A brilliantly curated exhibition delves into globalisation and cultural exchange themes
Technology, generally linked with natural sciences, occasionally ends up being treated like a mythology. This is particularly so when it turns into a language. It holds no secrets for its users, but those who cannot decode it find it mysterious. This phenomenon is not specific to a certain period or development in human history. For a computer-illiterate person even switching on a desktop, or opening word document are impossible tasks; not dissimilar to a non-Chinese speaker hearing a conversation in Mandarin, who is unable to comprehend it.
Such a person may like the sound of Chinese, or be fascinated with the swiftness of computer programs, but for them these entities belong to alien domains. Likewise the latest computer-generated means and technologies to create art pose a challenge for artists still occupied with conventional painting modes; oil, tempera and fresco. (To a multimedia artist, the technique of tempera painting can be a similarly inaccessible technology).
The question is where can the users of various dialects of art converse, after the makers and receivers of new-media art? A majority of their audience enjoys what is presented at a gallery, or on a social media site, but fail to fathom its meaning due to their unfamiliarity with its aesthetics. The work needs to be interpreted in text.
Translation is a significant – and sensitive – phenomenon. When translators pick up a book, they know that the target readers are, by and large, unaccustomed to the alien tongue. They face a double challenge; being faithful to the original text and being responsive to the demands of the target language so that a reader gets the content without a stumble.
The artists dealing with a medium that is not common/ familiar for most spectators typically choose one of two approaches. In some of the work, the exclusive technology is overwhelming and appears elusive; thus the viewer without much knowledge or experience of the new medium is held in its awe. He/ she is completely impressed by the artist’s command of the craft. However, the work scarcely communicates anything beyond that point.
On the other hand, some artists, possessing an equal ability to manoeuvre and manipulate the digital vocabulary, employ devices, apps and software to produce work that carries content – out of technology. We see material, we witness technique, we are aware of the complexity of the production process. Together, these generate an illusion of some other, distinct reality. This is not different from looking at a combination of pigments glued on a stretched fabric with a hairy wooden stick and mixed in some oils. Yet, in front of Mona Lisa we become oblivious of the methods of the early Sixteenth Century and are caught up in the smile of a woman who died centuries ago.
At a show held recently in Lahore, the visitors responded to multiple meanings and facets of computer-based art. Brilliantly curated by Aarish Sardar, the exhibition, Unity in Flux: The Ones & The Zero, delved “into globalisation and cultural exchange themes by embracing AI, VR, AR, and multimedia/ multidimensional practices.”
The exhibition engaged a wide range of audience through varying strategies employed by participating artists. If one was not cognoscente of the role of 0 and 1 in mathematics and computer coding, Ali Raza’s UV print on a mirror titled, Intrinsic Code I (2024) could still engage them. Raza explained that the “binary schema of digital 1s and 0s” is essential to “detect an electrical signal’s true (1) and false (0) states.” The artist interpreted this split in the popular practice (outcome) of digital media. A selfie substitutes for a human, but is a flattened, reduced and reverse version, ironically more easily and widely recognised than the individual in person.
Like human beings, who have a finite life span, contemporary machines go out of use after a new model/ gadget/ version is introduced in the market.
Binary expression emerged as a leitmotif in many items on the show – physically, formally, and digitally. Hasaan Saqib, in his Space Odyssey Pakistan (virtual reality immersive experience) forged a future “where Pakistan has its dedicated space station. From this station, people can embark on virtual journeys to the cosmos, such as a black hole and a nebula.” Envisioned as a futuristic scenario, the work facilitated a visitor to transcend the ground beneath his/ her feet and levitate into an unknown, vast, expanding universe. A voyage – undertaken by wearing a VR headset and steering the hand controllers – required no more than a few minutes, while standing on a tiled floor.
The return to familiar reality forced one to speculate on the truth of their experience, because when they interacted with the work, they were fully immersed in another – equally believable world.
The distance of physical and virtual – analogous to reality and dream – was a concern explored by other artists too. Some had weaved layers of reality into virtuality. For instance, Ammar Faiz’s single channel video, As Known As Real, of two identical chairs constructed through AI and rotating in corresponding rhythm, makes us wonder about the nature of what exists as reality, since the idea of physicality is perceived through senses – the system of communique through chemical and electrical signals.
The transition between real and virtual, and back to real, was witnessed in Aroosa Rana’s work, Split, which addressed it “by dividing the film Split, into two synchronised strands, exploring reality through multiple interfaces that mediate physical presence and representation.” The passage of to and fro continued, since film, using human actors and real locations, is an art work projected on a screen. At the exhibition, it was converted into a tangible object (a set of two screens as if the original view was sliced).
The presence of duality was also addressed in other work, like Wajeeha Batool’s digital prints on paper (Ohana Means Family and Tale as Old as Time) depicting two cats, but intelligently representing two other entities, organic forms and the digital format of pixels, possibly a comment on how our lives, thoughts and perception have been altered through the expansion of digital world. Batool deliberately picked images of cats and plants to convey the contrast of “organic and natural scenes” with the “rigid and calculated structure.” Interestingly, her prints alluded to another language: of translating nature into a grid, the tradition of cross stitching. Both a digital pixel and a cross-stitch piece are representations of reality as straight lines and available hues.
Tradition was visible through another lens in Anil Waghela’s video animation, combining two components of colonial raj in India: large classical buildings with native servants inside, and local farmers in fields. The uncanny, unequal and uncomfortable merger of the East and the West reappeared in the multimedia installation, Data Detritus by Rohma Khan and Artversation by Zahra Mirza. Surrounded by work/ devices that take you to another space, prints and video installations, this spectacular work was the most grounded (in both senses) art piece and most relevant to the concept of the exhibition. A heap of disposed stuff, all related to the brief history of computer technology, the installation comprised discarded CDs and DVDs with their plastic covers, redundant laptops, dysfunctional TV screens and jumbled up computer wires, along with rubble gathered from the surrounding area.
More than documenting the redeeming spirit of technology, it was a requiem in the wake of its updates. Like human beings, who have a finite life span, contemporary machines go out of use after a new model/ gadget/ version is introduced in the market. At some point in recent years, every household must have produced an assemblage of this kind – only to throw it away. If the work reminded us how digital data becomes unmanageable trash, it also connoted the way the Global North is getting rid of its excessive and outdated digital hardware by dispatching it to the Global South. The Islamic Republic, possibly, is one of the biggest dumps for this sort of waste where this (once essential and advanced) technological trash is recycled, reinvented and reused.
This happens on a smaller scale, too. For example, this page of text in your hand, printed and read today –will likely be used, Monday onwards, for wrapping freshly baked naans and chapatis at tandoors and roadside restaurants across Pakistan.
The writer is an art critic, curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore
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