Futures and Fictions

by Simon O'Sullivan

  Jacolby Satterwhite’s Reifying Desire

  What might the new landscape of derivatives “look” like (beyond the abstract shimmering differential network I mentioned in the first half of this essay)? Jacolby Satterwhite’s films give us one imaginative take on this future-in-the-present insofar as the digital animation he uses offers an “unlimited terrain of visual possibilities” (Kreutler 2014). Indeed, as with derivatives, the different space-times of Satterwhite’s films depend on the increasing power and speed of data processing in order to map out and give “realism” to these worlds that double our own. But Satterwhite’s films also introduce a difference into this post-digital landscape. They are not critical, at least, as this is typically figured on the Left (indeed, they operate in very much a post-critical space), but in their layered complexity and especially their deployment of more “human” aspects alongside the technological, they offer something different from the pre-emptive marketing of machine algorithms.

  Figure 2. Jacolby Satterwhite (2013), still from Reifying Desire 6. Courtesy of the artist and Moran Bondaroff, Los Angeles.

  It is worth noting Satterwhite’s own personal history here; his early experiences with gaming, watching music videos and writing code for websites (including those selling pornography). Satterwhite is of a generation as equally at home in these forms of digital culture as in any reality outside the screen (although his films also reference “real” spaces such as club culture). In the series Reifying Desire, Satterwhite presents libidinally charged scenarios that portray a queer sexuality alongside other more inhuman encounters and connections (for example an abstract and machinic immaculate conception scene in Reifying Desire 3). In an interview with Evan Moffit for Frieze magazine, Satterwhite draws attention to the impact AIDS (and the practice of “barebacking”) had on his work, but also references other key archives such as Outsider Art (and there is something about the sometimes cramped — and chaotic — spaces in the films that looks to the latter).

  Satterwhite has also suggested in another previous interview with Charlie Ross (in relation to his involvement in the 2014 Whitney Biennale) that his films are about bringing disparate archives into conjunction and thus making differences congruent. A combinatory logic is in play here — not unlike that found in some experiments in 3D printing — that produces complex additive images which themselves militate against the increasing standardisation of subjectivity of web 2.0. This is then not a refusal of our automated reality — there is no nostalgia for the real in Satterwhite’s work — but a working through of our relationship to technology and an exploration of what forms this relationship could take. Here, we might say, alienation is method and the poetry comes from the code.

  Reifying Desire then presents different spaces and places inhabited by complex avatars with various prostheses themselves single and multiplied. All these dreamscapes and figures are of different scales and/ or change scales and move at different speeds, like a digital Alice in Wonderland or a destabilised Second Life. This visual complexity is accompanied by electronic music, produced by collaborators, and which, in its sampled texture, doubles the imagery. Later in the Reifying Desire series there is a further layering of imagery and an acceleration of action that produces a hallucinogenic rush (the drug references — like the dream ones — are inescapable). Streams of chains, threads and beads are projected from different avatars and link together various objects; some of the imagery in Reifying Desire 5, for example, is not unlike recent scientific imagery of cell/molecular combination. In terms of derivatives (and Meillassoux’s thesis of the radical contingency of the future), the films are not exactly predicting what’s to come, but actively writing it — presenting, it seems to me, different audio/visual propositions.

  If derivatives, alongside other instruments such as risk assessment, are involved in modelling a future that might come about (rather than attempting to predict it accurately, which, of course, would mean the end of any speculative nesting of fictions) then rather than suggesting that an art practice might follow the logic of the derivative, could we not say that the derivative follows the logic of art insofar as art is the presentation of a possible world? These fictions — or models — are not to be thought as representational, they are not near or far approximations of the real, but rather exist alongside the real, as it were. In fact, we might go further here and suggest that the real only “exists” insofar as it is can be modelled.

