Is The Artificial Real?

Previous to this exhibition, I was familiar with Rafael Zen and Khalil Alomar’s media collaborations in the context of Emily Carr University’s student exhibition spaces, where the duo are both pursuing degrees in New Media and Sound arts. I’ve come to expect riotously tongue-in-cheek technicoloured cultural commentary from Zen and Alomar, and FOREST/FLUX/FREQUENCY at SUM gallery followed suit.

On opening night of FOREST / FLUX / FREQUENCY, the small gallery space at SUM was filled with people taking in the squawking, whirring, thrumming, and pinging coming from Zen and Alomar’s digital flagellations. Or was it Zen and Alomar? Both artists appeared in disguise, with angular masks covering their faces while overall-clad bodies manipulated tech on white plinths, flanked by cylindrical glass jars of moss and dirt fogged with humidity. One being arrived with a face of tree bark, the other with an amalgam of what looked like garbage and wires glued onto tree bark, evoking a forest character caught in the torrents of post-industrial civilization. A sheet of white fabric hung across the room with kaleidoscopic shifting colours projected onto it, depicting the wiggling and expanding body of what appeared to be a mini cheese grater with LED lights and antennae stuck onto it. A few cycles of wiggling in, I accept the creature as cyber bug and listen closely for their voice. In the background of the performance was a desktop computer draped in translucent plastic, bearing the hot pink proclamation: “ARTIFICIAL IS REAL.” I took this contradictory truism as a kind of thesis for the ritual at hand: everything we have, even the neon and flashing, comes back to the land. A large branch stared back at me from the middle of the room as I braced for synthesizers.

It’s par for the course for many urban workers to rely on digital fabrications of nature to regulate the nervous system: a sublime landscape desktop background between tab-maxxed windows, a calming ocean sound effect through a Bluetooth speaker. I’ve been known to cope with hours spent in a fluorescently lit white cube by nodding along to recordings of the rustle of wind in imaginary trees. Encased in a drywall shell, I pace my breathing with a distant memory of the world as it exists without me. Alomar and Zen’s soundscape intends to take this experience of alienation from natural environments to the full extent of its meaning: a world where relationship with land is completely mediated by digital technology. Is this a celebration of resourceful and innate human connection to all life despite extreme alienation, or a warning of what depth of death masked by illusion is yet to come?

A quote from Indigenous Brazilian thinker Ailton Krenak’s Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (2019) is offered in the exhibition text, which begins: “Humanity is abuse dressed up as reason.”

Krenak goes on to emphasize the use of technological advancement as a tool to sedate populations, lest the consumer notice that corporations “devoured all the forests, rivers, and mountains”. Alomar and Zen have taken the dressings of technology’s reason and scrambled them into a cacophony, but what have they done to reflect back the abuses hidden within the lights and sounds emitted by technology? Discomfort reigns my visceral experience of the soundscapes, but other than this abstract sense of doom, I am left dazzled by sound and colour.

The text that accompanies the exhibition provokes a radical anti-capitalist, anti-colonial framing, while the artwork and performances themselves miss the opportunity to act on these provocations. There’s this problem with technology: it abstracts its own materiality through the phantasmagoria of sensation. The artists seem to work with hypnotic, ethereal qualities of digital technology, rather than tech as pieces of metal unearthed by dark bodies, then soldered by a worker made nearly blind by their task. FOREST/FLUX/FREQUENCY does not expose the material and violent extraction of land and labour that it takes to create and run these products, but plays within their glow. When I think of a future glutted with screens, I cannot help but imagine the Democratic Republic of the Congo gutted of their people and their land. The work is posed as a meditation on the ecological- and yet there is a critical silence in relation to material land and human life in the work. I fear that the introduction of the non-human figure is used to direct attention away from those whose lives are the cost of new technology. In a conversation about technology and futurity, I wonder about those whose labour from childhood into premature death is to mine the minerals that become computers. Afterall, even the artificial is real.

I have room in my heart for artwork about technology and futurity that is playful, imaginative and fun. Yet, I feel that the silence in the connection between technology, land, and labour is at best, a missed opportunity for contemporary art to act as a weapon against empire. At worst it is a violent replication of “abuse dressed up as reason”. If an artist is to call for art to be used as political counterattacks as Rafael Zen does, then I hope to kindly and boldly hold them to this standard.