MATTI STURT-SCOBIE
Press Texts
04/02/2023 – 09/04/2023
© Garage Rotterdam, Lena Kuzmich, CHIMERA, 2022
Artists
Lena Kuzmich, Alli Coates & Signe Pierce, CROSSLUCID, Mamali Shafahi, Rachel Maclean,
Since we first caught sight of our reflections in still, dark waters, we started chasing self-image - driving us to refine the technologies we use to do so. At each step of this evolution, from silver-nitrate mirrors to explosive flash powders and today’s one-eyed “selfie” cameras, new fables have emerged.
These tales speak to the fragility of humanity and the fluidity of its values - each new reflecting pool becoming a site to question and play, or a means to entertain and bully guests at festivities. Mirrors - from those inhabiting the luxury salon to those in our linted pockets, each carry their own functions and emerging fairytales.
As new technologies create new opportunities to distort, beautify or otherwise adjust ourselves, in pursuit of self-knowledge, we become the protagonist of our own fantasies. Face filters engage us in a new daily ritual: the timeless ritual of masking - until today, these rituals take place in front of our phones. Through the screen of our phones we challenge binary structures and experience the prism of the self - while we train exploitative algorithms for ambitious startups, the development of neural networks and Artificial Intelligence. With every technological development, a slice of fiction becomes a reality. These fictions are a state of identity that emerges temporarily as we pursue freedom of movement and expression. Along the way, this occupation with ourselves generates new stories to immerse ourselves within.
The exhibition Screen, Screen on my Phone, Who’s the Fairest of Them All? is a follow-up on research that Doringer has conducted on the ritual of masking (2007-2018) known under the title FACELESS.
© Garage Rotterdam, CROSSLUCID, Landscapes
Landscapes
CROSSLUCID Sylwana Zybura & Tomas C. Toth
(2021)
In order to create new images, artificial intelligence must first be trained using what is known as a “data-set”. These data-sets (commonly built of archives of 10,000+ images) are built by human beings with human biases. If data-sets do not feature the diversity of humanity, neither do the resulting images or programs that go on to use them. This leads to higher levels of inaccuracy when this technology is used on people of colour and gender non-conforming individuals; who can then be denied access to social services, healthcare or fundamental human rights when such technology is used to make decisions.
CROSSLUCID is a duo of artists: Sylwana Zybura and Tomas C. Toth, aiming to build new and inclusive data-sets that envision a future beyond these human biases. Using their own dataset of images from their previous work, Landscapes Between Eternities, the duo (alongside the “data-alchemists” Martino Sarolli and Emanuela Quaranta) trained their own Generative Adversarial Network. This GAN is a program where two digital processes compete, one producing fake data, the other checking it for its likeness to “reality” until an outcome is reached. In this new series of images, new forms take shape, creating a place to imagine a future where the body and its expressions are free from strict codes of behaviour.
As one might predict, after 5 months of training, their GAN began producing new and uncanny identities - bodies from beyond our imagination. They stand in stark contrast to the output of the conventional GAN (trained by white, western and gender-conforming images). Rather than the usual apocalyptic discourse surrounding AI, CROSSLUCID shows us the shimmering possibilities of AI in understanding the self within technology's ever-evolving landscape.
© Garage Rotterdam, Alli Coates & Signe Pierce, American Reflexxx
American Reflexxx
Alli Coates & Signe Pierce(2015)
American Reflexxx is a short film documenting a social experiment that took place in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Director Alli Coates and performer Signe Pierce draw from the hyper-sexualised “ideal girls” we see on TV, online, or in porn (blonde, sexy and silent without self-determined purpose or identity - other than to be observed). Coates’s collaborator Signe Pierce, performs as this “ideal girl” non-identity, strutting down a busy oceanside street in stripper garb and a reflective mask. The site of Myrtle Beach is one of the most radically conservative places in America - interesting to the collaborators because of the duality between churches and strip clubs that seem to appear on every street corner. There is a tension between the dynamic nature of the seaside vacation town, which seems to draw people from all walks of life whilst simultaneously reinforcing fierce heteronormative and patriarchal values.
The pair agreed to communicate when the experiment was completed but never anticipated the horror that would unfold in under an hour - horror reflected in Pierce’s mirrored mask and in surrounding smartphones and cameras. The result is a heart-wrenching technicolor spectacle: raising questions about gender perception, mob mentality and violence in America. Coates did not set out to create a work about dehumanisation - and further than this, hopes that it is not what one draws from it. Instead, they seek to inspire action, seeing this moment of adversity as a place to use their voices and stand up for what’s right, hoping others will do the same. The work becomes a place to create further discourse - around breaking from the herd and maintaining unflinching confidence in being who you are, regardless of expectations.
Pierce states: “I knew that there was no way that I was going to let them have the satisfaction of getting me to unmask. It didn’t matter if, behind the mask, I was a man/woman/trans/ugly/pretty, and I didn’t want them to feel like they were any less justified in hurting me if they realised I was a cis woman after hurling all these hateful slurs and transphobic remarks my way.”
