BHAM💥 – The Black Hole Aesthetic Machine is my latest project, currently available to view on The Doughnut(W)Hole Pavilion, where you can also download a PDF version of the ‘product’. As a product that offers a kind of pseudo-therapy, it alludes to an economy in which so-called services are mostly all that is left to workers coming to terms with automation and post-manufacturing. Sure, things still get made, but factories are populated by fewer human bodies while machines take over the brunt of the work. Universities close down whole departments, and shops and warehouses are run by algorithms. There are even experimental schools in which some or even most of the teaching is provided by a programme (sometimes with a human deliverer, but not always). Of course, the project goes beyond economic reality – it operates across multiple fields, extending many of the tropes and concerns explored in earlier projects such as why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers/, ://LAMELLA, Orpheus in Homebase and the other booklets I’ve published in the last couple of years.
Like the astronaut project, BHAM💥 is situated within and emerges from collapse. On a surface level, the collapse may be of the ‘image of the image’ (Rovelli, 2024), and not only because images can now be made within seconds by a machine. But rather, as we are living at a time of collapse out of which something else will emerge, although one cannot ignore that the collapse may be violent and deadly for many. Although an inquiry and perhaps even a lament of such, it employs the tools and tropes of immediacy, as explored in Anna Kornbluh’s (2023) excellent book of the same name (I may not be entirely on board with Kornbluh’s diagnosis of autotheory, but her concerns about the image and the deluge of meaningless fluidity in which we all drown nowadays, along with rampant anti-intellectualism, seem spot on). [Edit: quote added 14/11] She writes, “Immediacy style rapidly inputs information available on the surface as immanent unto itself, without need for slow, long reading or interpretation” (60). BHAM aims to interrupt that process. Vicky Kirby’s (2013/2017) excellent analysis about entrenched dualisms even in places that claim to overcome them, often by reinstating yet further dualisms, also speaks to one of my long-term interests and is expressed in my refusal of the persistent ‘practice over theory’ found in art pedagogy dogma, which arguably feeds into some of the very problems Kornbluh identifies. The work is both a text (itself one form of image, but which requires slowing down) and a series of pictures. The alphabet symbols can be read predictably as text, if desired, but also function as symbols that may or may not be taken literally, but instead as mutable pixels that emerge onto the screen when engaged with.
You can read BHAM💥 online and/or download the PDF available on the website, which is embedded within the HTML. (Do both!) I am considering printing a book next year, but I haven’t made up my mind yet. Perhaps it is most appropriate to exist forever simply as HTML with the possibility of making it onto someone’s desktop or home-office printer.
BHAM💥 can be visited at The Doughnut(W)Hole, a Wrong Biennale 7th Edition Pavilion
I wrote about dualism and unconscious commitment to it here, here and here (the latter to be included in a publication for Sense and Reason, which has taken a back seat while I focused on BHAM💥 and the Doughnut(W)Hole.
Refs:
Kirby, V. (2013) Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Durham: Duke University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822394440.
Kirby, V. (ed.) (2017) What if culture was nature all along? Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Kornbluh, A. (2023) Immediacy, or The style of too late capitalism. London New York: Verso.
Rovelli, C. (2024) White Holes. London: Allen Lane.