Time Piece Writing — Simone Handelman Duffy Database

Time Piece

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Simone Handelman Duffy

2025
To see the accompanying bio-install, click here please

Dedicated to my parents & to the bionts who collaborated in this making.

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Dear Reader,

Consider this the first and last time you will be addressed by this work. Consider this an expression of gratitude that you are here, that you are interested, that you care enough to read what has been written. Also consider that this is not, and I’m sorry to break your affect-driven heart, written for you. This is not being written for anyone at all. We are uninterested in cause-and-effect today. It is being written so that it will be, because I am a being, or I am am, and because I am, I want others to be! Sit with that for a moment if you so please, because it is a very special, very magical thing, and it is also the most common, most human thing. We–whoever ‘We’ may be–have always made things, been made by things, have made things that make things. It is an incredible mystery and a credible blatancy that beings make being(s). Humans (and the creatures that compose them) have always created, informed matter, materialized form, expressed the internal, internalized the expression. Where does this interminable impulse originate? What does it mean that we have called one form of this impulse art, defined and demarcated one mode of making and forced ourselves to reckon with all the mysteries it illuminates? Perhaps this is the question lurking in the shadows of the question this work asks, building the foundation upon which my mental unrest rests. Don’t worry, dear Reader, that question will be presented shortly. I know how you itch for an introduction, thesis, three paragraphs, and a conclusion! I hear your pleas! But, sweet Reader, this is not written for you. It is written so that it is. But I am not cruel or unfriendly. I am so grateful that you are here.

Before I Ignore You… A Note on Reading (This Text):

It is time to think about time. Or rather, it is about time to think about time. No no! It is about to be time to be about time to think about time. That’s the one! The written word, at present, demands linearity of both Reader and Writer. That sentence just there ←, and that one there↑, too? I wrote those one word after another, just as you read them one word after another. In fact, you are presently reading those sentences one after another too. I don’t deny the many benefits of linear language, it is quite practical that you should understand what I say because of how it is said in a straight line of time. I do, however, question the whole premise of linear time and the linear information it begets. I wonder if we could create legibility through other logics, through chance or intuition, through spirals and circles, rhizomes and databases. This is really not so pretentious or complex as it sounds. We learn so much from dictionaries and encyclopedias, though they need not be read in order. We learn so much today from experiences we had at age seven, though we need not have understood their import then, only now. Comprehension is not always linear. I cannot pretend I have invented a way to undo the linear sentence, but I can make a suggestion to you, dear Reader. This text will be written in fragments, beloved fragments, and may be read as such. Together they will form a whole, a being, but that being will be no matter how you order its parts. Read any fragment in any order that you please, but save “Art That Dies to Prevent the Death of Art” for last (that one’s a bit different and death tends to be the finale, it enjoys thinking of itself an ending). I will model this by writing the fragments in any order that I please. Though really, I am subservient to the being I am bringing into being, so it will be in any order that it will be.

“Ahh, Writer,” You correctly accuse, “I was told this wasn’t written for My understanding! Why should you care how I read or apprehend?”. Thanks for listening, good listeners are sexy. This is not written for your understanding’s sake, but it is written for its own sake, and it would itself like to be complete and whole, for to be is to be whole, and one way to test wholeness is through audience apprehension. Thus the concern with understanding. Really though, it means nothing to the text whether or not you get anything from it. It will be, and that is all it must be. Though I too have an ego, and would be happy to know you thought something of what I made :)

Annoyed yet?

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“And this thinking [poetically], fed by the present, works with the “thought fragments” it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past—but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living—as “thought fragments,” as something “rich and strange,” and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene.

Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940,” in Men in Dark Times (205-206)

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Contents

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The Implications of A Time-Based Art

Bio-Art & Time

Why This, Why Now?

Art Historical Time & The Historical Now

A Manifesto

Art That Dies to Prevent the Death of Art

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The Implications of A Time-Based Art

“For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”

– Paul Valéry

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Does fine art remain fine art when one introduces duration into its form? For the vast majority of art history, and thus of human history, a work of art existed essentially atemporally. Does this mean that art is atemporal in essence? Venus of Willendorf, whose stone corpus has remained unaltered for 30,000 years can tell us that art mustn’t change in time. Stare at her for a ½ second and she will be essentially the same woman she would be if you stared at her for all of those 30,000 years. Granted, the wear of time and evidence of decay may change her visuality, despite our obsessive conservational efforts. Yet, this temporal change does not a durational art make. There is nothing intrinsic to her that is durational, all evidence of time comes from extrinsic factors. We are here concerned only with that which is inherent to the work of art. Athena Nike Adjusting her Sandal has been adjusting that same sandal since 410 BCE. Pesky sandal that must be, paused in a state of interminable adjustment. Even Duchamp’s iconoclastic Fountain is the same urinal it was when he bought it in 1917, without so much as a piss stain of difference.

Fine art has, for the vast majority of history, had no concern with duration, no change in time, no relationship with the temporal. It is logical, therefore, to associate fine art with atemporality. If we want to derive art’s essence from works of art, the obvious insight would be that it is no coincidence that fine art is dominantly non-durational. Its non-durationality appears as part of its essence. In his book Art and Objecthood, Michael Fried argues this point precisely. Looking at paintings from Manet onwards, he notices their increasing assimilability to objects, prompting the essence of the fine arts to be called into question. He observes a growing curiosity amongst artists about what it is that they are making, where its limits are, and what art should be. Can art be an object? If not, then precisely what distinguishes art from objecthood? Fried sees the creative shift toward Minimalism and other contemporary art movements as an embracing of objecthood in response to this crisis of art’s essence. Fried proposes pictorialism as art’s essence–the syntactical relations of non-literal, non-object, non-durational forms. Pictorialism is thus in opposition with duration, suggesting that durational art cannot be art, as it is in contradiction with art’s essence. Here, changing art, driving it away from pictorialism, and introducing duration is not advancement of the discipline, but rather the death of fine art. Introducing time to a work of art introduces death to the medium of art. Time-based art is the cold-blooded killer of les beaux-arts.

