There is something mesmerizing about the artworks currently exhibited at POST Arnhem. In the exhibition ‘Embodied Encryption’ you will find weirdly morphing videos of deepfake drag performances, abstract closeup visualizations of motherhood based on poetic scripts, and gender non-binary portraits generated from archive paintings of the Qajar dynasty. However, the exhibition in general does not come across as conceptually complex or abstract as this may sound. The overall decor is simple and the atmosphere at POST is rather serene. What stands out is the intriguing visual quality of the topical work, still on display until mid-December.
Like with previous POST exhibition in Nijmegen, I think the particular relevance of this exhibition should be emphasized. We currently live in a time of strict image regimes that confine and police how we see ourselves and others. Patrick Nathan described this in his book Image Control and points at the current resurgence of fascist aesthetics. In the brochure of the exhibition, Lieke Wouters uses the example of a 2024 twitter post by Geert Wilders with an AI generated false ‘epitome’ of the traditional white family. The post coincided with a government’s agreement on the most restrictive asylum procedures ever. The AI system can as such becomes an extrapolation and feedback loop for oppressive worldviews. We definitely need creative interruptions to counter invasive and politically fraught images and specific image environments. Better flagging generated content or further improving the existing regulations and data moderation is not enough. We have to be more inquisitive and experiment with creative resistance that actual deals with underlying structural political issues and systemic injustice. How can we take artistic experimentation with encryption and glitching towards reimagining political alternatives? The presented artworks can be seen as preliminary artistic answers to this question, and that is exactly what makes the POST exhibition so intriguing. Especially as the works seem to revive interesting lineages of performative experimentation and artistic interventionism for current algorithmic society.
A clear example is the work ‘in transitu’: by posting bare chest photos on Instagram while transitioning Ada Ada Ada probes the interpretation of gender by algorithmic platforms. The work combines brave and vulnerable experimentation with generative models and critical investigation of platform categorizations. Also the work of Jake Elwes called The Zizi Show is a case in point, involving the London drag scene to create a new datasets of specific movements form drag performances. Elwes’ exhibited life size videos were produced with mutual consent, drag kings and queens were synthesized through deepfakes, exploring ‘what AI can teach us about drag, and what drag can teach us about AI’. It activates performative queer art in relation to current generative AI and algorithmic platforms. It unemphatically and cleverly interrupts binary notions and uses glitches and generated visuals to oppose reductive technological imaginations.
Cut outs from The Zizi Show by Jake Elwes.
Still, if these artworks merely offer critical perspectives or stimulate discussion, this would be rather unsatisfying. The reference of Legacy Russels ‘glitch feminism’ in the catalogue helps to set the tone for a more clear political stance, but Russels manifesto risks encompassing too vague and somewhat fragmented notions like ghostly, cosmic, shady, virus like, refusal. The reception of the exhibited work could benefit, I think, from emphasizing more concrete lineages of creative resistance and more explicit political ambitions.
As Dominique Routhier suggests in With and Against, “our own spectacular moment in time – where automation discourse is yet again a defining feature – has a history, and, more importantly, a history of contestation”. He traces such history from the surrealists to Tiqqun’s The Cybernetic Hypothesis with a specific focus on the work of the Situationist International. Recent forms of glitch art or engagement with technical failures indeed also can be understood as deriving from this ‘avant-garde’ history (even if they were working in analogue media then) as Michael Betancourt stresses in his book Glitch Theory. Part of this history is also the work of the surrealist women recently described as Militant Muses which are especially important in relation to the exhibited work at POST. Specifically, the work of Claude Cahun which consists of shifting portraits also with a mesmerizing and haunting quality, that resolutely intervened in the imagination and ideologies of the time. During fascist oppression, through secrecy and dangerous subordinations, Cahun and others created false documents and ‘paper bullets’ and experimented with performative identities, intriguing depictions, and indirect action. Cahun’s work and life interrupted codes and identities, and “reveled in ambiguity and sought disruption”, writes Gavin James Bower, as “a way to reconceptualize society”.
Collage of work from Claude Cahun.
