Day before tomorrow

DAY BEFORE TOMORROW

Filip Kostić, Zarina Nares, Eva Papamargariti, Lyn Liu, Damien H. Ding, Vuk Ćuk

Curated by Vuk Ćuk
On view: June 23 – August 9, 2023

In 1966, J.G. Ballard, the British writer for whom the line between utopia and dystopia was a murky one, wrote a book called The Crystal World. It’s a story of a doctor in a remote area of Cameroon who is trying to reach a hospital run by a woman with whom he is having an affair. He soon gets waylaid however by an unfolding supernatural emergency in the area – people are fleeing and the army has been deployed because a strange process of crystallisation is spreading through the forest. As it goes, each atom of every object, plant, tree, animal and person seemingly unlucky enough to be in its path is made shiny and hard; interlocking precious stones, held in stasis. I write “seemingly unlucky”, because Ballard’s narrative has a shimmering nuance to it: for many of the characters this crystallisation has a spellbinding allure, offering a break from the mortal flesh, a promise of never-ending life and a beautiful, sparkling, future in which time and the weight of physicality has been vanquished.

While the book was written over two decades before the ubiquity of digital culture, and way before the artists in The Day After Tomorrow were born, it offers a parable to the irreversible spread of networked technology to the very pores of our being. As the world goes online it melts, like the crystals, the boundaries of time and space, lines of identity, physicality and immateriality. In Damien H. Ding’s egg tempera diptych painting, Path (Diptych), each canvas depicts an almost identical scene: two men, one standing, one sitting, are illuminated by a widening shaft of light that stretches from one side of each frame to the other. The men seem mesmerised by the light, yet their body language is not of religious rapture but hypnotising lethargy. One of the seated man’s hands rests limply over the armrest, his friend’s facial expression is blank and emotionless. Ding’s light beam widens as it spreads across the canvas, as if it might engulf the entire frame. The source is equally obscure – the New York and Singapore-based Ding doesn’t provide easy narratives in his work – but the way it spreads a glow across their faces is reminiscent of a phone screen, a blue light glare dimly lighting up faces in an otherwise darkened room.

Filip Kostić was raised amidst gaming communities and online subcultures – that blue light lit his face for hours as a kid in his Belgrade bedroom – and has long tracked not just how technology has become indispensable in the everyday life of many (to the exclusion of others) and how it has transformed human-to-human relations and slowly refigured society. Couch Computer (2023) is a piece of meta-technology, part of a wider series in which the artist has computer optimised furniture into hardware. If the couch itself was an original piece of technology (dating to early man’s ‘invention’ of objects to sit on) that has since fallen into ubiquity, then Kostić burlesques the fast capitalist optimisation of every human tool and structure into digital hardware, from the obvious, such as phones, to cars, fridges and smart homes. On two screens attached to the once humble Ikea seat, is a cacophony of software: the first screen is swamped in programmes that elicits anxiety, from email accounts to online tutorials (the “grindset” as he labels them); on the second plays websites and apps that offer a place to relax (“the mindset”).

The colonisation of tech has extended not only to physical and psychological structures but to social, economic and political apparatus too, something that artists Vuk Ćuk and Zarina Nares have identified in their work. In Imported Landscape, the former returns to his long running use of the online marketplace Aliexpress, in which the most absurd items, many easily customised, can easily be ordered for strikingly low prices. Here Ćuk displays a litany of everyday objects overprinted with stock imagery of desert-scapes, many suggested by the algorithm of the shopping site that has slowly learned and encouraged the artist’s obsession, alongside a scale model of the fake palm trees that are used to camouflage and beautify cell phone masts; a satirical take on the displacement of the natural world to a mere decoration of human advancement. Around the base, a dozen or so dead pigeons lie (lifelike replicas imported, again, from China), a nod to conspiracy theories on 5G networks.
Ballard talked of “super-saturation”, again with ambivalence, though social media-aided conspiracy theories must be the darkest side product of online culture. “As more and more time leaks away,” Ballard writes. “The process of super-saturation continues, the original atoms and molecules producing spatial replicas of themselves, substance without mass, in an attempt to increase their foothold upon existence. The process is theoretically without end”. Nares’ video works remixes a variety of people on Tik Tok commenting on an male American musician who is alleged to have cheated on his wife, a model for a lingerie company, with an social media personality There’s a shared visual grammar within the posts, as the sassy social media users pick apart the personal failings and apparent moral predilections of the minor celebrities in question. It’s funny and depressing in equal measure, but also oddly timeless, as people go about gossiping in the most tenacious manner people have done for milenia: the subject of the gossip in these videos is not important, the celebrities interchangeable, their lives used as mere ciphers to the projections of the poster’s own constructed identity. Avatars appear aplenty too in Eva Papamargariti animations played out over four screens. Each profile in portrait mode (mirroring Nares’ found Tik Toks) a grotesque biped, psychedelically multicoloured, monster (as if the artist birthed the “fantastic birds [that] fly through the petrified forest, and jewelled crocodiles glitter like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline river” of the Crystal World.). Papamargariti’s beast moves in an uncannily human manner: dancing, choosing clothes on a rail, drinking coffee. With AI ready to roll, there’s no reason why they can’t be as ‘real’ and you and I. There is a mutability and hybridity to its body form: degendered, transformative, a radical body in the truest sense. With our collective mind increasingly harvested to ever-evolving machine learning, flesh and blood has become the final frontier of the digital takeover.

Nares recently quoted Mark Fisher’s question of “How do we articulate any kind of critique of digital culture without sounding like conservatives?” The question seems an odd one now, , in a world half a decade on from Fisher’s death, where to “like” or “dislike” digital culture seems as fruitless as having an opinion on the merits of oxygen. Yet Ćuk, who curated this show, suggests a sliver of structural instability to this immaterial edifice with his inclusion of two paintings by the New York- based Lyn Liu. In one a set of stacked plastic chairs seems liable to fall over, in the second a trick is being played in which a playing card is whipped out from between two glasses full of water. It’s a reminder that cracks might still be found in crystallisation; slivers of meatspace amongst the digital space through which the winners and losers of this new world might be determined.

– Oliver Basciano