Dark Drives, on view at Haus der Kulturen der Welt as part of the 25th edition of the transmediale festival, explored the “uneasy energies” lurking beneath the slick, seamless surfaces of new media technologies and the utopian promises of networked culture. Whether through glitches, dissonance, or eruptions of noise, the works in the show foregrounded moments of eery disturbance, presenting these as clues to help us reimagine our relationships with the machine.
Installed in a dark, cavernous black box consisting of a sequence of screens, projections, headphones, and spot-lit frames, works by pioneers of media art hung alongside objects and images circulated outside of the confines of the art world: a viral video of Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer “going crazy”, Ruth White’s deranged and spookily synthesized interpretations of Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, and a small, stunning 1899 photograph of Nikola Tesla, the father of wireless energy transmission, reading a book in his laboratory.
Ruth White, “Flowers of Evil”, 1969
Highlights of the show thematized tensions between the body and electrical circuits, algorithms and code. A video of Franco Berardi Bifo documented the theorist giving an awkward but impassioned public reading of the I LOVE YOU virus source code as if it were a modern day Ursonate. Chris Burden’s photo-documentation of a 1973 performance (Doorway to Heaven) captured the artist in what looked to be a moment of mystical transcendence while attempting to electrocute himself.
Other pieces focused on cacophony as a strategy to point to agonistic conflict. William S. Burroughs and Antony Balch’s early experimentation with the fragmentation and resampling of words and images (The Cut-Ups, 1966) was structured as a permutating loop of film and voice, cut and pasted to form a collage of disjuncture. Steina and Woody Vasulka’s In Search of the Castle (1981) employed mesmerizing analog processing effects to distort a sequence of video footage, which increasingly oscillated between clear figuration and disintegration into abstraction.
William S. Burroughs and Antony Balch, “The Cut-Ups”, 1966
In the best of these works, manifestations of the dark drive inititated uneasy areas that couldn’t quite be worked through and didn’t quite add up to straightforward sense, a didactic message, or a simple one-liner. In these pieces, symptoms of the drive put pressure on the seams of representation– digital or otherwise– and subtly undermined positivist claims of technological efficiency. Within these mysterious gaps and fissures, glimpses of the untapped potential of new vocabularies occasionally glimmered up, investing moments of discomfort with an uncanny pleasure that remained rooted in a healthy sense of doubt.
Vibek Raj Maurya, “Fotos of e-waste found on Flickr”, 2009