Jasmin Schädler: The possessed gaze
20 minute presentation for AEROPONIC ACTS - growing roots in air, DAI's 3 day marathon of lecture-perfomance acts, May 2019.
Mark is possessed by Algorithma.
She looks through his eyes at everyone else.
The stars watch from above, streaming ethereal power, acting upon their destiny.
Ghalya Saadawi, Laura Harris, Ana Texeiro Pinto and Antonia Majaca responded to the question:
Are you looking at me?
Report by Ayesha Hameed:
Schädler walks onto a stage under blue lighting. She pulls a male figure – Mark – behind her with a harness and speaks into the microphone in harmony with him/or pitch shifted – it is unclear. Mark, who wears an S/M mask, is the CEO of a company, she says. The artist asks whether the world is more unified or fragmented, whether the internet is an expanded world, and how one locates choice within it. The voice changes – now high-pitched, someone in a magenta robe sings a melancholy tune from the rafters that turns into a throaty lament. The narrative switches back to the terrestrial. Mark looks for data on the internet, people who give away their information. ‘Why? They are dumb fucks.’ He cannot imagine people as part of communities. The singer takes off her costume to reveal a shiny magenta body suit, marking her transformation into Algorithma, the narrator. The new narrator with their new voice asks for indeterminacy between algorithm and non-fallacy. This difference is usually thought of as a black box, not represented as a person in a pink suit. The black box as unknown simple provider of easy information is disrupted by the figure of Algorithma who explores the relationship between use and exchange value.
Ghalya Saadawi noted the voice here is an excess object beautifully rendered by the false opera that breaks down. She said references to the likes of Mark Zuckerberg permeate the performance with the question of who has knowledge.
Laura Harris thought the voice acted as a medium that called attention to the unpaid labour of the internet. On the erotic charge of Mark’s presence, she asked: ‘How does it complicate the argument and presentation?’
Ana Texeiro Pinto saw the presentation as one in which readings were mapped onto cybernetic ontologies that challenged true and false binaries as well as gender, leading her to question: ‘How do you turn enjoyment into something to be democratized?’
The presentation called to mind Mladen Dolar’s exploration of the death of second opera, for Antonia Majaca, in which the artist relates social death to the libidinal investment that follows this decline. Majaca saw this idea meander complexly through the question of the black box. She suggested it would be fruitful to consider the role of the error and glitch. She also questioned the gender of Algorithma in observing the gendered-ness of ‘uncovering’ the mystery of the black box in revealing the figure of Algorithma.