The Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga has an exhibit called Enjoy Your Time by UCI artist Connie Samaras. Connie cites a range of influences, including science fiction, urban political economy, and the history of art as historical/archival/ political practice. The exhibit makes these connections come alive in disturbing, dystopian, but tentatively hopeful, critical ways. Here are some thoughts on the work:
Connie Samaras’ work raises a range of fundamental issues : she’s addressed human agency, narrative structures of art and everyday experience, and our globalised urban futures. In conventional schools of philosophy as well as of science, “fundamental” problems are supposed to have fundamental answers – that is, abstract answers that are testable, authentic, universally applicable to all the possible manifestations of those problems. However, these are not the kind of answers Connie offers us – indeed, she invites us to consider not just the impossibility, but also the undesirability of such a quest; the complicities and blindnesses which a search for fundamentalism, immutability, universality, would bind us to.
Consider the question of agency. Rather than offering us the agency of the artist as heroic explorer, recorder of irrefutable fact, exposer of immutable truths, Connie gives us, deliberately, the uncertainty of the “not sure” in response to the question of what is in front of the camera, or of the ideological intentions behind the camera. But this refusal to unmask is not a refusal to show. Rather, the work shows us so much, almost an excess, a profusion of image and information to assimilate which we must work, not passively consume. The resulting relationships – among the conventional subject positions of artist, subject, object, viewer, viewed – becomes a pedagogical one rather than a consumerist one. One is forced to ask how these, and not other, more conventional narratives (such as the heroic solo explorer in the Antarctic, the revelatory tropical travelogue, the intimate, heterosexualized cityscape) came to be – how were these camera positions enabled? Why haven’t I seen this image of a mosque before ( through the shanty-town-like walls of a labor camp), rather than more conventionally romanticized and orientalized mosque-at-dusk images? How does the choice of too-bright-to-believe – yet un-manipulated colors and surfaces and the choice not to digitally manipulate, help us think about consumer technology and the ways in which we digitally manipulate our own images and narratives almost automatically, “correcting” the artist’s seemingly askew perspective to a more easily digestible one? None of these questions suggest clean contemplative answers – rather, we must enter into the messiness of everyday life, the choice made to walk into the labor camps of Dubai in particular ways, making allies of taxi drivers and security guards; the choice to be deliberately slightly out of place, and out of pace, in the 7-star hotels of dubai and the masculinized scientific spaces of Antarctica. We enter into a pedagogical relationship with not only the artist, but her networked-agency; we see how the artist is always linked with allies without whom networks could not function; she is a spy-with-accomplices without whom agency would falter, a curious traveler with fellow travellers without whom mobility would be impossible.
Where is agency, as we enter this embedded network? It becomes decentered, contingent, always dependent. It is not just the heroic artist who is dethroned here – the heroic proletarian is absented, too. Connie’s images of workers may be inspired by Fritz Lang’s, but the emotional impact of the tired construction crews far above the Dubai street is quote different from the utopian worker striking in early 20th century artistic narratives. Agency on both sides of the camera is decentered; cast out of the individual . It is emergent and and indeterminate, rather than pre-ordained and predictable.
What about the conventional narrative structures of art and everyday experience, what happens to them? Connie’s work unravels all our conventional narratives, and we are invited to re-thread them, in a collective pedagogical encounter.
And our globalized urban futures, what of them? Muting but never disemboweling the utopian harmonics of future imaginings, Connie’s work suggests the impossibility of most of these imagined futures. But in deferring both revolutionary and dystopian futures, she is engaging us in a far more hopeful conversation. That conversation is embedded in ground-level realities, yet never reducible to the pragmatic. It participates in flights of hope and fantasy, yet is never naïvely utopian. Like all techno-scientific imaginaries, it contains the historical, political, economic traces of its functions, as well as the fantasy structures of our culture.
All technological and scientific stories of progress, oppression, struggle, truth, and vindication lie embedded in history as well as in fantasy. By saying that the historical and the fantasmatic mutually constitute techno-science, I am not suggesting simply that scientists and planners “have their creative sides.” Rather, the way in which they, and we, have conceived of technological solutions has everything to do with the fantasmatic ways in which they understand contemporary problems. Fritz Lang’s workers in Metropolis see the machine as pagan god demanding human sacrifice; and the robot-Maria as an orientalized seductress; the choice of the apparently rational but equally fantasmatic head-heart-hand trinity as the resolving metaphor for the film should not distract us from the fact that all these fantasies continually played a critical role in this repeated science-fictional and political narrative of industrial conflict and human-technological identity.
If the heart represented the mediator between human head and machinic hand of the industrial-era narrative, the heart becomes de-centered in later science fiction. Recall that in the Wizard of Oz, the Tin Man seeks a heart, and finds that he already has it, by virtue of his human-like practices. Philip K Dick raises the suspicion that machines, evolving with humans, might already have the hearts we believed we withheld from them at their creation – or, conversely, that humans never had what we conventionally call the heart. The whole notion of emotional agency is decentered, hovering somewhere in the decentered network that is always already human and machininc.
Recall Bladerunner, the 1980s sci fi classic that re-jump-started the American public’s love-affair with dystopian techno-fantasties.As Rutger Hauer’s replicant character dies at the end, the audience suddenly experiences heart, hope, emotions. The replicant’s speech contains memories, emotions, hopes, dreams, a consciouseness of time and mortality – everything that seemed to make humans unique, set them apart from machines. Ridley Scoot – drawing on Philip K. Dick – blurs the line between human and machine here, as in so much other Philip Dick-influenced sci fi film. Also recall the set design in blade runner. In the fight scene on the rood just preceding this clip, the turbine-like wheels turn, the rain drips – reminiscent of an industrial era landscape. Yes Bladreunner (1982) set the stage for a revival of science fiction film that has culminated in images of technology far different from the industrial. The ability to move between the industrial and the digital, the steam era and the network era, with a rich palette of metaphors for agency and identity, is a malleable strength of science fiction. In another essay (in progress, co-authored with Bleak Masterson) I want to explore further the links between Samaras’ work and the SF genre and its many techniques. But I’ll end this piece here just by commenting on the distance we have come, technologically:
Have we entered, as many authors claim, a new politics of time (Virilio’s chronopolitics ) or of global technology (Castell’s informational order, or Jameson’s global postmodern)? If so, it is simultaneously new and old. coal power and quantum mechanics co-exist in our world. This world’s simultaneous newness and familiarity can only be grasped through a simultaneous narrating of the fantasy structures and the historical/economic/ political structures that make it possible. Connie Samaras’ work brings to us, in so many breathtaking and troubling ways, all the sides of this simultanaeity.