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GODMODADOGGEREL
This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod,
And there is in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of
Some oracle
Must rectify our knowledge.
As with the confused mariner Alonso in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the prevailing analogy for understanding nature has always been architectural. Whether it is the altar or the icon, interlocution requires a device. What is more familiar to the reader, than the cliché of pulling back the curtain or, more on point, crossing the threshold, moving from darkness into light, and the ritual therein?
Science, and its particular rubric, has over centuries evolved to mirror this same reliance on delineation. Bernard Siegert, channeling the 19th century architect Gotfried Semper’s observation that the first architectonic gesture was that of the fold, reminds us that science was initially a question of keeping time. In this way shelter marks the human experience of seasons, protecting us and also predicting, in a way, times cycle, thereby anticipating the many ways the calendar will come to dictate culture in carnival and religion.
For Siegert, the fold is synonymous with the door and its predecessor the gate, a tool that in his words “turns the hunter into a shepherd…” and with that the door becomes a synthesis of technology and consciousness, “of a coevolutionary domestication of animals and human beings.” And much like the churchbell—marking the hours of preindustrial society—the fold has helped shape both space and time leading us to the modern present, echoing the symbol of the serpent and evincing digital tech’s language of switches.
It is here that we also locate art and its collision with science, as a device that, like the door and time, serves primarily to assist humans in creating and controlling space. This is the origin of the exhibition title “Godmod,” a term that today evokes gaming but that stretches back to prehistory in its purpose and politic. The modification implied in any technological hack, whether first person shooter, alchemy, or clowning, is one of distinction, and for Siegert, distinction presupposes “not only an observer who observes this distinction but techniques that process this distinction and therefore first make observable the unity of the things distinguished.” Embedded in this statement is the squirrely “unity” or perhaps more bluntly, origin, a fraught concern weighed down by history and chauvinism but one that marks the pull to science.
What is our shared language for untangling this febrile evolution? What once was called pneuma? What tools, what modifications to the architecture of our shared environment / game space can be imagined as a bridge between these players?
This entangled past and question of the future has today resurfaced with profound urgency as laid out by Bruno Latour whose term “hybrid” reflects this attempt to describe the proliferating intersections of living and non-living agents.
Implied in this choreography of things is that there are still methods, erotic, technological, absurd, that can be activated to engender this relation -- what Anselm Franke calls a second “first contact” of the moderns with everyone else. Might this meeting be a stage? A new doggerel to re animate our “business more than nature”?
The dogdom doggerel is the voice of the oracles, still present, and it is these actors that GODMODADOGGERELwill highlight in the group exhibition arranged in response to the Getty initiative “PST ART: 'Art & Science Collide' scheduled for fall of 2024, curated by Anna Wittenberg and Nick Herman.
DOGDOM DOGGEREL
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