Fried’s logic uses historical precedent to determine essence. He turns to what art has been historically to understand what it is essentially. His logic makes sense. In our linearity-loving, cause-and-effect-obsessed culture and minds, we tend to turn to the past to to advise the present, looking at antecedents and originary points to make sense of the new.

In the realm of aesthetics, however, this may be a dangerous impulse, as can be seen in Walter Benjamin’s cornerstone text, The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility (WAAMR) which analyzes how art and perception are irrevocably altered by the introduction of mechanical reproduction. When you can buy a Starry Night phone case or a Mona Lisa tote bag from any hipster corner store or intercontinental drop-shipper, when you can see almost every art work flattened across time on your Pinterest feed, when you can do a VR tour of the Louvre before your AFK visit, the human relationship with and perception of original works of art is completely changed. The notion of an “original” withers, becomes of equal value as its reproductions and derivative works. The unique “aura” of the original, singular, human-made artwork withers too. Reproducibility changes the perception of art and its (re)production alike, changes the human relationship with art and artworks, and utilizes new technologies and social organizations in the act of creative expression. This text is chronically misunderstood as a mourning of aura, as a ritual in grieving the death of traditional art, and as a romantic idealization of the arts of antiquity. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Benjamin, like many, finds beauty in auratic and antique arts, but he is not trying to force us to make in a mode that belongs to history. We make in a different world than artists of antiquity made in, and our art must reflect that. When new technology is invented and new modes of social organization manifest, it would follow that social organization (and aesthetic practice) would change in suit.

New ways of living, new ways of producing, new ways of economic structuring, new ways of making. It just makes sense. Benjamin saw a growing proletarian mass and he saw ever-expanding technological innovation. He saw that, should one use reason, as the proletarian masses grew in scale, they should also grow in power. Economic structures should evolve to reflect the realities of society. So too did he see that, should one use reason, those new technological innovations should be used to better the lives of all. When we have the technology and masses to cover the world in seeds and crops, why do we use that technology and those masses to cover the world in bombs? Benjamin understood that we have the means to make a more free world, and instead, those very means were being instrumentalized by Fascism to keep the world in unfreedom. The energy and power of the masses were entirely redirected to maintaining their own oppression. Instead of changing the economic relations of capitalism which continually oppress the proletariat, Fascism managed to convince the proletariat to perpetuate these unfree economic relations. This is, quite plainly, illogical and unreasonable. But Fascism has no truck with reason. To preserve these economic relations despite changing social structures, Fascism provides the masses with expression. It provides the masses with art. But this art cannot reflect liberatory potential or technological innovation, it must reenforce the relations of the past. Thus, Fascism uses antiquated aesthetics to support antiquated logics, to support economic relations which simply do not make sense in contemporary society. It insists on a mode of creative production that does not engage with the newly invented means of production. It encourages an art that does not reflect the realities of contemporary proletariat life, but romanticizes an aesthetic of an older social formation. It is no coincidence that the “trad-wife” aesthetic is rampantly popular, even among the left. It is no coincidence that Trump signed an executive order that government buildings be built in the Greco-Roman style. It is no coincidence that the Red Scare girls have made a style (and a fortune) off the aesthetics of an earlier century. Fascism is on the rise, and it has weaponized the aesthetic plane for its nefarious purposes. As Benjamin states in the final sentence of WAAMR “This is the situation of politics which Fascism renders aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”

Thus, art’s essence cannot be as simple as Fried would have it. He is correct that there is something special that we call art, that art must be defined as itself, by itself, for itself. He is correct that for most of history, art has been pictorial and non-durational. He is correct that art is important enough that it should be concerned with itself, that we should think deeply about it, that we should preserve it for its own sake. But he is wrong that to change fine art is to kill fine art. His artistic essentialism unconsciously lends itself to a Fascist relationship with the aesthetic, entirely misunderstanding how art relates to its moment and its mode of production. Fried fails to see how clinging to what art has always been will arrest art’s ability to remain expressive, experimental, innovative. His desire to keep alive an art that was, manifests in killing the art that will be.

What does this mean for the artist, the critic, the art historian, and the art lover? It means she will find herself in a moment of confusion. The gap between the art that was and the art that will be is widening, temporally and conceptually. She is standing in the middle of that gap, on a very narrow bridge. She must make art that reflects her world, while making art that remains true to art. She must preserve and innovate at the same time. She must find a way to let art respond to the problems of its time in the media of its time, to respond to the problem of time in the media of time, but she must also find a way to keep art alive, to keep it aligned with itself, to make it know itself and continue to be that self. She must make and make and make, and see what wants to be made badly enough that it will come to be.

Bio-Art & Time

“Not Darwin, but fungi taught them that it is collaboration over competitiveness that defines a notion of evolutionary success. The only way to survive and thrive is through cooperation and collaboration. Because we are never separate from others.

