Re-Perceiving the Worlds of Techne
an unreliable reflection by Nathan Sibthorpe
Memory is an agent of distortion. I’m standing in the backyard of a West End Queenslander, taking notes on my phone. I’m listening to discussions from a line-up of very different artists. Only, I’m not standing. I think I was sitting. Or leaning. And now it’s 18 months later and the notes on my phone don’t all make sense.
I committed to writing something for House Conspiracy in response to TECHNE: an exhibition of various art practices held in January 2019. But as they sometimes do, some other sudden jobs popped up and stole my attention for a long while. This promise slipped its way down my to do list, and then somehow off my to do list, until now – when I’m suddenly reminded of this distant agreement and I scramble to form some words.
What an asshole – me, trying to remember the nuance in carefully considered artworks from more than a year ago. Me, loosely shirking my responsibility to represent these artists in some form of legacy documentation. It’s a dodgy attempt. But I’m a little bit comforted by the idea that perhaps words can only do so much. Reducing any artwork into discussion is to constrain and limit it. Its natural state is to be inherently more complex than words; more present and more vivid than any description or commentary can afford. This was always going to be futile. So why not lean into the futility?
Because this may be what some of the Techne artists were doing – leaning into the futility. Not of art, but of perception. Memory is an agent of distortion because my recollection of these works can’t be trusted with any detail or clarity. (Hence the heavy use of disclaimers, and, well, this ongoing apology). All I’m left with is an impression of the works – a series of disconnected feelings or images that have stuck with me for long enough to become a part of my understanding of the past.
I saw this once. I felt this once. Something like this happened to me on a certain day. It’s distorted. But it’s what I have now – and so it may as well be real. My reality.
But in a similar sort of way, so too is art an agent of distortion. Here, we are all borrowing snippets of reality – found objects, real people, facilitated moments – and reframing them as something ‘other than’ real. They sit within but outside of our realities. Passed from the control of the artist, to the unreliable chaos of the audient. Tiny staged worlds, soon to be absorbed into the distorted realities of everyone present.
Okay so maybe this is starting to sound like some late night stoner philosophy. But I think there’s something here that connects with the impetus for the exhibition. By referencing the greek word ‘techne’ (meaning art, or craft) as the root for the word ‘technology,’ the House Conspiracy curators are offering a new angle in the art-with- technology discourse. Perhaps art itself is the harbinger of virtual worlds. Technology was never the catalyst - imagination was; technology was simply the enabler. And so whether or not they are using noticeable technology (as its own agent of distortion), the Techne suite of works examine real and virtual worlds through acts of construction, interpretation and questioning.
I do appreciate the slipperiness of real and virtual worlds in art – there’s something so playful about fictive circumstance blurring against our actual circumstance. I remember feeling this when engaging with Amy Conlon’s work in particular. Stepping into a small room, I felt challenged at first in discerning the edges of the artwork – what was “part of it” here? At first I was only looking at the content of a video screen. A video work. But then I gradually noticed the arrangement of surrounding objects. The mise en scene of the room. The intentionality of the space I was standing in.
Though at first this made me uneasy – was the whole room in fact the artwork (where was I to look?!)? I soon relaxed into the melancholic uncertainty of the work’s borders. Hovering in the doorway I felt the potential fictional world of the work lapping up against my own. I’m listening to snippets of conversation from other guests, but also discerning details in sound design that could just as easily be the shifting soundscape of this old house, creaking around us.
Conlon’s work implies a narrative, but it is mostly unavailable to us. There is a sense that someone has lived here, has endured a tragedy and has tried to capture something of it. But all we get are glimpses of hope and hints of destruction. Of course in the worst-case scenarios of our near-future, there’s a good chance we would never have the satisfaction of knowing full stories. What would it be to feel the effects of mass catastrophe without ever understanding what had caused them? Should we even expect something as sensible as narrative from the nonsensical acts of annihilation that we fear? This work creates the experience of a space loaded with feeling, amidst a fictive reality so unresolved in its detail that it may as well be our own.
Upstairs from Conlon’s bunker, Georgia Pierce skews reality in a very different way in one of the most playful of all of the Techne Works. In the Mollison Street kitchen, Pierce distorts everyday moments by heightening and re-framing domestic acts as choreography.
We as the participants are invited to make a cup of tea, following a set of careful instructions. But in the same invitation, we are challenged to transform our behaviour in response to the task – to find performativity in our bodies and elevate the action from domestic to choreographic. Pierce might be a dancer and choreographer, but for the most part we are not. Even so, the friendly un-staged quality of her facilitation in this process lends itself to authentic participation. We are performing, but we are not leaving ourselves behind to play a part. We feel welcome in this space to bring a bit of ourselves, and allow for it to be transformed by the context of Pierce’s experiment.
There’s something magic that happens in these moments of intense self-awareness, when we become so conscious of the specificity of our actions that it makes us feel like our very presence has been heightened above what it normally is. Pierce’s approach to a virtual world is to hyper-aestheticise our reality until it becomes itself amusingly unfamiliar. Here is the effect of technology, reduced to an analogue instruction and facilitated context. There is a joyous playfulness to this work.
One of my favourite moments of the evening was to linger and witness Nevin Howell’s two simultaneous pieces of performance art – the one that he had planned, and the one that evolved out of circumstance.
