In 2024 I started working with curator and art historian Giulia Colletti on the 5th edition of a small but intriguing exhibition project in the Istria region in northern Croatia: the Industrial Art Biennial.

The theme of the show builds on some of the ideas I worked on the last couple of years and explicitly links the development of contemporary systems of extraction and management, such as global logistics or AI, to the longer history of the Industrial revolution.

Below is a text Giulia and I drafted to introduce some of the ideas that guided our thoughts.

(More soon)

 

The Vast Automaton

The term Factory, in technology, designates the combined operation of many orders of work-people, adult and young, in tending with assiduous skill a system of productive machines continuously impelled by a central power (...) I conceive that this title, in its strictest sense, involves the idea of a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concern for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinated to a self-regulated moving force.

Andrew Ure
The Philosophy of Manufactures: or, an Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain, 1835, p. 13

 

Backdrop
An emerging landscape

A novel, monstrous industrialization era is unfolding around and through us: it is beyond human comprehension, hyper-granular but opaque, ubiquitous and always somewhere else. It is multi-scalar as its processes and bodies are capable to mobilize and intersect multiple layers of human and non-human lives, from the nano to the planetary scale, from the molecular to the geopolitical, fostering novel interconnections and frictions, when not overt conflicts.

Emerging from an extensive process of extraction and transformation of planetary resources and intelligences, such an evolving landscape embodies both a material force and a powerful cultural engine. Networks of global logistics, real-time management, smart agents and automated feedback loops not only redefine production, supply chains, or the design of infrastructures, but also human intelligence and subjectivity, as well as a sense of agency and the functioning of democracy at scale. 

All of a sudden a strange similarity emerges with the old mining industry, a production machine lying beneath the earth’s surface perpetually cloaked in obscurity, whose only marks manifested either as its inconspicuous overground facilities, or the illnesses on workers’ skin and lungs. The current scenario poses a similar challenge, but at a rampant speed and intensity: what is the industrial, when industrialization runs through data streams and convoluted decision-making processes? Where to look when there is apparently nothing to look at? When machines and sensors do the job of seeing and understanding instead of you? How to orient yourself when you only get blurred shadows of what industrialization is really setting in motion? How do you reclaim agency and redefine justice? In this terrain crumbling beneath our feet, we are requested to imagine the unimaginable.

Threads / Our take
Spectres of the Geogothic

In the framework of the 5th Industrial Art Biennial, the aim is to expose the blind spots and explore the opportunities of this emerging landscape. We set out to tap into the current polycrisis and closely observe the social and technical apparatuses inherited from the 20th century, which provoked it. But that is not enough. In order to unleash alternative imaginations, we also need to forge an inventory of terms and artistic practices that may look strange and unstable, at times even dark and menacing to a human-centered order of things. Gothic and even queer: they will turn out to be necessary to capture material and cultural transformations that are often faster than our ability to recognize and express them.

In the Istrian landscape, the specters of old infrastructures linger, echoing the instances of individuals that made, inhabited, and even questioned them. But specters also come from the present, as unheard voices or invisibilized realities, and the future, disguised as promises and dreams. Specters of the  accumulated knowledge that is required to design and operate machines of extraction, but also the knowledge necessary to destroy them, or take them over to imagine a new, more just society. In a way, technologies are time machines that are capable of evoking, compressing, anticipating, and preempting. 

The curatorial rationale unfolds through the following main threads, taking their cues from artistic practices and projects that we would like to host:

1. Ghosts in the machine: the unseen.
   Practices that reveal industrial processes of suppression of anomalies, both contemporary and future. The process of suppression of diversity escalates in the statistical operations that we call artificial intelligence as one of the building blocks of contemporary supply, production, distribution and consumer chains. They are made invisible by design.
2. Ghosts in the machine: the unseeable.
   In the age of machine vision, human visual culture has become a special case of vision, often bypassed by artificial sensing apparatuses which in turn have become the cornerstone of automation, blurring boundaries between large scale systems and user interfaces. What is the role of machine learning within these operational landscapes? What are their technical, aesthetical, and political implications?
3. Inverse Gravity
   Extraction has always been incited by the dream of infinite energy. Extractivism magnifies it into a systematic, all-encompassing endeavor. Extractivism is two-fold: firstly, it is a strategic vision that is embedded in large scale technologies of extraction. Secondly, it stands for the deployment of extraction into other realms, including the extraction of human and non-human intelligence for optimization, control and exploitation. Now the ore fluctuates in the sky and in our cells, the weightless is heavy, water is instrumentalized, oxygen-based creatures plunge by proxy into the abyss of the sea. 
4. Mythologies of Calculating Machines
   The “vast automaton” is a shape-shifting myth that mutates and adapts to the new century. Today, from opposite corners of the same binary imaginary, both the idea of a god-like, charismatic and thaumaturgic superintelligence and the plagues of out-of-control zombie nanorobots can perfectly coexist. But is this the only way to imagine an alternative to the humanist project and its blind spots?
5. Infrastructures of fear, cruelty, and collapse.
   The industrial revolution was always tied to control over land, people, animal and vegetal life. From climate change to war, from logistical revolution to indiscriminate exploitation.
   The notion of the uncanny valley refers to the moment of bewilderment when facing robots that looked almost like, but not quite like, human beings. What if AI and other examples of planetary-scale computation could work as machines that produce effects of inverse uncanny valley, as mirrors pointed at us and the uncanniness of our civilization?

Materialization
Spells and antidotes

The selection of art projects, newly commissioned installations, and films presents a vision of the industrial as a multi-faceted landscape, explored according to the main threads exposed above. The artists invited to exhibit in the 5th IAB embrace a range of strategies: 

• mapping this elusive territory,
• tackling its dominant mythologies and offering new ones,
• evoking its ghosts or exorcizing its demons. 

By questioning the historical alignments of facts imposed by power, inhabiting the latent space of big data models or conjuring up alternative presents and futures, our selection suggests possibilities of alternative visualities, speculation, counter-design, documentarism, ethnography or performativity in the statistical underground of contemporary technological mediation.