– Yasmine Ostendorf

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Bio-art, the creative practice of fine art-making in collaboration with organic beings, materials, and ideas, proposes new relationships between artist and material, self and other, human and more-than-human, organic and manufactured. It is a mode of thought, a way of working, a genus of materials, an interspecies intersubjectivity. More simply, for the purpose of this essay, bio-art is art that is made with organic materials. This definition is still much broader than it may seem, haphazardly including glass, clay, and performance art to name just a few disciplines. Though these may be bio-artistry, let us refine what this particular essay seeks to signify in saying bio-art, by specifying that these organic materials must be more-than-human, and must be “living” or have at one point been “alive” and thus have the capacity to die or already be dead.

Bio-art, as practiced with organic, growing, decaying collaborators demands a particular mode of making, thinking, and relating. The bio-artist works with other living beings. The bio-artist does not work alone, even when he’s hiding in his studio with no “people” there. The bio-artist is always multiple, multiplied, multiplying.

Of course, this is true of everyone, just consciously so for the bio-artist. We are all always made up of an incomprehensible number of beings, and we collectively make up some pretty incomprehensible being(s). We are holoents, an aggregate of many creatures, living and non-. Holoent is Donna Haraway’s term to extend Lynn Margulis’ holobiont, a term for an assemblage of a host and the many other species living in or around it, which together form a discrete ecological unit. More plainly, holobiont is a term for the entire community that makes one being, like all the many microbes and bacteria that collectively make a human being. Despite the definite and worthy attempt to extend the human through this term, holobiont is still an inherently flawed term as it distinguishes host and symbiont, rather than seeing all the creatures as mutual symbionts to one another in a multitude of relationalities and assemblages. Holoent decentralizes the human and includes all beings, living and non-, in a collaborative symbiosis. Our gut flora and the microplastics in our bodies are all part of our holoent. Holoent includes everything that we are made of and make up. We are always already multiple. Do we contradict ourself? Very well then, we contradict ourself, (we are large, we contain multitudes).

Haraway and Margulis’ thinking is indispensable to the mode in which Time Piece is made. The latter’s writing on symbiogenesis, an evolutionary theory posited by Famintzin and Merevschovsky, developed by Kozo-Polyansky and popularized and addended by Margulis immediately undermines a linear conception of history. Symbiogenesis is “the origin of evolutionary novelty by symbiosis”, living together to create, or critters eating critters and getting tummy aches. It suggests that much of evolution was not the survival of the fittest, linear, Darwinian model we have so long assumed it to be. Instead, evolution is posited as the process of multiple species combining or collaborating to survive together.

The dominance of Darwinian evolution and prejudice against symbiogenesis shows how social thought and intellectual expectation have always permeated other spheres of thought, including science. Western Enlightenment logic lets humans view themselves as the pinnacle of the natural world, and thus, entitled to dominate it. They see the endless, incomprehensible past as a linear evolutionary cause-and-effect journey to their creation. They call other beings by strange names like animal or microbe to show that they are not like us–that they are Other–despite common ancestry, shared lives, and shared holoent collaborators. They pretend to be the product of linear growth, when really they are multiple and part of one unbelievably large spiralling process of collaboration.

This logic is inseparable from linear time. Linear time and Darwinian evolution have become the dominant mode of past-facing thought in the contemporary West. We project an evolutionary fallacy onto anything we can and art does not escape the wrath of this scientific calm. Art becomes a linear chain of cause-and-effect relations, styles and epochs are demarcated, rendered organic, and seen in stages of birth, growth, and decay, an illusion of linear, spatial time that the human mind has created and forced upon the natural world as if linear time was real and objectively true. It simply is not. The year is not a line, perhaps more of a circle, perhaps not anything independent of our minds at all. Our demarcation of it as a unit of linear time is for our own sake of comprehension and clarity, it is not provable that a year is a year without a human mind to call it a year. Things move in cycles, they generate and make and die and regenerate and remake and redie. If you are buried, that is not a linear end to a linear life. It is your material self reentering the earth and offering itself to her and to all the creeping things that creepeth within her and those beings break down your being in just the right way that your being can beget new being(s). Life is not a linear thing, it is an incomprehensible continuity of vastness. Linear time is only real in the human mind

Everything exists in this process of circularity and loops and non-lines, save for the non-decomposable. The immortal. Oh, one must pity them. One must not demonize their plastics for being plastics. If we want to decentralize consciousness and unpack our prejudice against the inert, our primacy of the (hu)man, how can we, in good faith, not extend empathy to those who will never decay and decompose. What a sad lifetime it is for plastic. Cured by immortality to kill the world and cursed to stay alive, watching it die. Plastic never asked to be made, and now it will outlive us all. Pray for plastics. Be thoughtful of them. Plastic and other immortals have become incredibly commonplace in art-making. From silicone molds to acrylic paints, we make with things that will outlive us all. We refine organic materials and create synthetic ones, changing them according to our will. One must work against this, must interrogate a practice that makes immortal work. When we make in a non-decomposable way, we pay no respect to those who made us, those who we are symbiotic collaborators with. We reinforce a Darwinian, linear relationship with nature and natural time, making things that extend linearly and forever, and we re-enact the patriarchal domination of Enlightenment logic.

Bio-art asks the artist to reflect on their relationship with matter. Must matter always be subservient to form? Or can we make art in collaboration with matter? Can we work alongside matter to create form? Can we show matter that it matters?

