A Curatorial Perspective on Two Objects

Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty foregrounds the revolutions in indeterminacy spurred across art and science since the early 20th century. Newtonian physics had established since the 1700s that all phenomena were fundamentally predictable, but quantum theories emerging in the ‘20s suggested that matter was instead unstable and therefore unpredictable (see: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty, Schrödinger’s cat). Following the second world war, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener and others applied this quantum uncertainty across mathematics, information theory and computer science, forging Wiener’s seminal study of cybernetics (from the Greek kybernētēs, or steersman) in 1948. Wiener argued that we lived in a universe of open systems rather than linear matter, systems motored by generative feedback loops and charting wandering paths which could not be predicted with certainty. Cybernetics and quantum revelations animated early experiments of conceptualism, motivating the irrational operations of Surrealism, Dada and FLUXUS and upending Newton’s sacrosanct laws of a predictable universe.

In the 80s, the theory of complex systems emerged from cybernetics to provide specific mathematical language for describing such dynamical systems. Its research maps how masses of entities self-organize and exhibit group behaviors–bird flocking, ant colony movement, and the assembly of cognition from neurons are paragon examples. The complex system pulses between order and chaos, producing structure from randomness and colliding with interfering systems towards unchartable ends. Many believe the complexity model to be crucial for studying a world whose symptoms are too intercausal to be apprehended individually, systems as unpredictable as climate change, networked surveillance, financial tides and artificial intelligence. Future Tense highlights artists who apply the complexity framework to interrogate such entangled symptoms; their transdisciplinary work offers artistic models for living in a skein of global forces and witnessing one’s place amongst its threads, speculating solutions to the myriad biological, environmental, technological, and sociopolitical issues faced in the 21st century.

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Shadow Stalker and Ralf Baecker’s Interface 1 offer together a nuanced construction of the complex system.

Baecker’s Interface 1 visualizes the friction generated where complex systems cross. Natural radiation, detected through Geiger Müller tubes, feeds entropic impulses into the Interface 1 machine. As the data is processed, feedback loops build upon their own wake, new systems of behavior are generated, positive forces beget negative counterforces, the center holds. Its mechanisms demonstrate the synchronous order and chaos inherent to the complex system: from the side, pulleys appear to ascend and descend with ostensible randomness; from the front, a perfect sine wave governs its ticking parts. Critically, Baecker’s work performs the rare feat of presenting process rather than display. Interface 1 offers a vantage from deep inside the churning mechanisms of the black box algorithm without translating its data generations into image or transcription medium, making plainly visible the nanoscopic processes typically buried within semiconductors.

Leeson applies Baecker’s interface frictions directly onto social landscapes. In Shadow Stalker, impulses are drawn not from natural radiation but from human subjects. Facial recognition files, license plates, satellite images and phone records disappear into an algorithm which outputs ostensible ‘crime prediction’ regions on police maps. In these zones, marked in red, patrolling is increased and the algorithm becomes lethal. Leeson functionally extends Baecker’s model into abject fruition; the nanoscopic churning expanded in Interface 1 is concealed and accelerated deep within Shadow Stalker’s vision, amplifying input bias to catastrophically unpredictable ends. Police violence becomes a “wicked problem,” defined as one whose causes are so entwined they can only be understood as a matrix of complex forces. Leeson concludes by inviting users to submit their own email addresses into Shadow Stalker’s database. Its blunt inquiry of user consent makes apparent those non-consensual ports which extract viewers’ data and process it through skewed feedback loops–the audience confronts their surveilled condition, their vulnerability to complex police violence.

Both works stress the critical urgency of the complexity framework and its potential for unraveling contemporary issues. Beyond pedagogy, Leeson and Baecker together offer poetic intervention which allows viewers to see themselves reflected, even involved within, a global organism of superimposed systems and deep entanglement. Future Tense does not offer a window into the future but rather a method for reframing its arrival; only by mapping its complexity can the present be fully apprehended and the future be meaningfully guided.

Exhibition page.