Upcoming Exhibition – Chronus Art Center

Mycelium and Dust: Dispersed Fiction

2024.03.15 –2024.05.19


ARTIST:
Martin Howse

VENUE:

Chronus Art Center

2nd Floor, Building 11, No.50 Mo Gan Shan Rd, Shanghai

SUPPORTED BY：
Abteilung Kultur und Bildung, Generalkonsulat der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Shanghai

Chronus Art Center is pleased to present Mycelium and Dust: Dispersed Fiction, the fourth installment of CAC Projects in collaboration with artist Martin Howse. The project will open on March 15, 2024 and remain on view through May 19, 2024.

Delving into the soil and volcanic craters, we glimpse across the ether from the micro-cosmos.

By observing similarities between the array of radio telescopes and the radiative ring growth of Amanita Muscaria, Howse initiated the project Radio Mycelium Array, attempting to establish a connection between wireless communication networks and mycelial networks, spanning spores and signals. Based on the explorations of predecessors in animal magnetism, remote bio-sensing, and interstellar communication interception, Howse explores how non-human entities play roles as detectors and spiritual guides, stimulating alternative dispersed imaginaries. In Radio Mycelium Array, Reishi acts as antennas for receiving cosmic signals and gathering radio waves from the same celestial body within the fairy rings, assembling a larger electromagnetic cosmic view. In this context, mycelium is not only a decomposer of pollutants and death but also entangled with interspecies symbiotic intelligence, serving as the soil's extended skin, conducting fluctuating radio signals, and mediatingthe metabolism of psychochemistry. The fungal installation Radio Mycelium Array slowly encode the geology, weaving not only the murmurs of roots but also the chants of photonic exchanges. Stars and spores combine in such imaginative ways, radiating a new magnetic field and recoding the psychogeophysics domain.

Martin Howse, Radio Mycelium Array,2017 ©the artist

The exhibition extends in two directions based on the Radio Mycelium Array. The piece VOIDT is a dual-channel video work of a performance underground, documenting Howse’s circular walks inside an open volcanic cave on Tenerife Island. When cosmic rays penetrate the atmosphere, they produce numerous subatomic particles, including muons. Muons are ubiquitous. They travel through bodies and objects at nearly the speed of light, providing a means of observation for understanding impalpablematerials and scale in scientific works. For example, measuring the rate of muon incidence within a small area helps to examining the material properties and density of structures above or to the side of the detector, a method also known as muography (or μography). Using this method, the artist walks barefoot into the volcanic cave, writing with muons. When artist’s moving device detects cosmic rays, a small amount of volcanic sand settles down. The real-time evolution of the geological landscape is a slow and imperceptible process. With an inherent implication of "intermediary", muons linger in the abyss of the volcanic crater. As Timothy Morton discussed in Hyperobjects, this "interobjectivity”, serving as the “in-between”, is not in spacetime—it is space-time per se. Through the intermediary state provided by muons, people observe the deep-time structures in temporary signals and perceive void materials.

Martin Howse,VOIDT, 2022 ©the artist

In addition to the exhibition, CAC also attempts to explore the aesthetic significance of astral bodies through diverse public programs, calling for audiences to participate in physical experiments collectively, learning the scientific properties of metal accumulatingand refining process within the environment of human body and their associated implications in contemporary technological culture.

Howse's practices explore the impact of geological topology on individual psychology, consideringbody as the ultimate ecology of the apocalypse, becoming a part of soil and planets. In his works, fungi and geology are dynamic materials entangled with computer technology. Today, as minerals and geological time are incorporated into the vast contemporary infrastructure system, geological substrateand its inorganic components have already circulated into every living being. "bio-geo-symbio" is not a moral admonition of how human should coexist with nature, but as the normal withdrawals in an era of frequent emergencies, it becomes an increasingly revealing reality.

< About the Artist >

Martin Howse is occupied with an artistic investigation of the links between the earth (geophysical phenomena), software and the human psyche (psychogeophysics). Through the construction of experimental situations (within process-driven performance, laboratories, walks, and workshops), material art works and texts, Martin Howse explores the rich links between substance or materials and execution or protocol, excavating issues of visibility and of hiding within the world.

From 1998 to 2005 he was director of ap, a software performance group working with electronic waste, and pioneering an early approach to digital glitch. From 2007 to 2009 he hosted a regular workshop, micro-residency and salon series in Berlin. He has worked and collaborated on acclaimed projects and practices such as The Crystal World,Psychogeophysics, Earthboot, Sketches towards an Earth Computer and Dissolutions. For the last ten years he has initiated numerous open-laboratory style projects and performed, published, lectured and exhibited worldwide. He is equally the creator of the skin-driven audio divination noise module, The Dark Interpreter, and the ERD modular synthesizer series.