Art is often made in a way that relies on cause-and-effect, means-and-end, form-and-matter distinctions. We see the end–the painting we plan to make–and use the means–paint–to reach that end. Art is often seen as a bifurcated process where concept and ideation precede fabrication, where the artist informs matter after imagining the desired form. Here, the concept is the cause, the fabrication the effect. Linear time has influenced how we see, make, and understand art as a linear cause-and-effect, just as it has influenced the Darwinian evolutionary model.

Many artists will tell you, however, that this is not really how art-making goes. Even the best-laid plans can prove themselves weak when the artist begins to make. The form has will, it wants to be a certain way, it knows how it needs to be, and the artist has to uncover this as they make. The artist becomes a communicator between form, matter, and herself, always already in collaboration with her means and end. To fabricate in imagination and then fabricate in matter is not the mode of fine art but instead, for Collingwood, the mode of craft. Making art is becoming conscious of an impulse, starting with “I feel… I don’t know what I feel,” and not knowing what you are trying to express until you have experienced its expression in the making. Art cannot be made through cause-and-effect, it demands a continuous becoming, becoming, being. Art is a becoming-conscious.

With art as a becoming-conscious, can bio-art be creative symbiogenesis? For, as we know, biomaterials have a will all their own, have life, consciousness, whatever term you so please to indicate being and desire. So, making art in the Collingwoodian vein of becoming conscious in the making, while also making art in collaboration with other biological beings, means that you are collectively making something organic that cannot be known until it is made. Sounds a bit like symbiogenesis evolution, huh?

This is bio-art. This is the renunciation of linear cause-and-effect in the creative process. This is creative symbiogenesis.

Oh, how lovely it would be could this line of thought end here. Would that the ethics of bio-art were so simple. Try as the bio-artist might to work in absolute, non-hierarchical, non-causal collectivist mode of creation, the bio-artist still calls the shots. She may claim until her face turns blue and her SCOBY grows mold that she works in a mode of absolute interspecies ethics. But this is simply not true. She buys slime mold from some guy in Florida and keeps it cold, inert in her fridge until she decides it’s time to resurrect the dead. She uses beeswax despite staunch veganism and justifies it in the name of expanded artistic affinity. She wraps mycelium in plastic so it grows how she likes it. She orders hot plates off Amazon and lets the world burn as her algae plastic simmers. Yes, her collaborators have voice, and yes, the bio-artist tries to listen. She really does try. But she is not blameless.She plays God, takes and gives and shapes life as she pleases, listening to their feedback but calling the shots nonetheless. The bio-artist makes her hand invisible, but it is still the hand that molds.

What can the bio-artist do? She must question everything before she makes, as she makes, as she is made. She must remember that humans are no better than any other critter, that we are not separate from any Other, that collaboration is the backbone of survival and of beauty. She must try in every moment to be and make being through care and intersubjective, interspecies empathy.

Why This, Why Now?

“Cybernated art is very important, but the art for cybernated life is more important, and it need not be cybernated… As happening is the fusion of various arts, so the Cybernetics is the exploitation of boundary regions between various existing sciences …

we are in open cir

c

u

it

s.”

– Nam June Paik

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How can art respond to the problems of (its) time in the medium of (its) time? Why should it? And just what media can speak to the unbelievably complex and ever-changing world in which we live. These questions demand dynamic answers, anything static or fixed cannot answer them. These questions demand a working out in their own medium, a visual question can only be answered in visual terms, a technologized question can only be answered in technologized terms. To translate visual language into written or verbal form can be an exercise in futility and false understanding. It remains to be seen whether the written word has any authority left these days, if anything that can really speak to our world can speak the language of words. After all, our culture is no longer dominated by the narrative form, by the novel, by the structures of language. We are no longer in Lyotard’s modernity, we no longer have a Grand Narrative that follows a linguistic meaning structure and provides us with a sense of social cohesion. Our lives play out in databases and rhizomes, we make meaning in video and on the Internet. Our contemporary lives play out through contemporary media and contemporary problems whose meaning must be understood in contemporary modes. Address the problems of TV life through TV. Address the complexity of bio-catastrophic life through bio-generative media. Address the absurdity of Internet adolescence through an absurd Internet art. We are in a world where the medium is the message. Some things are said in certain media that cannot be translated into word. It is strange to write about “new media”, if that’s what it must be called, because writing is certainly not a new media, it is strange and ancient as snakes. Perhaps our thesis papers should be written in steam engines, player pianos, Roblox minigames, and Halal cart LED signs. Yet, even McLuhan wrote a book. So “Time Piece” the text will try to translate what Time Piece the installation already says.

Time Piece speaks this language of visual art, of bio-art, of technologized art. They are asking and trying to solve the problem of new art for new life, new making for new society, new media for new meaning. Their medium is their message, they want to understand nature and technology and art by being nature and technology and art. They are trying to figure out what they mean and why they are (made). Trying to understand cybernated life by taking cybernated form; bio-catastrophic life by taking bio-generative form. Bio-art responds to the social realities and necessities of our time. Simply and frankly, the Earth is dying all around us, and fast, and it is terrifying, and it is hard not to feel hopeless. But we have no choice but to maintain hope, we must discover millions of small ways to live and fight and care. It is not an option to give up, even as the world burns. It has, sadly, become normalized in contemporary culture to view humans as a plague upon this world, and to resign to our own extinction as an apology for the damages we’ve done. Not only does this ignore the other species we’re taking out with us, but it fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between the human and the more-than-human. Robin Wall-Kimmerer shows us how First Nations, Metis, Inuit (FNMI) and Indigenous knowledge understands the human as part of a huge organic process, as one of many collaborators in an enormous ecosystem. Humans are not a plague upon nature, because we are not separate from nature. Accepting defeat and deciding we ought to just go extinct deeply misses the point: Nature depends on symbioses and intricately interdependent ecosystems. We must do our part as collaborators in the relational process that is nature.