The former depended on some tricksy applications of motion tracking technology to explore performativity in wrestling culture. Howell is interested in the conscious playfulness of professional wrestling that allows for a both-real-and-fictive world to be embraced with enthusiasm by both performers and active witnesses. In this installation, Howell pays homage to wrestling mystique by inviting participants to step into the role of a readymade wrestling persona. Donning ritualistic costume pieces, the participant is prompted to perform physical actions in response to instruction. Their physicality triggers media cues with further narrative effect, so that the scene becomes a collaborative dance between participant-performer and technology, both co-contributing to the world-building by bouncing off each other.
This was the intention of the work, and for several scenes throughout the evening, this was what Howell shared with the visitors at Techne. But when the technology started to come undone at some points, Howell got stuck performing acts of forensic troubleshooting – investigating glitches on the fly and rebooting systems in an effort to keep the work working. I should note that as a maker who works with technology myself, I have an intimate understanding of the dread and frustration involved with such moments – but in this instance, something really exciting came from the troubleshooting nightmare.
In an area demarcated by tape as a wrestling arena under the house, Howell’s troubleshooting became an accidentally performative battle between man and machine. As the community of guests who had wanted to participate started to form a gentle queue, a totally different mode of spectatorship evolved, complete with cheers at signs of progress and reassuring cries the likes of “you can do it Nevin!!!”
The work that Howell had planned was interesting and playful – but the live art that played out for this part of the night that I witnessed was accidentally captivating! I’ve never seen live wrestling before, but I felt like surely this was in the spirit of it.
Other works sought to conjure virtual worlds without the complications of digital technology. But even though the artefacts in the room might be analogue, both Marta Larzabal and Julie Purcell draw on mediatised pop culture in their own work. Wielding pop culture as its own distortion lens, these very different offerings demonstrate how our perceptions of reality may have already been warped by a web of prior story-telling.
In Purcell’s case, this is about appropriating tropes from video game aesthetics to a painterly form. Seeking a world-building play space from her art, Purcell seeks to “challenge the monopoly the video game industry has over imagination, personal freedom and play.” But at the same time, reframing video game aesthetics in this critical context invites a new socio-political consideration, exposing traits of Orientalism that echo acts of cultural othering from art history. Larzabal’s interrogation of pop culture casts a wider net, evoking dystopian narratives of fear that influence our contemporary state. With echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, and iconic imagery of atomic bombs, this installation looks out at our cultural appetite for thrilling darkness, to consider how we look forward into an uncertain future. Rorschach symbology invites us to lean in to our own interpretive instincts without any reassurance of answers. The use of paper and tangled thread as medium conjure a sense of fragility and temporariness. These narratives may be projecting into the future, but these artefacts won’t last that long – they would likely disintegrate before we did.
Finally, perhaps the most complex use of technology is also the most blatant example of distortion by technology. By this, I’m referring to Drew Flaherty’s media work, which was either created by him or his algorithm, depending on where you might fall in that debate. As an experiment in what creativity is, Flaherty made use of machine learning processes and generative models to produce a series of text, moving images, and sounds.
It’s not that this work was produced automatically by a computer, because of course Flaherty had to at first craft the processes of importing stimulus, and establishing points of reference. He curated the result, to some extent. But at some point, Flaherty was able to take his hands off the wheel and allow the specific creative choices to be made by software, rather than himself. His intentions began the impetus for the work, but the results can’t be said to be all his, can they? We can credit him for the impact of the work, of course – but how do we relate our personal experience of the work to him as its indirect author?
Maybe this is just a bias I have developed in how I think I engage with art. I expect for the medium to be a connective tissue between myself and another human who has crafted it. As I receive the work, I believe that someone is reaching out to me through it, and my reception is in some way connected to the humanity of another person, another human who might think, feel and perceive the world in ways that could possibly be similar to how I do. It’s a reckless generalisation, but art makes me feel less lonely because it reminds me that someone else is thinking, feeling, asking, trying…
But there’s something unnerving about the nature of my exchange with Flaherty’s work. It has human intention, but not nuance. The detail is not connected to another human, but rather to a machine, which somehow feels manipulative. It’s not art as an emotional bond – it feels more like art as a kind of manipulation. The effect of art reduced down to an elaborate template and then recycled. If I felt something while experiencing the work, then am I some kind of schmuck?
Because Flaherty’s work is of course strangely beautiful. It’s hypnotic and compelling to watch. And at some point, I did feel something (what a schmuck!).
And so the real weight of the work sits in this space – as we continue to navigate the early days of machine learning as a technological force, Flaherty’s mutation of an artwork challenges us to find how we might approach it, how we make sense of it, and how we accommodate it within our existing cultural sensibilities. Flaherty posits this project as a “collaboration between human and machines,” but very much acknowledges that it plays on the existing anxieties we have about AI.
Flaherty’s work in particular has burrowed into my distorted memory from Techne. It has forced me to grapple with some of my broad assumptions about art, and in reading my reflections I already feel so naïve! Who am I to say that art depends on a ‘connective link’ between two humans?
In all of these works, art is used not just to express an impulse from one person to another, but to construct elaborate virtual realities. In these, we don’t just witness a single expression, but we become visitors exploring an elaborate play space. Particularly in Flaherty’s work, there is room within these spaces to find metaphor, analogy and meaning on our own terms.
Techne celebrated the power of art to forge virtual worlds that intersect with our own realities. And though each work served as its own agent of distortion,