Urbach Justin, Vall Tatjana, Kiel Johannes, “NO MIND NO MATTER”, at Kunstarkaden Munich

“NO MIND NO MATTER” by Urbach Justin, Vall Tatjana, and Kiel Johannes, curated by Kunstarkaden Munich, at Kunstarkaden Munich, Munich, 25.06.2024-27.07.2024.

I spy with my little eye something you do not see and that is… Now, guess! So, you ask yourself: Am I the ‘I’ capturing, the perceiving subject? Or am I the ‘something’ being captured, the object of perception? Or what is the ‘something’ I do not see, cannot see, that which eludes capture by my naked eye? Today, in the technological scene, not seeing anything intelligible is the “new” condition of contemporary perception. Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious” introduced by photography has been updated to the unconscious of planetary scale computation.

Capture agents comprised of one or more sensors vary in forms and sizes; from surveillance cameras detecting faces, over the sensors monitoring heartbeats, to the complex network of satellites orbiting earth and tracking devices. They can see through the entire electromagnetic spectrum, spanning gamma rays, x-rays, infrared to visible light, as well as micro and radio waves, which outstrip human sensibility. Machine vision plays out in the bubbling behind the scenes of surveillance capitalism: continually extracting, filtering, and decrypting data to be efficiently blackboxed by corporate big tech gatekeepers. Within this infrastructural system of prying eyes and sensors capturing our every move, we are excluded from a hidden order of reality, warping itself around earth. What occurs behind the scenes remains opaque, veiled in secrecy, impenetrable; yet these transparent appearing infrastructures re-configure the scenes of life, obscuring their entanglement with the material world. NO MIND NO MATTER pries open the cracks by making this very dazzling dialectic between visibility and invisibility material, partially revealing the ‘something’ we do not see, cannot see, that which eludes capture by our naked eye.

This exhibition weaves together new independent and collaborative works by Tatjana Vall, Johannes Kiel, and Justin Urbach. In resonance with Donna J. Haraway’s aesthetic strategy of “sympoiesis” as making-with, they co-produce a dynamic meshwork of intra-acting artworks, entangling the perceiving subject with and within their responsive feedback loops. The invisible relations among the distribution of artworks resist instant recognition, and are only rendered material, and thus visible, through the visitor’s intra-action within and across the space. The material visibility of the emerging feedback loops is set against the hidden mechanisms driving them behind the scenes. From being the ‘something’ captured and detected, to being the ‘I’ capturing and activating, the subject-object relation is ever-mobile, continually re-negotiated in attunement with the visitor’s co-production. By harnessing the contemporary powers of visualisation through a return to matter, Vall, Kiel, and Urbach re-articulate the politics of the (in)visible. “Now, it is your turn. What do you spy with your little eye that I do not see… ?