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    • Info
    • Portfolio
      • The River Sweats
      • Fidelity Ablation
      • Fouling the Nest
      • Dandelion Bonebath
      • Make Hay
      • There is Always a Shadow
      • Sagehen Residency
      • Confidence to Sing
    • Research
  • 0
  • Info
  • Portfolio
    • The River Sweats
    • Fidelity Ablation
    • Fouling the Nest
    • Dandelion Bonebath
    • Make Hay
    • There is Always a Shadow
    • Sagehen Residency
    • Confidence to Sing
  • Research

This triptych of digital environments was created for a residency and exhibition with Foreign Objekt. To navigate through these spaces visit: https://www.foreignobjekt.com/alex-adkinson-xennoverse


https://newart.city/show/thereisalwaysashadow

There is always a shadow

There is always a shadow

where u stand

No matter how radiant the light

 

Given  the themes of this exhibition, I wanted to make something which brought  together my interests in post-humanism and theology. The main process  used to create this work is called photogrammetry, a technique I became  familiar with due to my work with iDigBio. In my role as a researcher, I  attempt to create highly accurate 3d models of live plant specimen.  Throughout this iterative process of digital capture for empirical  analysis, I have been hung up on a few things. The flatness of the  model, the implications of capturing life for digital archival, and the  strangenesses of the material properties of this process. 

The  process for making this piece involves me slowly walking in circular  patterns in a swamp while I wave a small jet black silicon shard around  at arm's length from my body. These medias are captured by machines  designed as an extension of my own sense-abilities then algorithmically  reconstructed and represented as contrasting pixels. The phone captures  as much data as it can of the space, later to be stitched together,  rendered, and opened to the digital realm of manipulation and  representation.  It isn't hard to equate this to a type of demonic  power, and for sure, much has been said about the relationship of  technology to demonic forces, the occult, and religion. Taking this  psuedo-theological perspective seriously alongside a more  materialist/post-humanistic approach opened the lines of thinking being  explored in this piece.


In  the Old Testament, demons have little to no power over the earth, and  are rarely even mentioned. Introduced more fully in The New Testament,  demons are typically framed as fallen angels. Angels no longer in heaven  but with contact to the earthly and the divine. The presence of demons  seems to correspond with the advent of technical abstractions, or early  social technologies. Turning back to the old testament, angels are  referred to as “watchers” or in greek “egrḗgoroi” a term used in occult  circles to mean a “non-physical entity”. This abstracted form of  non-secular angel/demon are thought of as socially constructed entities,  which can be actualized through ritual or techniques to enact a  non-human power, or to engage with the realm of divinity so to speak.  There is a resonance here with the mechanics of “abstract technical entities”, or technology itself. 


In Roden’s seminar talk, he mentioned  that encounters with technical abstractions or hyper agents happen as  “encounters in the dark”. Interactions that occur beyond human  perception and with forces we cannot conceptualize or represent.

Massimo  Cicciari takes an interesting materialist perspective on the semiotics  of the angel in a book called “The Necessary Angel”, where he links the  appearance of angels to moments of great crisis, specifically crises of  representation. Following Benjamin, he says, “The problem consists in  the representational giving of itself of the idea, and not of the forms  with which a “civilization of vision” represents the idea to itself.  “Truth is the death of intention” (Benjamin in The Origin of German  Tragic Drama); any theory that wants to reduce the truth to the circuit  of the intentional relation is destined to miss “the peculiar giving of  itself of truth from which any kind of intention remains withdrawn”. The  forms of the analytic-conceptual connection presume to represent truth,  just as names presume to possess in themselves the thing itself. In  reality, this conception betrays only ignorance to the problem of  representation. If representation stands for the identical image of the  thing … we would then have to say that forms of connection are truth  itself. If we were to produce the forms, truth would be the product of  our intention. … A philosophy that corresponds to this problem does not  find itself in the condition of mere “research” to which a “current  conception” reduces it. The researcher moves in a sphere of the simple  “extinction of the empirical”. This art of confutation shows only the  imperfect nature of knowledge (obtained through representation). The  researcher is an ironist whose art “extinguishes” the empirical by  showing the constitutive instability of (representation).”

 

These  environments are focused on moments of representational collapse where  this kind of “encounter in the dark could take place”. No matter how  much information about a space is captured, it is always rendered in  flattened images, reduced to contrasting pixels, bitmaps. I wanted to  push in to the moments where the digital apparatus of capture is unable  to adequately grasp on to an earthly subject. Moments in the render  where the traces of this absence are present.

These  swamp scenes (in the form of .glb files) feature large amounts of  ‘algorithmically useless’ information, for instance photographs of the  sunlight rippling on water or shimmering through Spanish moss, while  these photographs might add a few data points to the mesh, the majority  of them are tossed out due to ‘bad fit. Traces of this lost information,  however, tend to remain in the texture of the 3d surface. Where there  is loss in the capture, there is also an uncanny addition. Together,  these three scans work as a kind of triptych entitled “the soul  confronted with ever-increasing science”. The captures are taken at  locations around a swamp in the north Florida panhandle. 


The  first space, “there is always a shadow” is a scan of a small pet  cemetery near the high watermark of the swamp. The graves are marked by  stacks of seashells and cinder blocks. A makeshift monument is  emblazoned with a woodcarved Kawasaki logo. Municipal drainage  infrastructure looms in .mp4 format. 

The  second space, “where you stand” is a scan of a section of the swamp  which flows into the municipal drainage system. In the center of this  area is an enlarged render of a burst cicada exoskeleton wrapped in  spider webs. 

The  third space, “no matter how radiant the light” is a scan of a burnt out  structure along the shoreline of the swamp. Digital videos of sunlight  reflecting on water form a cathedral like structure amongst the ruins.