The chance that makes it what we are
“... the incomputable is the leading force of human evolution: incomputability is why history is human”. (Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Futurability - The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, Verso, 2017.)
“The chance that makes it what we are” couples a nearly perfectly repeatable process, the one of the robotic arm that moves with millimetric precision, with a chaotic complex one, which is the movement and recombination of sound.
It is like observing a machine tossing a dice with a million sides and trying to follow and make sense of this process. With respect to the theme of the exhibition we are interested in what precedes error, that is the moment we recognize an event as such; what stands before us is an horizon of potentialities triggered by accidents we try to attach meaning to. The piece is also a stage where the arm is a sort of Demiurge, a God that plays with matter to generate a cosmos. We face the unfolding of this process, watching it dancing with the cage.
Dually, Emma has used a frottage technique to extract traces of material from the chaotic sand movement created by the robot by dropping the sand on top of the paper. "The drawing process was trying to reach what is non-linear and surprising. It began from accidental traces and misunderstandings of controlling the robot arm. As I got further with creating more and more drawings I started to reorganize them to find new paths and connections between what was there.”
Stones, metals, charcoal and water as well as ash were all materials that have something to do with the beginning of the world, the elements of what we all are built of. These are the worlds we understand inanimate, but those that create life. What are we, how did we end up being what we are now, how is the matter affecting what we become?
The projected images are at first a microscopic view of what is happening inside the box; such a small world that suddenly becomes as large as all the matter available. Later computer visions, interpretation of Emma's frottages, create patterns and geometric assemblages that resemble constellations. Finally, the image explodes in 3d space and the digital matter is free to articulate itself in rivers of sand, where the energy lets the sand flow and continuously recombine in new forms.
From the asynchronous dialogue between the artists and their methods, our human condition emerges, plenty of accidents, full of uncontrollable forces but unbearably grounded in the materiality of the universe.
Opening on the 13th of June at Mänttä Art Festival.
The project has been supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland and Suomen Kulttuurirahasto.
Video by MODOMO fillm