  Satterwhite’s films are also involved in developing a new kind of language, one in which objects become subjects just as subjects become objects (there is a kind of generalised digital animism at play). He has also referred to Gertrude Stein in relation to his work, suggesting that the use of his own body in his films operates as a punctuation mark (Satterwhite and Moffit 2016). In fact, it seems to me that it is also the cut-up, and, earlier, the tradition of collage that inform the logic of the films. The figures, objects — and links — construct a strange non-linear syntax of sorts, one that is then overlaid with Satterwhite’s own digitally rendered handwriting which then adds a further level of visual and semiotic complexity.

  Crucially, then Satterwhite greenscreens his body, performing dance moves (or “vogueing”), into these digital landscapes. He has stated that it was the desire to both construct spaces in which he could perform, and to actualise the kind of space of his earlier paintings, that precipitated his turn to animation. As with Trecartin, the films involve a certain experimental hybridity of the “live” (or actual) and the digital (or virtual). In Reifying Desire 2, Satterwhite also uses real landscapes — coast and forest, for example — that then have digital animation “spliced” into them. Later, in Reifying Desire 5, Satterwhite performs in more public places — various sites in New York City for example — footage of which, again, is then spliced with digital animation or otherwise manipulated. In terms of the utilisation of his own drawings and handwriting we might also say there is a further hybridity between the analogue (or low-tech) and the digital (or high-tech).

  Other binaries are also disrupted and played with in the Reifying Desire series: the machine/body (where Satterwhite becomes cyborg), but also masculine/ feminine and black/white. Although the films are concerned with the male — and queer — Black body, there is a sense in which Satterwhite’s worlds, with their morphing bodies and strange conjunctions, gesture towards both a post-race and, indeed, post-gender world. Again, it is as if different future possibilities are being played out. This is no longer an artist who is immune to the play of differences he writes; rather the artist is themself subject to this play of differences, “taking on” on the different positions and propositions. Satterwhite’s films explore these other — synthetic — forms of life, whilst also providing some of the images and narratives appropriate to them.

  A further key binary is that between the private and the public. As well as the use of his own body Satterwhite’s films involve the deployment of a personal and intimate mythos imbricated with images and effects that are enabled by new technology. For example, in an earlier film, Country Ball, Satterwhite “overwrites” images of him and his family dancing at a gathering (sourced from a VHS home video), at one point turning the whole scene into a digital flag that a dancing avatar (based on himself) waves. There is a folding of one fiction within another, but also this looping connection to different times. Here the past, in the form of Satterwhite’s videoed memories, connects to a future in which he has become a digital image. It is the technology that allows this flattening of time insofar as it enables the manipulation of the visual and aural (again, Burroughs and his experiments with both tape and video recorders would seem a key precursor here).

  Also at play here is his mother’s own mythos and lexicon of drawings/diagrams (often of everyday objects) — future patent possibilities as she saw them — and the recordings she made of herself singing. The latter, mixed in with various types of electronic music, resulted in the sonic fiction Birds in Paradise. The diagrams, re-drawn and ani
mated, are incorporated within Satterwhite’s own imagery, to produce a further difference. Although abstract there is then a kind of narrative, or series of overlapping narratives, at play, themselves produced by a number of disparate elements. In interview Satterwhite suggests that both his turn to his own memories and the use of his own body was a way of sidestepping typical art-historical references and Western art ideologies — dominant myths — with their particular portrayal of Black subjectivity. In fact, Reifying Desire 3 involves a kind of commentary on this: as well as anything else it is a fiction about the Black prostitutes in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) (Satterwhite and Ross 2014).