Yet, of course, ça ne marche pas comme ça. Western colonial thinking does not allow humans to be in symbiosis with the Other, instead treating nature as something to be dominated, subordinated, exploited, and trampled upon by man. We coerce and manipulate our natural collaborators, extract everything we can from the earth. We take so much more than we need and force it to do as we please. This logic carries directly into the visual arts. We use immoral materials, so vein are we that our beings must be externalized ad infinitum, sculpted and molded with matter that will outlive us all. We refine nature, bend matter to our will. We dominate her and reassert our patriarchal dominance over her every time we paint in oil or cast in silicone. We view her as an object and an Other, something that can be represented in visual art, but always represented on the human’s terms. You can paint a tree because you see its beauty, but you hang that painting in a frame of dead wood.

The Aristotelian view of art as imitation suggests that art is the representation of the natural world through the informing of matter, that we see the natural beauty of the world and replicate it in our art. This logic, while tempting and historically celebrated, inherently suggests nature as the magical Other. If something is like us, we would not have to imitate it, we simply would be it. By making the natural into the Other, we reinforce an idea of man as separate from nature, as the pinnacle of creation, and as superior to all other organic life. Yes, the imitation theory of art recognized the immense beauty of nature, but it instrumentalizes this beauty, turns it into an object for human extraction and consumption.

Dr. Kim Tallbear speaks and writes on how we view nature, sex, and spirituality as objects, instead of as the intersubjective and collaborative relations that they are. Nature is not something you can hold in your hands, it’s not really even something you can point to. This is because nature is not an external object, it is a relation that the human is part of. When we objectify nature as such, we are already preparing to dominate it, viewing it outside of and below ourselves. This is, unconsciously, the precise logic that underlies an art philosophy of imitation. If we reorient ourselves to see nature as it is, as a dynamic relation, the notion of creative imitation becomes redundant. We are always already a part of nature, nature is a part of us, and we are working in collaboration to create new forms together. There is no need to imitate an external Other when we can collaborate with both internal and external relational beings. We must reorient practice and theory to a mode of relational collaboration, undoing the imitate and dominate logic many have taken up.

At present, ecological crisis and the logics that have prompted it are made manifest in most creative practice, both materially and philosophically. If we are to address the problems of our time in art, and if one of those problems is environmental collapse, we must work creatively to repair our relationship with the more-than-human organic. We must critically examine how we dominate nature casually, how environmental destruction is normalized and banalized, how our patriarchal obsession with overcoming the more-than-human world has led to this point of ecological collapse. This must be addressed in art by reorienting practice. To address environmental problems in visual forms, we must work against and challenge our automatic dominance of nature. We must conceive of ourselves as collaborators with other species, recognize that we owe so much to the more-than-human, and actively practice a mode of making that works against our dominance of nature.

This is why bio-art must be made today. It is the only media that can address the logics of ecological crisis in their form. The only art that can materially process and productively materialize how man and more-than relate to one another.

Some may critique bio-art as an exercise in novelty, a greenwashed sticker to throw atop an unsustainable or ornamental discipline, or an aesthetically pleasing way to pretend we are meaningfully caring for the more-than-human. It is taken as a new field that seeks to assert newness, trying to grab eyes and using sustainability to justify its desire for notoriety. To these critics, this text suggests learning about the history of biomaterials. Humans have been brewing kombucha, for example, from the Qin dynasty, around 221 BCE. The Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast (SCOBY) pellicle that is an inherent byproduct of kombucha has, thus, also been around since 221 BCE. There was no magical material transformation nor stunning development in fermentation technology that allowed SCOBY to be an artistic material. The material has always been there, we just never thought to use it to its creative potential, never saw the SCOBY as a creative collaborator. This is not because of its properties, but because of our perception of this microbial community, because of our perception of nature, and our logic of art as imitation, not collaboration. Fungi is between 635 million and 2.4 billion years old, sharing a common ancestor with man at 1.3 billion years ago. That is an inconceivably long expanse of time. There is nothing new about mycelium, yet we are only now coming to understand its incredible intelligence and creative potential. Biomaterials are not new, because the biological world is not new. It is simply we, humans so lost in the labyrinths of Western capitalist logics and anthro-exceptionalism, that are new in perceiving value in organic forms. Bio-art does not seek novelty, it is not trying to be avant-garde, its aesthetic and social values are not in its newness. Bio-art seeks to reinstate and reassert the value of the eternal, the more-than-ancient, the biological, the organic, the compostable, the communal, the natural. Bio-art seeks to repair, not invent. Bio-art’s medium is its message: Let’s work together.

So too does the art of the technological have its message in its medium, though the message may be quite different. Perhaps it will feel more intuitively clear, as our minds are already electrified and electronified today, we are all cyborgs, not goddesses.

