Arriving at critical inquiry of one’s resource, energy and raw material consumption –particularly in scope of the speculative discourse encompassing new media technology, machine learning and generative processes –has become a codex for curating with the multi-faceted nature of the term ‘root’. Codex itself comes from the Latin word caudex, meaning “trunk of a tree”, “block of wood” or “book”.
Exhibiting together for the first time, as the newly established class for emergent digital media led by Hito Steyerl and Francis Hunger, the term ‘root’ rudimentarily alludes to a gradual development of a common language, whilst nevertheless citing a slightly more complex computational index of meaning. Considering for example, terminology for data structure: the root node or root directory or ‘/root’ as the superuser account in operating systems.
While preliminarily focusing on process-based, experimental work with recent forms of image, sound and artifact generation, individual works are periodically activated by a concentrated sonar superstructure. The political economy of digital media as well as its instrumentalization and mediation run central lines throughout the exhibition.
If the declining value of meaningful content was summarized by Marshall McLuhan in 1964 via ‘the Medium is the Message,’ today, rapidly shifting status of human agency in relation to the production and representation of emergent digital media signal what philosopher of technology Benjamin Bratton and computer engineer Blaise Agüera y Arcas have termed: ‘The Model is the Message.’ Addressing these ‘root’ properties playfully, the exhibition aims to expand on a critical observation of their infrastructure: from the rational to the imaginary: from the pragmatic to the ubiquitous employment of ‘root’ not only as term, but as position. Resulting in an interest in how one’s approach to the production of meaning –as articulated by Amanda Beech in Art Beyond Identity: Constructive Identification for Real Worlds –takes place within and against the proliferation of substitutes for the real.
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