  Although I have been attending to the logic of financial instruments in this article, we might also look elsewhere for a logic of fictioning the future, for example with the Cybernetic culture research unit’s concept of “hyperstition” (defined as an “element of effective culture that makes itself real” and a “fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device”) (Cybernetic culture research unit); or, indeed, Sun Ra’s concept (and practice) of myth-science. In fact, Satterwhite’s multimedia audio-visuals have much in common with Sun Ra’s future-past archives and “sonic fictions” (as Kodwo Eshun calls them). With Satterwhite, it seems to me, we have a kind of “updating” of myth-science, especially in the deployment of new narratives and image worlds for “post-internet” subjectivities that do not necessarily recognise themselves in more dominant narratives. As with Sun Ra, technology is re-purposed for other ends, though here it is cyberspace rather than outer space that provides the alternative setting. Ultimately it is this that the logic of financial instruments does not attend to: the need for new images and stories about our relation to the future and the past, to technology and the non-human, but also to each other. In these complex works of libidinal engineering by artists like Satterwhite and Trecartin we move beyond any simple critique — or, indeed, refusal — of the technological (as in certain forms of critical theory), but there is also not a simple affirmation of the predictions of capitalist axiomatics (as in certain forms of “accelerationist” thinking). Indeed, in this working through in the present of what’s to come, and especially what forms human-machine relations might take, it seems to me that fiction — or what I would call fictioning — is crucial.

  1. Shaviro follows the important work of Kodwo Eshun in this area and especially his article “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism”, which attends to a situation in which “power operates predictively” through the “envisioning, management, and delivery of reliable futures” (Eshun 2003: 289). For Eshun this signals the end of the “utopian project for imagining social realities” and, instead, SF becomes concerned “with engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present” (Eshun 2003: 290).

  2. See: http://www.robinhoodcoop.org/DEMOCRATIZING_THE_POWER_OF_FINANCE; accessed 2 February 2016.

  3. See the exhibition (and accompanying catalogue) HFT: The Gardener, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 22 September–29 October 2016.

  4. See http://www.goldinsenneby.com/gs/?page_id=3; accessed 2 February 2016.

  5. See, for example, the exhibition Priority Infield (and book/catalogue of same name), Zabludowicz Collection, London, 2 October-21 December 2014. The installation of the films as a series of different “levels” harks back, it seems to me, to Matthew Barney’s own Cremaster film series — indeed, in both, the fiction is created and sustained through a series of chapters (precisely, a sequencing); as we shall see the same is the case for Satterwhite’s Reifying Desire film series.

  6. Thanks to David Burrows for this point, and for conversations about Trecartin and mythotechnesis more generally.

  Works Cited

  Ayache, Elie (2010), The Blank Swan: The End of Probability. Chichester: Wiley.

  ——— (2014), “The Writing of the Market”, Interview, in Robin Mackay (ed.), Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development, 8: 517-602.

  Cybernetic culture research unit, “Hyperstition”. https://web.archive.org/web/20030204195934/http://ccru.net/syzygy.htm; accessed 4 March 2016.

  Eshun, Kodwo (2003), “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism”, in CR: The New Centennial Review, 3.2: 287-302.

  Fitch, Lizzie in conversation with Ossian Ward (2014), “Supplies, Situations, Spaces”, in Priority Infield. London: Zabludowicz Collection, 133-37.

  Fitch, Lizzie and Ryan Trecartin (2014), Priority Infield. London: Zabludowicz Collection.

  Glazek, Christopher (2014), “The Past is Another Los Angeles”, in Priority Infield. London: Zabludowicz Collection, 67-73.

  Goldsmith, Kenneth (2014), “Reading Ryan Trecartin”, in Priority Infield. London: Zabludowicz Collection, 91-97.

  Jameson, Fredric (2005), “Introduction: Utopia Now”, in Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso, xi-xvi.

  ——— (2015), “The Aesthetics of Singularity”, in New Left Review, 92: 101-32.

  K.D. (2014), Headless: A Novel. Berlin: Sternberg.

  Kreutler, Kei (2014), “Artist Profile: Jacolby Satterwhite”, in Rhizome online. http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/jan/09/artist-profile-jacolby-satterwhite/; accessed 13 September 2016.

  Langley, Patrick (2012), “The Real Internet is Inside You”, in The White Review online. http://www.thewhitereview.org/art/ryan-trecartin-the-real-internet-is-inside-you/; accessed 23 April 2016.

  Malik, Suhail (2014), “The Ontology of Finance”, in Robin Mackay (ed.), Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development, 8: 629-812.