© Garage Rotterdam, Mamali Shafahi, Deep Throats
Deep Throats
Mamali Shafahi(2022)
Mamali Shafahi’s “Deep Throats” contain a deep fascination for the impact of emerging technology on life and art. Shafahi’s concern is that new generations are losing ties with the magical past of traditional cultures and that technology is diminishing our interest in myth and legend. As a result, Shafahi deliberately builds bridges between our high-tech future and the richness of ancient cultures. In Persian fables, as in many ancient cultures, the protagonists are animals. Shafahi employs such animal iconography - that of gorillas, snakes, scorpions - as each culture has its own symbolic reading. We see tales across geography and history doing the same: from Aesop and La Fontaine; Kalila wa-Dimna, One Thousand and One Nights, to Attar of Nishapur’s The Conference of the Birds. In ‘How deep is your mouth?’, within a snake’s head, there are two gorilla babies playing inside its mouth, ignorant to the snake’s own rage. With these puzzling, frightening, violent, and yet playful situations, Shafahi connects ancient fables with the cartoons and video games that shaped the imaginations of children in the 20th century.
To explore “genetic heritage” within his family, Shafahi persuaded his father, Reza (then 70 and with no prior artistic experience) to start drawing. Through this, Shafahi hoped to identify signs of a shared creative gene. He placed both of his parents in roles of actor, artist, and even digital characters throughout his work. In doing so, he explores the implications of an inverse parent-child relationship that he calls ‘mutual metamorphosis’: parents create and raise their children and later, the adult children transform their parents.
Using suggestive, sexual or romantic titles such as ’How Deep is your Love’, Shafahi plays with pop culture icons and memory. This is part of a mission to give mythology an appeal to the next generation, merging pop culture with history and fables. Gorillas and apes become parallel to people through our shared genetic history and affectations. Their joy and anger are relatable. Using the technique of velvet flocking is a further call to nostalgia. For Shafahi, it is full of memory. In cinema, there is the film ‘Blue Velvet’ by David Lynch. In Middle Eastern culture, it has been used in everything from car interiors to t-shirts. Thus, there is a question of self-value: flocking appears as velvet, but it is a cheap substitute. When UV light is applied, a new futuristic aesthetic emerges wherein technology allows us to see what we can not with the naked eye.
© Garage Rotterdam, upside mimi ᴉɯᴉɯ uʍop Rachel Maclean
upside mimi ᴉɯᴉɯ uʍop
Rachel Maclean(2021)
‘upside mimi ᴉɯᴉɯ uʍop’ is Rachel Maclean’s first fully animated video work and introduces her latest protagonist, Mimi, a fairy-tale inspired doll coming to life. In the film, Mimi sings to her reflection, ‘mirror mirror in my hand, who’s the cutest in the land?’ But she never gets a definitive answer. Instead, the mirror keeps her in a destructive cycle of self-improvement, trying to achieve an ideal of beauty which is forever out of reach. Like Mimi, the video is stuck in a loop, going round and round with no clear beginning or end.
Mimi, is a constant reminder of the ‘threat’ of ageing and degeneration. Like consumer capitalism itself: Mimi looks light and playful on the surface but becomes dark and discouraging once you look past the glossy veneer. Mimi has come to life in many forms including installations, paintings, sculptures, tapestries and an NFT. At each stage Mimi mirrors and inverts, using a mix of digital and traditional fabrication techniques to suggest a kind of uneasy, uncanny perfection. As her story unfolds, Mimi creates and references classic visual illusions to reveal new forms and faces in an attempt to undermine traditional binary notions; in the universe of Mimi ‘Up and Down’, ‘Young’ and ‘Old’, ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Grotesque’ are constantly in flux.
Mimi was first featured as part of a permanent outdoor installation: an abandoned high street shop situated within the woodlands of Jupiter Artland (Scotland).
© Garage Rotterdam, Lena Kuzmich, CHIMERA
CHIMERA
Lena Kuzmich(2022)
Lena Kuzmich Photo: Lena Kuzmich
In their childhood, artist Lena Kuzmich was deathly afraid of snails. These creatures, earthen and wet, became synonymous with the unknown, the instability and changeability of the “natural order”. In CHIMERA, Kuzmich draws from this experience and explores the distance between fear and understanding. Snails, amongst other gynandromorphs, become starting points to examine the queerness of ecology and non-binary life in nature.
In melding digital avatars, dark, reflective surfaces and sculptures of shifting materiality - Kuzmich examines the potential and instability within our notion of “human” as a species. Weaving technology with explorations of the natural world, Kuzmich wrestles with the systems of knowledge (biological and ecological) we use to build boundaries between fluid life forms. How can “we”, in symbiosis with technology, re-enter the category of nature?
Found footage, video essay and sculpture are assembled into playful worlds that question our “scientific” knowledge. Here, conventional wisdom - with which we are dissected and established as separate life forms (dooming queer beings as unnatural) is contested.
How can we function in such systems of alienation? Which cultures appear to counter nature: creating the simultaneous disasters of climate change and the gender binary?