment with different possibilities and potentials of these works. The studio in this instance is a place of resistance where research into ones own work and potential stands in for the resistant gestures of the Body-Wall works as they respond to the Institutional Space of the White Cube. The white cube as it is defined in the age of neo-liberal capitalism has become a space of containment where the gestures of market system, entertainment industry and museology mix together as a sovereign cocktail. In this work the constructed wall once again mimics an already existing one that separated the front and back of my studio. Again it became an armature supporting a number of historically active optical devices that produced opportunities for seeing. In this case two stereoscopic devices were used. One in which a lit blank screen confronted the viewer and the other a three dimensional image of a young girl of the DDR looking out upon the urban horizon. The former provided an opportunity to project ones imagination on a blank screen while the latter allowed one to ponder the conditions of history itself. The space was also monitored by a surveillance security camera which looped into an exposed video monitor. Thus the space also became a place of self-reflective body awareness. These devices were housed in wooden enclosures in shapes such as squares, circles and triangles that protruded out of the wall into the space itself; thus the works name. The inside of the walls were collaged with magazine and newspaper covers from the past 100 years which I had been collecting for the past 5 years and was a nod to my own experience as a child exploring haunted houses in which the inside of the walls were insulated with old magazines. This work became the mother structure for the production of Black, Square, Circle, Triangle, Remnant (2007).

Again this wall was undone and cut up to preserve the optical instruments. One such fragment 1.5m by 1m was re-installed with the help of aluminum studs used to make the structure of the original wall in the first place. This work was installed as a free standing entity with the inside wall facing backward as shown in the House Trip exhibition. This fragment faced a second section. A photograph of the Palast der Republik in the process of its own undoing was photographed in such a way with a large format camera that it appears to be falling down and breaking apart from the inside. It is secured with screws on a piece of drywall which is attached to another stud frame of the same dimension as its brother. The back side of this structure is made up of a mirror work which stands at 90 degrees from the front wall and adds support. The back of the drywall has been taped with alternating black and white tape to create an optical illusion. That taped wall is reflected in the mirror as a “mise-en-abyme”. The lighting of the work is very important. The transparent window like effect created by the open spaces left by the mounted works creates the opportunity for the production of shadows on the walls of the space embracing the works. Altogether the undoing of the Palast is metonymic for the process of undoing of Architecture as a cultural act. The Palast was not demolished but is being slowly and meticulously taken apart. The cultural undoing, assimilation and subsuming of the communist block by Capitalism after the fall of the Berlin is re-enacted in this work.


Rainbow Brushes (2008)

Rainbow Brushes

2008

Wooden Paint brushes with pig hair, Acrylic paint, Variable dimensions

Rainbows found in landscape painting in the past 1600 years were discovered to vary greatly in color and and order of hues.  Some of the rainbows in fact had little to do with the scientific analysis of the rainbow and reflected instead cultural factors, like the colors of clothes worn by the king.  Acrylic paint was first used to copy a section of a found rainbow upon a piece of 3 meters Fabriano paper.  Next a large 13 or 15 inch brushes were pulled through the paint in one brushstroke to create the painting.  This process left an afterimage of paint on the brush and the brushes were hung on the wall.


Untitled Program (2006)

Untitled Program

2006

For this project the Body-Wall was installed in the context of a white cube. A mimetic wall is built in the gallery space. Visitors are not initially aware of the presence of the wall, while those who have been in the gallery before are aware of an uncanny difference. The phenomenology of the space changes and Body/Wall thus becomes a work about the phenomenologic uncanny. As the visitors walk inside the gallery, they discover the entrance to the wall by chance. The wall is expanded to 60cm from its normal condition of 10cm, thus acquiring a new depth and expanding metric relations into typological warped ones. A two-sided rotating mirror is also installed in the gallery space as part of this work. Random turnings of the mirror by visitors to the gallery enable visitors inside the wall to get different views of the space.

Moving inside the walls of the gallery is an uncomfortable state of being as it constantly unmasks the hidden and secret as the inside hybridity. Once inside the wall, the visitors can look through two different holes drilled in the walls. The first hole is aligned with the rotating mirror and gives them a complete 360-degree view of the gallery and the works in it. The other aperture in the back of the wall opens onto a mini DVD screen in which a section of Belle De Jour with Catherine Deneuve, directed by Luis Buñuel has been ripped and altered. In this looping 5sec clip the actress is seen to become part of an obsessive-compulsive action of looking through and looking away from a peephole.