I admit, when the concepts of Holes and Wholes relating to absence and presence were first mooted among a small group of artists with whom I was discussing work we might create for the 7th edition of The Wrong Biennale, I had some reservations. This is down to a short passage in Kathryn Hayles’ 1999 How We Became Posthuman – which conveys a message that seems to have slipped away in the noisy years between then and now. It is a passage that has nevertheless stayed with me and fuels much of my creativity and output. And one that I suspect is more pressing than ever. I write about it in BHAM💥 and other texts that have yet to be made public. Hayles wrote, ‘The technologies of virtual reality, with their potential for full-body mediation, further illustrate the kind of phenomena that foreground pattern and randomness and make presence and absence seem irrelevant.’ Note that she says seem rather than are.
Even with my commitment to Hayles’ overall notion, in the intervening years, some aspects have become questionable. Virtual reality is one. VR may be a problematic term, although it is still used routinely, as the boundaries around ‘virtual’ get a little fuzzy when you consider VR headsets are deployed in therapeutic settings to treat people suffering from a range of symptoms, and the therapy really affects them. In another example, people and specifically women, are harassed and abused in so-called virtual reality games and experience genuine distress, even trauma. Perhaps we might replace ‘virtual reality’ in Hayles’ sentence with ‘digital culture’ or even use the term ‘immediacy’ (Kornbluh, 2023). What’s more, randomness has been convincingly shown by Thomas Nail (2019: 338) to be flawed:
In fact, there is no such thing as absolute or ontological randomness. Absolute randomness would require a motion to be completely unaffected and thus unrelated to any prior motion that would determine its subsequent action in any way. Randomness and affection are thus incompatible. All matter is self-affective, sensuous, and therefore nonrandom. The idea of randomness is a logical category, a pure mathematical idealism, as if we could abstract matter from its motion and affectation. Pedesis, on the other hand, is unpredictable precisely because it is relational, affective, and sensuous.
Despite or with those retrospective adjustments, Hayles’ 1999 assertion nevertheless deserves further attention as the words ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ are indeed impacted in the wake of a pattern-oriented world underpinned by recursive code. If I had had my way, perhaps we Doughnut(W)Hole artists would have addressed pattern and pedesis (the word Nail uses to describe pattern and movements, some of which are recognisable to us, much of which is not. The word pedesis relates to leaping and jumping, and therefore ‘feet’ as in the way we might dance.) And some might say, we did, regardless of the terminology used. Since I am nothing if not experienced working in groups and can be fairly flexible (most of the time), I know enough to avoid insisting on or forcing my own issues – especially in this case, since we wanted the work to be accessible, avoid positioning itself within an ‘aesthetic silo’ to be engaged with only by others who exist in whatever silo that might be, and approachable for people curious to find out more about dynamic process technologies (AI). I hope we succeeded with a wide range of works that give different people different entry points.
All of that said, one would never know that absence and presence might now be irrelevant (which suggests they aren’t). Everywhere you look, there are projects addressing absence and presence in relation to dynamic code, the latest of which, AI, causes understandable anxiety, alarm and outrage, as well as entrenched defensiveness. Multiple projects situate their inquiry around holes/wholes, just as ours does. (I shan’t place them here – you will need to take my word, but believe me… There are quite a few!)
In the end, I resolved my reticence by addressing pattern and pedesis in BHAM💥 while the wider Doughnut(W)Hole stuck with absence and presence. I suspect that was the correct choice.
In a related development, I’ve received a Wandsworth Cultural Micro-Commission to run a small set of BHAM💥-inspired ‘happenings’ in early 2026. The live events will begin with a performance/talk (I use the word performance very loosely! It will be more like a chat and a bit of a reading while attendees have a cup of tea or something a little stronger), followed by a short workshop, and end in shared reflection. This format provides a way of experimenting, at a local scale, with how pattern-making, anxiety, and obsolescence (the absence of humans either in the workplace or altogether) are lived and felt in the present. These workshops allow the concerns of BHAM💥 and the broader Doughnut(W)Hole Pavilion into a community setting while feeding back into the overall research. Kim, our curator, and I are looking forward to other Doughnut(W)Hole artists running small events locally, too. I’d like to thank the London Borough of Culture Local Champions for selecting my BHAM💥 proposal – and I look forward to identifying a venue and getting on with plans. Keep a lookout for details soon 👀!
BHAM💥– The Black Hole Aesthetic Machine – is an imaginary product and service designed to help humans come to terms with their impending obsolescence. Assembled from seemingly disparate images, it is a conceptual object that provides guidance and self-help exercises – not for purchase by consumers, but to demonstrate how purchasing, consuming, and identity maintenance operate as informational pattern-creation within the limits of one’s parochial position. It processes whatever temporary configurations (human, machine, theistic entity) engage with it and has no interest in the entity’s interpretation – be that honest recommendation, dark humour, or outright insult. BHAM💥 was made for The Doughnut(W)Hole Pavilion as part of The Wrong Biennale (7th Edition) 2025/26 which runs from the 1st of November 2025 to the 31st of March 2026.
Initially published 3/12/25 – updated 4/12/25 with corrections and clarification
Refs:
Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.
Kornbluh, A. (2023) Immediacy, or The style of too late capitalism. London New York: Verso.
Nail, T. (2019) Theory of the Image. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.