  Meillassoux, Quentin (2008), After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier. London: Continuum.

  Satterwhite, Jacolby (dir.) (2012), Country Ball, 1989– 2012 [13 min]. Available at https://vimeo.com/user2947668; accessed 13 September 2016.

  ——— (dir.) (2014), Reifying Desire film series (1-6) [various length]. Extracts available at https://vimeo. com/user2947668; accessed 13 September 2016.

  Satterwhite, Jacolby and Charlie Ross (2014), “Interview: Whitney Biennale ‘14’”. Available at: https://charlierose.com/videos/16971; accessed 13 September 2016.

  Satterwhite, Jacolby and Evan Moffit (2016), “Interview: Body Talk”, in Frieze online. https://frieze.com/article/body-talk-0; accessed 13 September 2016.

  Satterwhite, Patricia, Jacolby Satterwhite and Nick Weiss (2016), Birds in Paradise [4 min]. Available at https://soundcloud.com/thevinylfactory/ birds-in-paradise; accessed 13 September 2016.

  Shaviro, Steven (2011), “Hyperbolic Futures: Speculative Finance and Speculative Fiction”, in The Cascadia Subduction Zone, 1.2: 3-5 and 12-15.

  Trecartin, Ryan (dir.) (2013), CENTER JENNY [53 min]. Available at: https://vimeo.com/75735816; accessed 13 September 2016.

  Trecartin, Ryan, Katie Kiamura and Hari Kunzru (2011), “Ryan Trecartin: In Conversation”, in Frieze online. http:// https://www.frieze.com/article/ ryan-trecartin-conversation; accessed 23 April 2016.

  Treister, Suzanne (2016), HFT The Gardener. London: Annely Juda Fine Art.

  A CENTURY OF ZOMBIE SOUND

  AUDINT (Toby Heys, Steve Goodman and Souzanna Zamfe)

  Originally formatted in 1945 by three ex-members of the Ghost Army, AUDINT now currently consists of Toby Heys, Steve Goodman, Souzanna Zamfe and Patrick Doan. Drafted into the research cell in 2009 by a rogue artificial intelligence named IREX2, they have been directed to investigate the ways in which ultrasonic, sonic and infrasonic frequencies are used to modulate psychological, physiological and architectural states. Of particular interest is the fact that ever since the invention of recording technologies, such as the phonograph and telephone, military organisations have been interested in the ways in which vibration not only connects but also converges and deterritorialises the realms of the living and the dead. This is a brief historical overview of AUDINT’s spectral archive, stretching from 1922 to 2064, a period referred to as “a century of zombie sound”.

  1922: Muzak

  The same year that Ford’s doct
rine of functional specialisation and division of labour flourishes, Wired Radio is made available for the industrial plant. Created by US Major General George Owen Squier, this technology allows radio programming to be piped into factories, restaurants, small businesses and to individual subscribers. This is the inception of Muzak. A neologism of music and Kodak, Muzak begins life by adopting the rhythmical science of the factory’s assembly line. Meanwhile, the social sciences are harnessed to organise the most economic ways that the single and mass social body can carry out tasks in the workplace. By invoking Yerkes and Dodson’s law (which proposes that there is an observable relationship between levels of arousal and performance), Muzak’s engineers index actions, emotions and human relations, in a musical framework of reference within the workplace. The ultimate expression of this orchestration manifests in their elaborate programming of fifteen-minute blocks of music known as “Stimulus Progression”.

  Premiering in the late 1940s, “Stimulus Progression” is a method of organising music according to the “ascending curve”, which works counter to the “industrial efficiency curve” (also denoted as the average worker’s “fatigue curve”). Subdued songs progressing to more stimulating ones, in fifteen-minute sequences (followed by silences of thirty seconds up to quarterof-an-hour periods between transmissions), span the average workday. Yielding better worker efficiency and productivity than random musical programming, the industrial functionalisation of organised sound has begun.