The strategic interruption of codes and identities to reconceptualize society, related to what José Estoban Muñoz calls disidentification, is different from the more limited pleas for more visibility for queer and marginalized groups or calls to expand rich data sets for more inclusion. The latter would mean further adaptation and cooptation into what still will be a “heteronormatively constructed and oppressive social system” as the Queer AI introduction of the seminal Queer reflections on AI book phrases it. According to these reflections, artistic experimentation should rather be a “notion of refusal that articulates itself against binaries of all kinds”. Or more positively framed, like in Shabbar’s project Queer-Alt-Delete, art can interlace “algorithmic uncertainty with subjectivity in ways that facilitate an experimentation with new political becomings”.
This can push the works in the exhibition even more fascinating directions. Like the abstract visual narratives with evocative and visceral images of motherhood that Beverley Hood presents. The work becomes especially poignant when it helps to redefine what counts as motherhood and actively opposes naïve and regressive imaginations of what a mother is and should be. Just like the surrealist militant muses that already used different tropes to fight restrictive labels put on women, and countered prejudices around childcare and stereotypical women work, as surrealist covens summarized. We could see reimaginations of motherhood then having everyday implications and constitute more profound personal and political consequences. Maybe this could be further provoked by imagining radical alternatives like the “queer polymaternalism” proposed by Sophie Lewis, that speaks to “all those comradely gestators, midwives, and other sundry interveners in the more slippery moments of social reproduction”.
Or as a final example, this could push Rodell Warner’s Artificial Archive, also part of the POST exhibition, to even more firmly engagement with anticolonial work. Historical colonial databases that Warner works with often reaffirm stereotypical aesthetics of spectacular, exotic, otherworldly views and landscapes that await exploitation and subjugation. The exhibited work imagines what could have existed outside this extractive gaze. Taking a queer and surprising turn in relation to for example Albuquerque Paula’s work with colonial archives included in the just published Slow Technology reader, it use a similar more slow and deliberating approach, remediating inherent bias and stereotypes, resulting in the type of ideation that also the AIxDesign festival On Slow AI seemed to praise. Just like Moreshin Allahyari’s generated portraits of ‘moon faces’ it is a shame if this lacks any more substantial idea of what invokes ‘genderless’ spiritual experiences or abstains from the political implications of more firm anticolonialism. Surrealists ‘scorning of white supremacy, patriotism, religion, colonialism’ that Franklin Rosemont & Robin D.G. Kelley highlight, can be a reminder to work towards more elaborate and politically solid but still seductive and enchanting creative resistance.
Examples from Artificial Archive by Rodell Warner.
As I already proposed during EsArts in Barcelona, expanding on surrealist experiments of symbolic sabotage and war on work we might furthermore subvert the creative industries’ rush towards enhancing commercial creative work with algorithmic technologies. Artistic experimentation to exist otherwise and readapting the surrealist look for today’s algorithmically mediated world can counter image recognition and surveillance of the eye of the master. The radical surrealist dreams that already resurfaced in later cultural countermovements and riots of the 60s and 70s, as Abigail Susik and Elliot H. King argue in their beautiful recent book, could resurface again as part of current radical investigations and creative disruptions of today’s high-tech world. And for opposing the fascist resurgence within the current pervasive image regimes, we can benefit from surrealists creative legacy of resistance and persistent antifascism, central to the late Lenbachhaus exhibition impressively documented in the companying anthology.
Future artistic experimentation thus should, I think, embrace the impulse of militant muses to develop a firmer embodied antifascist and anticolonial queer and poetic resistance. Maybe not all the artists presented at POST are willing to engage in such a thing. Maybe some of the works now fail to live up to such promise. But if it fails, let it be a queer art of failure (taking Jack Halberstams famous assertion somewhat out of context). Especially in exhibitions like this, far removed from the more usual pretentious immersive and hyped experiential places like NXT Amsterdam and more intimate then the spacious artworks currently on display for Gogbot x RMT at Rijksmuseum Twente, this inconclusive experimentation can be sympathetically pushed and possibly further politicized. This should certainly not become yet another (oppositional) image spectacle. The attentive, accessible, but still gripping and glitchy moving visuals at POST might just one of the gateways towards future bold imaginations and generated visualizations for what could end up as embodied radical political alternatives.