The exhibition calling on magic and mythology to rethink our dark information age

In his recently published book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, artist and writer James Bridle calls for “new metaphors” to understand the array of complex systems that comprise our networked, information-overloaded present. The “dark age” he alludes to is our current one. Despite access to so much information we feel powerless to offset the adverse effects of a litany of societal ills: surveillance, Silicon Valley, terrorism, climate change and late capitalism. The problem, Bridle claims, lies in the metaphors we use to make sense of these vast and abstract entities — for example, ‘the cloud’ — which only serve to enforce their authority.

For his new exhibition at Berlin’s Nome Gallery, AGENCY, Bridle, who gained prominence last year for his disturbing essay “Something is wrong on the Internet”, expands upon these ideas with the intention of presenting new narratives that dismantle the power of existing ones. Works by seven artists, including Constant Dullaart, Ingrid Burrington and Morehshin Allahyari, make use of magic, mythology and humour to foster alternative ways of experiencing the world. “It’s a way of countering the deep-seated fear and apathy that is most people’s standard response,” says Bridle. “The artists in this show ask: what else can you do in response? That’s where the idea of ‘agency’ (as per the exhibition’s title) comes from.”

Following the Wikileaks release of hundreds of US State Department diplomatic cables in 2010 and the Snowden revelations in 2013, there has been a boom in imagery that describes and documents this era of surveillance and subterfuge. Important as such material has been in raising awareness on matters of privacy, in Bridle’s view, we can no longer get away with pretending we’ve only just twigged something’s gone awry. “The last eight or nine years demonstrates that the process of pure revelation has failed to produce major systemic change. In fact, it’s often solidified it. A lot of things revealed in the Snowden documents have now been signed into law. Repeating and reinforcing these logics is a trap that a lot of art falls into as well.”

Given this, it was a surprise to enter the gallery space and be greeted by a long table, piled high with, you guessed it, a cache of Wikileaks print-outs. But a presentation of the old story of fear this is not. The work is by Anna Ridler and is entitled Wikileaks: A Love Story (2016). Visitors are encouraged to pick up the tablet that’s also on the table and hold it above the papers. An augmented reality app reveals an added text layer of email correspondence with personal subject lines like “mwwah” and “I wuv you”, which are not the usual diplomatic cable fare. Instead, the artist showcases the metanarrative of a workplace affair, another form of ‘revelation’ that lies, along with so many bigger secrets, among the 10,000+ documents. The result is funny – enchanting, even – and all the more compelling for it. It offers a different route into making sense of the now ubiquitous ‘papers’ trope: Pentagon, Paradise, Panama etc. Humour and love become valid ways to take on this subject matter – and are also suitable comebacks for fear.

Other works perform re-enchantment of well-worn ideas in a more overt manner and in doing so weave the kinds of “new metaphors” the curator speaks of. Morehshin Allahyari’s 3D printed sculpture, Huma and Talismans (2016), for example, draws from the artists’ extensive research on jinn, supernatural figures from Islamic theology, in particular the female jinn that have been side-lined within the tradition. Huma is known as the bringer of heat and fever and so in the year 2018, Allahyari presents her as a talisman of climate change. As Bridle explains, “Huma is not here to save us from climate change, she’s here to assert that it’s coming for all of us and won’t discriminate. So Huma becomes a levelling figure. In thinking through her power to bring this fever to everyone, the artist insists that we have to think about this issue together – and urgently.” It’s an approach that evidences why mythology is never simply the telling of old stories but, “the constant retelling of old stories under the conditions of the present.” The work, he says “also stresses the need to think these issues through non-western, non-male and non-heteronormative figures, as a way of asserting the agency of other narratives.”

On the opposite wall hangs a framed grid of several hundred sim cards. Each represents a phone number needed to validate a Facebook account. These phone numbers can be bought in bulk and used to create social media armies to inflate follower accounts or influence public opinion en masse. This is Constant Dullaart’s work, PVA Composition (Tilt) (2016) and while fascinated by Dullaart’s ongoing exploration of how these gamified value systems translate into capitalism and the art market, Bridle admits that he didn’t initially read the work as operating in a similar way to, say, Allahyari’s. “It was only when putting this show together and thinking about the piece not just in terms of agency but also in terms of ‘magic’ that it became clear.” When seen from this perspective, the work’s constituent parts become totemic: each tiny gold plate represents a lamp, the place where the digital genies of fake identities are housed and summoned forth.

Ingrid Burrington takes this focus on the raw materials of technology and agency even further. Rather than breaking open a proverbial sealed black box to simply reveal what lies inside, she recasts the whole thing as a scrying bowl – quite literally. Her 2018 work, Alchemy Studies takes the form of a black crystal ball containing an iridescent silver power. That powder is a pulverised iPhone, encased in crystal and resin. Even in this form, the iPhone still behaves as a black mirror. Alchemy Studies provides a humorous take on magic, providing exactly the kind of ‘re-enchantment’ Bridle describes: “When we make tools, we imput a certain way of thinking about the world. To ‘re-enchant’ the tool is to rethink that and thereby make a different model of the world. It’s seeing a hammer as something other than just an object for hitting nails and as something that can be thrown in an athletic context, or that represents the Hammer of Thor as a magical object.” Burrington’s brand of magic shows how the standard metaphors and stories we use to talk about technology (like the Cloud) are just as fantastical when put under scrutiny.

Interestingly, one of the most arresting works in the exhibition concerns surveillance – but without a microphone or camera in sight. Instead, pencil on watercolour paper is the medium of choice. This is Suzanne Treister’s The US National Security Agency on Fire, a work Bridle regards as “extraordinary because it was made in 2010 and predates most people’s awareness of the NSA. Not only had Treister already identified it as the dark heart of this climate of fear, she was already imagining it on fire.”  Here, the transgression lies in the medium.“There’s a real assertion of artistic agency in that”, thinks Bridle, “the use of very ‘traditional’ artistic materials to comment on this kind of subject”.

It is through this idea of finding new ways to represent established ideas that the exhibition seeks to assert the ‘agency’ of its title. This is why the collision of magic and mythology, or the considering of everyday technology through more analogue traditions represents such fertile ground to Bridle, on account of the cross-currents that arise. The frictions or contradictions that might also emerge are actively welcomed as ways to break the television static of doom and fear that, in 2018, serves as a backdrop to any discussion on what to do. This fissuring also opens up space for other voices to take on and reconfigure that same old story. “We’re entering into a period when this kind of complexity – chaos, climate changes, information overload – is going to disrupt the picture to such an extent that we need to learn to see in the darkness, to think about other ways of seeing the world,” he reflects. “That’s why this exhibition is an exploration of agency – it’s asking who has the right, the voice, and the skills to meaningfully engage with this material? The answer has to be everyone.”  

“Agency” curated by James Bridle runs through to 7 December at NOME Gallery, Berlin.