Presently, we live in a world that is profoundly dominated by technology and digital media. As mentioned already in this fragment, we make meaning in digitized ways through digitized media in a digitized world. Our lives play out on the Internet, in databases, in 15-second clips, on jumbotrons and smart watches. In modernity, according to Lyotard, Azuma, and other post- and post-postmodern theorists, our lives were structured by grand narratives and literary forms of meaning-making. Today, our lives are structured by simulacra, by image economies, and new media meanings. Digital software governs so much of our lives. Our modes of living, communicating, thinking, feeling, relating are permanently altered by technologies. This has reached such a degree of intensity that we no longer even recognize it. Our lives are so inseparable from our technologies that we fail to even see how they inform our world constantly. Sometimes the obvious must be stated so that we can recognize it as real at all. We are in a deeply technologized society. But perhaps technologized society is already a misnomer, perhaps it is something more like cybernated society, computational society, or Digital Culture 2. Any term which shows that the virtual is now as real as the real, if not more so.

When technology comes to shape so much of our lives, when our reality is virtual and our analog is digitized, how could we possibly make art that responds to our time without making art that uses technology? If one is to express the experience of digital culture in art, one must use technology as a means of expression. The technology is there, silently shaping much of what we do. The creative computationalist has the power to reckon with this cultural moment in the medium of this cultural moment. As she codes and solders, she becomes conscious of digital life, becomes expressive in the making of digital life. We cannot know ourselves or our times today without knowing technology. This remains true in art.

It is of vital import to understand how technology has been instrumentalized for the domination of nature. We, as humans, have this incredible ability to make and innovate, one that drives us creatively and technologically. Yet, rather than understanding how technology and posthumanism is part of humanism, that what we make is part of who we are, and that our technological drive is a natural drive, we use technology to further dominate and Other the natural. We use our technology to guillotine whole forests when we could use it to plant new ones. We let chatbots consume small towns’ worth of water rather than using AI to come up with clean water solutions. We build microscopes so we might dissect and kill microbes in better view when we could use them to better understand our symbionts and collaborators. Technology has been so consistently used to kill nature. Can we use it to collaborate with nature instead? Must technology and biology be on opposite ends of a violent spectrum?

Time Piece brings nature and technology out of antagonism and into collaboration. The biological and the mechanical come to work together, become mutually expressive, aid man in her understanding of the interconnected world in which she operates. It reworks the violence of the technical into care between what is made and what makes. It forces us to reexamine what we consider to be human and non-, both in terms of the artificial and the natural.

Time Piece thus exists both as biology and mechanology, as organic and artificial, as ancient and new, as medium and as message. It is biological, mechanical, divine. It is becoming conscious of the problem of its time in the media of its time. It is reckoning with being a natural collaborator and with being under the sway of digital influence. It is bringing technology and biology into aesthetic community. It is cyborg and microbe, fiber optic cable and mycorrhizae, iPhone charger and photosynthesizer.

Why this, why now? Because only this can make sense of now.

Art Historical Time & The Historical Now

“The question is precisely to know whether the past has ceased to exist, or ceased to be useful...”

- Henri Bergson

*⏱*

History has come to be understood in strictly linear terms. There is a notable tendency to view all time before the present time as an inflexible arrow of cause-and-effect, a sequence of events each prompting the next. This conception of history aligns with human narrative structure, organic processes, and Darwinian evolutionary lineages. This does not, however, mean that linear historical time is actual past time as such. In fact, one cannot be so sure that there is such a thing as “past” at all. This paper does not claim to be one of quantum physics, nor does it claim to have a shiny new insight into the true, essential nature of time. It does, however, believe that linear time is a convenient gift of the human brain and a function of storytelling and meaning-making, not something actual or ontological. Time is much more bendy, loopy, and all-aroundy than we tend to think of it. We are constantly rendering the past in the present, calling up memories and histories, placing them in constellations and rhizomes with our current moment. Perhaps this is what ghosts are, not dead apparitions trapped in a living present, but past and future moments stacking on top of themselves and entering our perception.

While linear history is quite useful for the quantification and narrativization of human experience, it cannot accurately represent our experience of lived temporality. As expressed by Benjamin in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (italics added for purpose of clarity):

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time. (Benjamin, Thesis A)

When we engage with past times through present constellations, we enter Jetztzeit, a still-standing now-time ripe with revolutionary potential. Relying on history as a sequence of causal nexuses does not allow us to incarnate the past in the present, and it is this particular political form of reviving the past that yields liberatory results. Benjamin tells us that the French Revolution saw itself as Rome incarnate, blasting itself out of linear continuity, entering Jetztzeit, charging the present with the glorious energy of the past.

However, as good Benjaminian fangirls, we know that the evocation of the past is not without complexity. In “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, bringing the past into the present is a politically liberatory proposition. Yet, when we move into the realm of the aesthetic, incarnating the past can lend itself to Fascist logics all too easily. Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility shows us how Fascism plays out on the aesthetic plane. Rather than changing the economic relations that keep the masses in unfreedom, Fascism gives them expression, not revolution. It gives art to the masses, but this art cannot reflect contemporary culture, liberatory potential, or technological innovation, it must reenforce the relations of the past. Fascism uses antiquated aesthetics to support antiquated logics, to support economic relations which simply do not make sense in contemporary society. It weaponizes the past, particularly the aesthetics of the past.

So, in “Theses”, Benjamin shows us that incarnating the past in the present can be revolutionary. In Work of Art, he shows us how bringing aesthetics of the past into the present can be used Fascistically. What does this mean for art history and the artist? How can one evoke now-time in art without aestheticizing a barbarous past? This is something that all contemporary artists must reckon with, every time they make art. When we cling to antiquated conceptions of art, we are unconsciously playing into Fascism’s hand. So, the Antifa impulse may be to break entirely from art history, to disregard the aesthetic past and make only the radically new. Yet, when we leave art history in the past of linear time, we lose the ability to incarnate it politically in the present. How can a contemporary artist understand art history, let alone engage with or interpellate it into their work? How can a contemporary artist cling to an ancient conception of what art is, without aiding a Fascist aestheticization of antiquity and all its oppression? How could one view art history as living and present without the harm of the past being rendered aesthetically in the present?

