The ghosts, ghouls, and disembodied limbs that haunted the Fulcrum Press during a recent exhibition curated by Andy Bennett appeared as virtual apparitions and artificial personas: poor images of the present that despite having fended off the literal degradation to which Hito Steyerl refers1, nonetheless circulate as lame, phantasmagorical approximations of what we know to be “real.”
Steyerl equates poor images with ghosts. Arthur C. Clarke observes that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So is there any difference between the virtual and the spectral? Using computer-generated imagery, motion capture, photogrammetry, long screen exposures, and 3D scanning, the works on view in General Magic by Jessica Wilson, Rahel Levine, Inés Kivimaki, and Nathan Gulick actualize in physical form the residual human inexactitudes that undergird images and the technologies that make them. In essence, they belie the mechanics of the trick before the magic happens. Just try to clean a window, talk to Siri, remember the contours or your father’s face, or take a picture of a glass house—all will inevitably fade and lose the crystalline cohesion of their substrate.
A nearly life-size monitor stands vertically upright to display a hand washing a window with a rag, a sponge, and then a squeegee in Jessica Wilson’s Perfectly Clear (2023), where each instrument is as unsuccessful as the last in wiping away the persistent dirt and suds that cloud its surface and our view. But while the soap-smeared glass pane registers in high definition, except perhaps for the occasional unfocusing of a camera lens, all illusions of veracity are broken when the photogrammetry and motion-caption technology employed by Wilson to map and digitally recreate her own hand glitch in their attempted mimicry. Elongated fingers and forearms detached from any body stretch and bend at odd angles. Here, the willful technological failure of the work’s construction is metaphorically echoed in the lame utility performed by its subject.
Though exacting in its recreation of the Fulcrum Press’s front window, the faux-architectural construction and complete lack of functionality of Rahel Levine’s Untitled, (Reflection piece, Selkirk) (2019 – 2024), positions her sculpture not as a true representation of its source material, but rather a poor scrim clouding access to the real thing. An H-shaped steel frame holds at its horizontal axis three sliding 3D-printed clear acrylic panes that depict a fusion of images taken by Levine of a mid-century modern textile studio on the outskirts of Scotland. Combined such that the vagaries of what were reflections become a tactile, low relief surface, the resulting composite image physically codifies the familiar confusion of discerning whether an apparition identified in glass pictures an object in front of or behind its surface.
From one screen to another, Nathan Gulick’s Sincere Instances, Gary (2024) takes the iPhone screen as material substrate and conduit of endlessly circulating images to, instead, fix just one image permanently on its surface. On a white plinth against the wall positioned at Genius Bar-height, and mounted on chargers as one might find them at an Apple store, six such iPhones Xs—which have a uniquely flawed OLED screen—all display the same image of the artist’s father in varying degrees of opacity. By forcing the screens to continuously hold this image for an extended duration, ranging from two months to six years, Gulick exploits the iPhone’s flaw, such that a negative after-image is burned into its screen, or rather its epidermal memory. A desire to hold onto a memory, a ghost, a cherished photograph, somewhat ironically becomes more alienated with our reliance on digital containers. The object loses its preciousness as it ceases to be an object, and the degradation of Gulick’s negative after-image suggests only a technological inability to do what we also cannot.
of 20 burned into OLED screen. Image courtesy of the gallery.
Exorcizing instead of conjuring the ghost in the screen, two crystal trophies by Inés Kivimaki spin on blue-carpeted cylindrical pedestals in an equally blue carpeted, vertical blind adorned alcove reminiscent of corporate offices of decades past. Here, the odd constellation of spheres perched atop irregular shapes which comprise the trophies (Thank You and Yes, both 2024) are incised with the visage of Apple’s digital assistant, Siri, as imagined by her voice actor Susan Bennett. Where a notable distinction might be listed, the trophies instead display excerpts from an interview between Bennett and Kivimaki that reflect on time passed in the laborious and unknowing conscription of Bennett’s own voice into that of the ubiquitous digital persona. In honoring the unconsenting human behind the inane machine that was designed to serve, and yet only serves to misunderstand, Kivimaki quite literally crystalizes the unseen abject labor of corporate technological fantasies.
So while screens—personal or corporate, technological or architectural—and the attendant personages that animate and haunt them serve to unite the works on view, the exhibition nevertheless possesses a certain ineffable quality that belies articulation. There is, consequently, an auratic magic that permeates the room, weaving together a constellation of stories and objects that all, in one way or another, begin with the rabbit in the hat, which greets visitors on the door of the Fulcrum Press—a deceptively cute inculcator to the present omnipotence of the screen and the legacy of our tech overlords. This is the logo of the now long defunct technology company, General Magic—from which the exhibition takes its name. Having produced, however unsuccessfully, the first smartphone, this cartoon moniker serves here as nothing more than a reminder of the manifest ways that we continue to be enamored by the magic of what is (to someone who knows better, nothing more than) a trick.
General Magic: Jessica Wilson, Rahel Levine, Inés Kivimaki, and Nathan Gulick curated by Andy Bennett
The Fulcrum Press
Saturday, August 10th – September 15, 2024
- Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image.” e-flux Journal, Issue #10, November 2009. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/ ↩︎