fatal softness: pauline batista & madeleine stack

The koppel project, london

16 November 2017 – 6 January 2018

It’s about an excavation. Of the mind, of the self. Who is colonized and who flies freely? Fly in, fly out. We’re seeking a pattern. Pattern recognition. Data mining and mining for ore, a shared language of opacity and incoherence. Travelling at great speed above the surface of the earth or penetrating the borders that block free movement.

Is there a point to vision when what affects our lives most is what occurs invisibly? Waves, data, infrared, corruption, offshore banking, infection, the outsider becoming other. Who enters and who is stopped at the border? Capital flows freely while bodies stagnate, are dammed. Technology reaches obsolescence at increasing velocity, and acceleration fails to take into account the material consequences of a dream of constant progress: permanent environmental damage, an expansion of the colonial project by way of corporations, an enclosure of the commons, and an expectation of total work. Between Big Data and Big Pharma, what falls between the cracks?

Here are some threads at the intersection of technology and intimacy. Specifically, where have these projects for a future failed, and what possibility is there for dreams of progress to be redeemed? Perhaps via a third way, outside of the traditional binary of progress at all costs vs a return to the land. The imagery we mine is that of defunct and obsolete technology that once heralded progress. At the end of capitalism, the extraction of surplus value comes from what was once thought of as ineffable: our personalities, habits, preferences, memories. If algorithms take the traditional role of the artist in translating and making sense of the world around us, who decides what information is filtered, which memories are stored and how the circulation of bodies and ideas flows?

On AQNB

The soundscape for the show, composed by Herdís Stefánsdóttir, on Resonance FM ‘A Quieter Storm’ (begins 1 h 15)