These questions are inseparable from the logics of Time Piece. As a work that explores duration in art, it is fundamentally asking a question about what the past means for the present of art. Can art change so profoundly, yet still be what it has always been? Can we cling to a conception of the fine arts that has been true since the ancients, and can we make art that expresses the present? These primary questions inevitably prompt one to ask how the art historical relates to contemporary art, ask what it is we’re supposed to do with the past. Time Piece is terrified of both losing the past and romanticizing it, destroying it and deifying it, obscuring it and idealizing it.

Benjamin shows us how the present in the past is politically important and politically dangerous. This tension is what prompts Time Piece to interpellate works of the art historical past into the contemporary art present. “BioRelic No.1”, a mycelium form resembling a reliquary or alter is ornamented with four OLED displays running from Arduino Nano microcontrollers. Each of these displays is tiny, 128 x 64 piels and can only display poor images in black and white. Any image it shows is pixelated, miniaturized, distorted, and made small, strange, alien. Each display is cycling through three images each, all artworks from the past that are concerned with time or whose subject has to do with temporality. From the hands of the Sistine Chapel, always and forever about to touch yet frozen a moment apart, to Nude Descending a Staircase, where successive moments of time are shown in a single instant, to a still from Paik’s Good Morning Mr. Orwell, a simultaneous broadcast across timezones to respond to the new year of 1984. Time Piece is not alone in interrogating time in fine art. It brings these past works into the present so that the present may be ripe with now-time, full of creative, aesthetic, and liberatory potential. It renders past present, disavows linear cause-and-effect time.

Yet, in doing so, it flirts with the aesthetics of an oppressive past, especially given its reliquary form’s evocation of older Catholic arts. Herein lies the impetus for using OLEDs, a digital screen that renders the immortally conserved works of the past into poor, pixelated ghosts. There is a preservation of an aesthetic past, yes, but that past is brought into the modes of the present. These images recognize the significance of the past, but translate them into the language and means of our present moment, make them reproducible, miniature, and close. We incarnate the past with all its potential, but change the medium of expression to reflect the moment in which we make meaning, make art, and make our lives. We reorganize our historical now, respecting what has been and truly, thoughtfully, and with the intent of freedom, incarnating it in new modes, in means that understand our digital lives.

A Manifesto:

forgive my opacity. i demand it.

forgive my messianism. i preserve it.

art has always existed. art must remain concerned with its own problems. art must know why it calls itself by that name, and not by some other.

art has never existed before. art must become concerned with the world. art must remember when it was called by some other name, and not by that one.

art has no truck with your spatiotemporal orientation. it has no interest in affect. it does not care about you.

art is driving down the freeway of spatiotemporal orientation. it is concerned with effect. it cares immensely about you.

we have tried to dominate nature through quantification. she is sad and fighting back.

we have tried to dominate quantification through naturalism. she is mad and laying in wait.

notre holoent has a crush on votre holoent. est-ce que vous ressentez la meme chose?

how does one solve the problems of one’s time in a media outside the medium?

remember, reader, there are no splits here-banana or otherwise.

no chasms, all chiasmus.

so if art is experience discharged retrospectively, but there is no objet d’art, but there is pure autonomous consciousness, but consciousness is interface, but interface is reproducible, but reproduction is revolutionary, but the quantity is false quality, then do Fordists dream of electric slashes? do Fascists dream of electric auras?

so if the body is experience fragmented in visual data, but there is no multiplicity nor universality, but there is pure manufactured enfleshment, but enfleshment is interface, but interface is biological, but biology is software engineering, but the quality is false quantity, then do cyborgs dream of Barricelli’s electric Eden? do Marxists dream of analogue grandchildren?

do we contradict ourself? very well then, we contradict ourself, (we are large, we contain multitudes).

biological, mechanical, divine.

biological mechanical divine

biologicalmechanicaldivine

blgclmchncldvn

01100010 01101100 01100111 01100011 01101100 00100000 01101101 01100011 01101000 01101110 01100011 01101100 00100000 01100100 01110110 01101110 00001010

Manifesto Bibliography:

For Opacity, Edouard Glissant
“Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Walter Benjamin
“Three American Painters”, Michael Fried
Principles of Art, R.G. Collingwood
A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna J. Haraway
Poetics, Aristotle
Art and Objecthood, Michael Fried
Tony Smith’s account of the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike
On the Sublime, Cassius Longinus
N’TOO, Stephanie Dinkins
The Aesthetic Dimension, Herbert Marcuse
The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer
“Anti-Semitism & National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust’”, Moishe Postone
“Climate Barbarism”, Jacob Blumenfeld
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Anthropocene, Donna J Haraway
“Sixth Meditation”, Rene Descartes
Banana, Andy Warhol
“The Visible and the Invisible: The Intertwining—The Chiasm”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Art as Experience, John Dewey
“Body Extended: The Corporeality in New Media Art”, Maja Mumik
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility” from Illuminations, Walter Benjamin
Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson
“Implications of the Cell Animation Technique” from The Cinematic Apparatus, Kristin Thompson
“Picturing Efficiency: Precisionism, Scientific Management, and the Effacement of Labour”, Sharon Corwin
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Phillip K. Dick
Nils Aall Barricelli’s autonomous evolving integers research
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx
Song of Myself, Walt Whitman
Queer Times, Black Futures, Kara Keeling

Art That Dies to Prevent the Death of Art

“Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. ‘There is the blueprint,’ they say.”

