Orlando et la tempte
74, rue de Turenne 75003 Paris
September 5th October 21st 2020
Orlando
in the Thicket of Sasha (2020) 30x30cm
Orlando et la tempte (Orlando
and the Tempest) is a series of virus-modeled artificial life paintings I created between mid-2018 and early-2020
that indirectly addresses issues of gender plasticity within our tempestuous viral
and social-political times by imagining nonexistent mythic scenes from the
flippant 1928 novel Orlando by
Virginia Woolf (the story of an aristocratic young male poet who transforms
into a woman overnight and lives for 300 years).
Orlando et la tempte treats the fantastical and voluble story of Woolfs Orlando
with corresponding puckish flippancy.
But this playful
flippancy is achieved by what I think of as the responsibility of long lookinga shift into a non-binary visual noise field where viewers can re-appropriate their
capacity to visualize on a personal basis.
Storms have
no gender and mean full-blow fluidity. In Orlando
et la tempte, my ambiguous Orlando avatar (a regenerated Lazarus) is embedded into just
such noisy chaotic grounds to the extent that normal figure/ground relationships more-or-less merge, playing
elusively with what is seen, what is suggested, what is repressed, and what is
desired. That starring pansexual Orlando avatar plays a
painful hide-and-seek with the tempestuous, viral whipped, environment, that,
in the end, is meant to suggest carnal mystic queries.
Long term influences on my pangender interests have been key works of
Marcel Duchamp and Genesis Breyer P-Orridges term (from the mid-80s) panthropology: a transhumanist
multi-spectrum poly-androgynous concept that transcends gender labels. In 2000
I exhibited Computer Virus Project II
artworks (with artists statements) investigating virtual hermaphrodite
complexity in my ec-satyricOn
2000 exhibition,
and again in my 2002 show vOluptuary:
an algorithic hermaphornology. I have continued to use viral,
androgynous and trans forms in my work, since. In 2018, I penned a pansexual art theory paper entitled Before and Beyond the Bachelor Machine
that was published in Arts.
As
meticulously articulated in my book Immersion Into Noise, Orlando et la
tempte utilizes aesthetic visual noise that puts representation and
abstraction into interactive play by
flipping the common figure/ground emphasis (to some extent) so that the eye
must navigate
and unpack the phantasmagorical pandemonium presented. This entails an intimate
act of seeing and imaging on the part of the viewer,
which the paintings modest size encourages. As such, Orlando et la tempte dips
under the surface of the turbulently shredding atmospherics of today
to convey and encourage intimate fluid visualizations that resist social
constraints.
Gender
here is viewed as an act of becoming that fails to sustain sex oppression by
ceasing to draw the boundaries of the Other. As such it is a provocation not
only to male/female constructions of heterosexuality, but also to homosexual
constructions of identity. This critique of representation in the aesthetic
sense is part of a critique of representation in the political sense (and
vice versa).
The pictures in the exhibition are created
with custom C++ artificial life software modeled as a virus (made in collaboration with the French programmer Stphane Sikora) and
archival inkjet on Hahnemhle Daguerre canvas. The
black node graph panels in some of the diptychs and triptychs were made in a
manner similar to Markov chains, tracking the word virus in William S. Burroughs 1970 essay
The Electronic Revolution. In that essay, Burroughs draws attention to the subversive influence of the word virus on humans and the dangers of using
the human voice as a weapon. A script was
written to analyze the text, where, for every transition from the word virus to another word virus, a link was drawn between the
nodes corresponding to that recurring word. Then Graphviz, an open source graph
visualization software, was used to generate the graph, which I then
aesthetically treated.
works in the show
Orlando
in the Thicket of Sasha (2020) 30x30cm
Orlando in the Briar Patch (2019) 30x30cm
Sashaying Orlando on the Moonlight Mile
(2018) 30x60cm diptych
Noisy Orlando and the Need (2018) 30x60cm diptych
Orlando Down the Beanpole (2019) 30x30cm
Black Orlando in the Image Thicket (2020) 30x30cm
Plagued Orlando of Non-Binary Instability
(2019) 30x90cm
triptych
Shambolic Orlando of Stormy Times
(2020) 96x96cm
Orlando the Oracle of Thorns (2020) 30x60cm diptych
Heroic Orlando as Trophonios (2020) 30x60cm diptych
Oscillating Orlando as Thunder (2020) 96x96cm
Decadent Orlando in the Viral Maelstrom
(2018) 30x90cm
triptych
Dissipating Orlando and the Blue Blizzard
(2020) 30x60cm
diptych
Plagued Orlando Tracking the Viral Storm (2020) 30x60cm diptych
Evaporated Orlando within Snowflake Love
(2019) 30x30cm
Stormy Orlando and the Golden Plum Field (2019)
30x60cm diptych
Surveyed Orlando in the Thicket of Shreds
(2019) 30x90cm
triptych
Black Orlando in the Abyss of Thorns (2020) 30x30cm