Supported by

A Project of Bio-Geo-Symbio Series

Concept: ZHANG Ga

Curators: BI Xin, CAO Jiamin

Production: CAO Daxu

Graphic Design: PAGE OF

CAC · Exhibition | AI Delivered: The Abject

July 3 – October 17, 2021

Chronus Art Center (CAC)

BLDG.18, No.50 Moganshan RD., Shanghai

ARTISTS

Sofian Audry and Istvan Kantor (a.k.a. Monty Cantsin), HE Zike, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Casey Reas and Jan St. Werner, Devin Ronneberg and Kite, Tonoptik

CURATED BY

ZHANG Ga

OPENING EVENTS

July 3, 2021 (Saturday)

LAUREN (performance)

1:00 - 3:00 pm

*More info about the performance will be released very soon.

Artist & Curator Talk

3:00 – 4:00 pm

ON VIEW

11 am – 6 pm Wednesdays – Sundays

Admission: ¥ 30 (Free admission on Wednesdays)

*Free admission on the day of opening.

Chronus Art Center is pleased to announce the presentation of AI Delivered: The Abject, the first segment of a two-part exhibition under the framework of AI Delivered. Featuring artists and artist collectives Sofian Audry and Istvan Kantor (a.k.a. Monty Cantsin), HE Zike, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Casey Reas and Jan St. Werner, Devin Ronneberg and Kite, and Tonoptik, the exhibition will be on view from July 3rd through October 17, 2021.

When answering the question “Can Machines Think?” the British mathematician and AI progenitor Alan Turing in his 1950 essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” proposed his infamous ImitationGame (aka The Turing Test) as a counterargument to his own self-imposed question, writing “The original question, ‘Can machines think?’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.” Turing said instead “that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to program computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.”（1）American philosopher Daniel Dennett later speculated in his text Can Machines Think, contending “Turing was not coming to the view (although it is easy to think how one might think he is) that to think is just like to think like a human being … Men and women, and computers, may all have different ways of thinking. But surely, he thought, if one can think in one’s own peculiar style well enough to imitate a thinking man or woman, one can think well, indeed.”（2）

The exhibition attempts to implicitly raise questions on the epistemological limits of Artificial Intelligence while alluding to a recurring sense of frenzy and abjection in today’s AI-entrenched world.

Summarizing art since the 1970s as an outcry for The Return of the Real, the art historian Hal Foster famously stated, the real would be the actual bodies and social sites recognized in the form of the traumatic and abject subject. He commented, “The shift in conception — from reality as an effect of representation to the real as a thing of trauma — may be definitive in contemporary art.”（3）If contemporary art is ineluctably a part of contemporary experience encroached by the pervasive presence of Artificial Intelligence, the new locality of abjection may lie precisely where the AI’s imposed instrumentality reigns and dominates, perpetuated by capital’s greed, and held in sway by geopolitical powers. But the site of abjection is also a site of resistance and creativity. The burden on AI of the excessive human desire to make it human-like is a misery awaiting to be set free – this doppelgänger narrative constitutes the curatorial framework of the first part of the exhibition.

Works in the exhibition reveal the vulnerability of neural networks as well as AI’s despair in attempting to grasp reality’s intricacy and tumultuousness. While romantic chats played out by the machine learning algorithm seems ludicrous, human wits turn artificial artful and intelligence performed absurd. We see images reminiscent of a Baroque beauty, both concretely abstract and abjectly sublime. Incapacitating the garish wiggles of the Deep Dream-induced hallucinatory visuality and, at the same time, we make life or cause death of the neural network by plugging and unplugging network cables to artificially deconstruct and reconstruct. A technological substrate of wired life is witnessed as being delivered, stripped, and resurrected in the most visceral sense.

With the alternative narrative of the Turing Test and its implication in perspective, the second iteration of AI Delivered which is slated to open in early November 2021 imagines an AI freed from the assumed intelligence by a human measure as well as seeing machine intelligence as an agentic entity of another order, capable of a subjectivity other than that of humans. The exhibition therefore illuminates how such an AI is envisioned by artists to explore a cosmopolitically conscious ecology and the posthuman prospects of symbiosis and of collective commons.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extended essay, invoking historical and current literatures on the critical reflections of AI, to expound on the curatorial conception and the included artworks.

1.https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238, 5/3/2021

2.http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/mindsandmachines/Papers/dennettcanmach.pdf, 5/3/2021

3.Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), p. 146.

Sofian Audry & Istvan Kantor (a.k.a. Monty Cantsin), The Sense of Neoism?!, installation view. Photo: ZHONG Han ©Chronus Art Center