- Italo Calvino

*⏱*

Why do we demand immortality of our art? Where does the obsessive need for conservation originate? What in the human impulse to innovate leads to the human impulse to preserve? We have grown accustomed to believing that all artwork must be made to last forever. Art schools teach to coat your paintings in a UV protectant so the colours don’t fade. Archivists spend lifetimes preserving fragile pieces of paper. We extract the most immortal materials we can and seal them in protected hovels, under glass and in temperature controlled warehouses. Of course there is historical value in preserving that art which came before, of course the museum is a temple and one oughtn’t make art without looking at lots of art first, of course we want to learn from historical art so we can preserve art. There is so much beauty that I am so glad I get to see because of the hard work of conservationists.

Yet, the impulse to externalize one’s being in an immortal artifact is nonetheless worthy of a deeper consideration. It seems natural to want to externalize one’s being. Being(s) make being(s), we reproduce, we invent, we create, we inform. This impulse is so ancient and ubiquitous that one must take it as ontological or innate to the human spirit at least, the spirit of all being and being itself at most. But why must this externalization, when it takes the form of fine art, live forever?

The act of creation can be a dissolution of the ego, a becoming pure sensorium or a radical negation of the self in the presence of the Other. This is true in many forms of creation. Orgasm is a little death, as the French say, a moment of becoming no one at all while making a new someone. Art-making can be a little death too, a surrendering of oneself to what one makes, a giving up a self to bring an Other self into being. The truest of true acts of creation, the truest of true modes of art-making, involves not the extension or propagation of the ego, but a death of the ego. But this cannot be said of the immortal work of art. To externalize oneself into a new being that will outlive its maker is not an ego death, it is an extension of the ego, a desire to make other beings live on in the form of oneself. It is an act of egoism and anthropocentrism to demand that other matter lives on in your name. This has become the dominant mode of the fine arts, to externalize one’s ego rather than dying in the act of creating new being. Immortal art is industry standard, and I have been critiqued, jokingly and otherwise, for being a conservationist’s nightmare, that my work could never succeed because it cannot outlive me. And perhaps these critics are correct. They probably are.

But I am not afraid of death, so I die each time I make, I die each time my work dies, I die each time the beings that eat my dead work die. I am in the cycle of creation and destruction, of birth and of decay, I am in it with the beings I help be, I am not going to live on through them because I am not more important than them. We will die together, over and over, and we will help bring new beings into being by our deaths.

If we want art to be possible and sustainable into the future, we must start working in non-anthropocentric ways. We must kill our ego to keep the planet alive, let our art die to keep our art alive. If we want art to be responsive to its time, we must make art that can die in its time. For death is all around us, surrounds and enslaves us, is immanent and messianic and totally neutral, reminds us we are organic, reminds us we are mechanic–and our art should make that known.

My dad died the day after I turned 18, dropped dead out of nowhere and was buried in the saddest cemetery with the most beautiful headstone. Within a year, all my art was dying too. I am not foolish enough to think that my dying art isn’t in some way a grieving of my dead dad. I believe the medium is the message, so maybe that’s how I avoided looking his ghost in the eyes. Instead of making art where him and his death were the subject, I began to make art where death is in the object. I began to make art that I cannot control, that grows mold when it feels it should not, that has a will of its own, because I learned that life is something I cannot control, that people die when it feels they should not, that life and death have a will all their own.

My father died but he is alive in all my work. And then the work dies and he dies again with it. And then the work makes new life in compost bins, and he makes new life from 6 feet under. And I practice death over and over, and I practice life over and over.

I have never been afraid to die, even as a child I knew there was nothing bad on the other side, that maybe the process of dying would be scary or hard or painful, but that there was nothing to be afraid of at the end of this life. I think I always felt close to death in a way I couldn’t place. Death just never felt far. If you believe me that time stacks on top of itself, I think my dad’s death and my own and probably many others I do not yet know are stacked on top of my birth and that the spirits I saw in lucid dreams were ghosts of future pasts. Almost every night of my early childhood I dreamed that I was a mushroom who lived amongst other mushrooms. With the clarity of adulthood and retrospection, I can see that I was dreaming of the mycelial network. I was dreaming of being part of the Great Decomposer. I was dreaming of being so dead that I am beyond death, that I become the thing that tends to the dead, sorts them into new life. Now I live so alive that I can spare a little death everytime I make, I can spare a little death each time what I make dies too.

When my dad died, I could have died too. It felt like I might. It felt like everything I loved died with him, because he loved it all, because he loved being alive. It felt like art was dying, but art was where he and I could find each other best, and I could not let art die with him. So, to prevent art from dying, I let art die. I surrendered to the will of the Grand Organic. I make beyond myself, I work with life to make being, I work with death to make being, I work with being to make life, I work with being to make death. I am not saying that death can only be expressed visually in a medium that dies, plenty of fine art speaks hauntingly and sublimely to what it’s like to make eye contact with the angel of death. I am just saying that, for me, dying art is the only art I can grow.

I make art that dies to prevent the death of art. I make art into a death. I make art in death. I make death an art.

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