Curatorial text for the exhibition “Hyperflux – You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet“, an exhibition of accelerationist inspired art at deCurators gallery in Brasilia.
The text was presented in Portuguese, but here’s the original English :
“Move fast and break things” – Mark Zuckerberg’s slogan for Facebook
Money dissolves everything : traditions and tribal loyalties, social obligations and conventions, moral values. Money’s fungibility allows human activities to be broken up and redistributed and micromanaged across global distances, intercontinental supply-chains and an increasingly fragmented and flexibilized and precarisized workforce. Few people have a grasp of the whole. No-one exercises full control or responsibility. Money dribbles into the cracks and finds and extracts value wherever it can dissolve a previously stable (inflexible, “inefficient”) structure. It configures our dreams and desires, reschedules our time, redirects our attention, carves up and reshapes our bodies.
Deleuze and Guattari identified capital as a powerful flux; one of several drives or “machines” that operates according to its own endogenous logic. It is not at the service of humanity. And yet it’s from machines like this that our lives are ultimately woven. D & G are simultaneously enchanted and appalled by the tsunami of capital flow and its protean power of “creative destruction”. And faced with the failures of more traditional left-wing projects after 1968, they sketch out a new perspective on radical politics.
What could out-compete capital but a FASTER machine?
Thus politics becomes a search for the “hyperflux” : the flows that move faster than, and can outmaneuver, capital while exercising the same protean power to disrupt and free us from the restrictions and patterns and stabilities that capital itself still relies on.
Rapidly evolving technologies may be one place to look for them. In the 1990s and 2000s many were excited by the potential of the internet as a space where we could discover each other and coordinate and share our common interests and projects, free of commercial imperatives. Perhaps at a speed that even the market couldn’t keep up with. Might this hyperflux finally take us beyond capital to a new place of fraternity and collaboration? At the same time, technology was also turning our bodies into cyborgs and offering to transcend the constraints of our human shaped lives. On the internet, no-one knew you were a dog.
But two decades on, such utopian optimism looks premature. Via cellphones and social media, capital has recaptured the internet. And our experience online is increasingly restricted to commercial transactions and shaped by the imperatives of a few giant corporations seeking profits. Meanwhile the freedoms of transgression the online world seemed to allow – to role-play other identities, and build alternative economies – are themselves invaded and overthrown by a new conservatism which uses the tools of mass communication to reassert traditionalist values.
Politics as speed is an old idea. Edmund Burke founded modern conservatism as an evaluation of the desirabililty of change as a function of its speed : we should recognise the collective wisdom of our ancestors in the system they left us, and be happy to accord ourselves to it, rather than chasing untested and unproven new ideas. Progressives thought we weren’t going forward fast enough. Marx celebrated capital’s revolutionary potential even has he criticised it. And called for us to move forward and beyond. Not for him the “utopianism” of wished for “alternatives”.
In the confusions of 21st century politics, the philosophy of “accelerationism”, is becoming a popular and useful tool to map and understand our political / cultural landscape. Conservatives cling to their traditions and institutions while ironically seeking to unleash the flows of capital that will eventually dissolve them. A different group of “right-wing accelerationists” of the “Dark Enlightenment” loudly cheer them on. Nick Land, the leading right-wing accelerationist thinker believes capitalism to be synonymous with all disruptive fluxes, including “Artificial Intelligence”. (Markets are some of our earliest information processing institutions.) For Land there is no other flux faster than capital; there are simply new aspects of, or new names for the same protean force of which capital is one avatar. And for which our current human existence is just a stepping stone along the way.
The right-wing accelerationists decry all on the left as “reactionaries” for trying to resist the disruptive transformations that capital brings. The left seeks new ways to position and explain itself : does it accept that its project is an attempt to “slow down” the changes and disruptions of capital? Does it embrace the label “reactionary”? Or continue the project of seeking alternative fluxes that are faster than, and outcompete, capital? Or reject the narrative of speed altogether?
The artists in this exhibition didn’t set out to “illustrate” the story of accelerationism. But all these works find themselves caught up in this drama. Not only the works, all actors in the network are caught up, even the gallery itself appears to have sold out its own rule that “nothing is for sale”, and turned itself into a shop.
There are a surprising number of trees here. We tend to think of nature and artifice in opposition. That nature is rich and subtle. A fecund cornucopia of unfolding detail and complexity. While the fabricated products of our own creation are inherantly crude and dull and dead.
In his Heidegger inspired video presentation, walking between artificial illuminated trees, Hilan Bensusan meditates on a capital that has sucked all natural vitality out of the world as it warps it to its own instrumentality. In juxtaposition, Artur Cabral presents an example of “artificial life” : a “fake” or virtual tree with real growth processes determined by algorithms and a life-span which is engineered to fit within the duration of an exhibition. Accelerationism challenges our nature / artifice dichotomy. As we expand the range and complexity of the products of capital / artificial intelligence, might they one day overtake nature in richness and complexity? Might we, one day, have more corporations than animal species? And where then would we owe our alleigance?
Outside the gallery, Cirilo Quartim’s tree of money presents a more blatant synthesis of nature and capital. Trees are invisible fountains, sucking water from the earth and spraying it as a fine mist into the air. The flow of capital and the flow of the tree’s lifeblood are often in competition, but also curiously alike.
Money, of course, flows everywhere in this exhibition. In other of Cirilo’s works it floats in the air (by the power of magnetism) and its ghostly illusion lures the unwary into a trap. The proliferation of products – cameras, shopping bags and their brands in May Wolf’s collection, and shoes in Christus Nobrega’s shop window – witnesses the fecundity of capital.
But accelerationism is also a dream of monsters. The human subject is no longer seen as sovereign but simply a temporary and contingent encounter between fluxes. And as the machines accelerate and run their courses, they throw up new shapes and new beings. Cyborgs. Animals. Gods. Daemons. Artificial Intelligences. A post-human carnival of amorphous mis-shapes. The horror writer H. P. Lovecraft is admired for capturing the sense of configurations of forces that are so much larger and more powerful than us that they drive us mad with their incomprehensibility.
Dominating the the gallery is a highly ambiguous mural by Thiago Botelho. Mythical figures erupt from the streets of a regulated, well ordered Brasilia with revolutionary zeal, unleashing a confusing riot of animals and patterns and things in their wake. But is this a revolution or counter-revolution? Are these figures with their ancestral indigenous and afro-cultural references, vengeant older gods, calling us back to old certainties and patterns? Or are they something new? New assemblages of forces that are even more dynamic and progressive and challenging the modern order?
Today, as all stability in life is threatened by capital’s ever more rapacious dynamism, we can all feel the attraction of ancestral certainties. But is this mere nostalgia? Or are there flows which can be rediscovered by a strategy of “indigenization”, drawing on and hybridizing old and new, to bring an invigorating energy to today’s hyperflows? Just as the DNA from wild and heritage species of crops can reinvigorate the tired products of industrial agriculture? Amante da Heresia’s fast paced, technoshamanic video collage that merges anarchopunk, cultural bricolage and indigenous anti-developmentalist activism hints that there might.