Nadim Samman (eBook)

Dark Arts

Contemporary life plays out amid a profusion of technical systems whose inner workings are obscure—if not locked. There is no master key. And yet, this encrypted world must be borne somehow. Fortunately, the term “encryption” contains a latent spatial imaginary. And this imaginary yields insight into what is hidden by and within tech. In the face of information asymmetries, and when cryptographic de-coding cannot (or does not) happen, this perspective affords aesthetic purchase.

A spatial imaginary enables poiesis—the sense of making or creation which lies at the core of art—even in the face of the uncrackable. If an encrypted matter cannot be opened up and inspected, it may yet be rescored. Poiesis supplies narrative and pictorial inroads, a kind of endogenous psychological map of strange terrain—or, at least, certain points of orientation. While reviewing select artworks from the last decade, this book runs counter to Big Tech’s erroneous claims regarding a new culture of transparency and openness—showcasing, instead, a poetics of encryption.

The word “encryption” is built around the image of a crypt, as a primary figure for an enclosed or hidden place. Harking back to ancient funerary practices, the “crypt” contains a latent history that far predates modern technology. As an implicit corollary, the question of burial techniques, and the ritual and performative aspect of sealing-up are raised (like the dead) by the term itself. A crypt, by definition, contains a body. Negotiating its built structure thus activates drama concerning whether the buried figure can rest in peace, whether it may be disinterred by a sanctioned practice, such as archeology, or de-crypted by grave robbing.

A crypt is an occult place. The knowledge that it contains is esoteric, and may be gleaned only through recondite or suspect methods. As a work of criticism, this book oscillates between both poles, but leans more towards the latter. If cryptography exemplifies a lawful right-hand path for dealing with digital encryption—a scientific method—then poiesis and its interpretation pursue the left-hand path. It is the road of images and their dynamic imagination. This path may seem suspect if judged incorrectly. Yet, as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard reminds us, “Images are not concepts. They do not withdraw into their meaning. Indeed, they tend to go beyond their meaning.”1 Furthermore, “If the image that is present does not make us think of one that is absent, if an image does not determine an abundance—an explosion—of unusual images, then there is no imagination.”2 Through such abundance, the alienating, guarded, or jealous implications of encrypted domains are revalued—a different operation from unlocking.

Lying partially buried within the term “encryption,” the image of the crypt does not only hold a store of latent spatial figures and language. It overflows with supplementary frames of reference. Indeed, the crypt image is the wellspring of a whole poetics, “an aspiration toward new images.”3 It is like a seed that, when properly cultivated, bears much fruit. While establishing a familiar architectural figure through which to speak about relations to encrypted space, it goes even further, emanating tokens for death, afterlife, and spirit. If the sublime object of a closed grave is the deceased’s soul, a cryptic imaginary introduces high stakes for what may lay buried in digitally encrypted domains, namely, an embodied, personified point of reference—the inscription of an individual’s “essence” or ontological status within the technological field. Here, the spiritual and political converge.

This said, endeavors to make poetic sense of encryption must reckon with gloom and spooky affects. For the crypt image does not merely contain darkness, safely, in the manner of spent nuclear fuel enclosed within a holding system. Whenever tapped, even slightly (and especially by Nietzsche’s tuning fork), it disgorges both optic metaphors and unenlightened effluvia. The latter washes over the cultural scene—a wave of mysteries, monsters, and hauntings that should be out of step with today’s scientism but which, in fact, track it like a shadow. As we shall see, more tech breeds more encryption. And with it, Mehr Dunkelheit.

According to the political economist Sarah Myers West, “Surfacing and making visible the imaginaries we develop around encryption provides an entry point to understanding the implications of encryption technologies in a networked society.”4 These imaginaries influence perceptions of “what encryption is, what it does, and what it should do.”5 Endeavoring to broaden the scope of her analysis, before taking on national security and state secrecy, West sketches a brief genealogy of cryptography—from Egyptian religious hieroglyphics, to the Renaissance occultist and inventor of steganography, Johannes Trithemius. In her view, this esoteric history still colors public attitudes. As she has it, “the association between cryptography and the occult is powerful: despite the efforts of cryptographers over centuries to establish the practice as a science, it retains the residual mark of these dark associations.”6 But what are these residual marks, beyond a general suspicion of secret practices? West’s article does not venture any further, instead moving onto questions of policy. As we shall see, encryption’s occult imaginary abides today—indeed, flourishes—in an updated and rather surprising iconography that does not only address code but all inscrutable infrastructures.

This book is structured with three sections; each is a meditation upon a particular mode of embodied relation to the encrypted “interior.” These are imaginative exercises that result in a cascade of images. The artworks and associations that make up each cascade imply distinct models for where an intelligent human is placed vis-à-vis the realm of digital secrets and/or hidden mechanisms. The first concerns being locked in: burial or entombment within a technological grave, and the labor of escape from this situation. The second explores the affective response to being intellectually locked out of ubiquitous consumer and industrial products; neither archeologist nor effective grave robber. The third offers an anatomy of strange effects associated with a scrambling of inside and outside, open and closed—oblique perspectives that are associated with being locked down.

That said, the more visible titles of each section deploy a metaphor of darkness classically associated with what is hidden from view. Following the Bachelardian logic of imagination, these dark tokens “go beyond” concepts of the locked while similarly emanating from the primary image of the crypt: “I. Black Site,” “II. Black Box,” and “III. Black Hole.” Each serves as a tag for the way encrypted objects are negotiated in the course of everyday life, and the way they order experience. If these names are not passwords, then they are incantations: spells that structure the discussion of visual art’s interest in what cannot be seen, through a magical focus on sensory aporia.

“Black Site” opens with Jon Rafman’s 2010 refashioning of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, setting up a discussion of who or what has been stolen away—through consideration of works by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, Lance Wakeling, Trevor Paglen, Simon Denny, Evan Roth, Julian Charrière, Mary Mattingly, Amy Balkin, Suzanne Treister, Vladan Joler, Critical Art Ensemble, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Roger Hiorns, and Tom McCarthy.

“Black Box” unfastens with a melancholy rumination on the rhomboid in Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 masterpiece, Melencolia I. The blurry outlines of a face appear on the surface of this object, presaging the following artists’ reflections on the inscrutable: Carsten Nicolai, Félix Luque Sánchez, Britta Thie, Susanna Hertrich, Beny Wagner, Tillman Hornig, Adam Harvey, Mimi Ọnụọha, Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, American Artist, Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Zach Blas, Chim↑Pom, and Eva and Franco Mattes.

Finally, “Black Hole” unseals a monstrous triangulation between the myths of Bitcoin and QAnon, astrophysics, and the riddle of the Sphinx. The artists discussed do not escape its event horizon, including Jonas Staal, Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion, Omsk Social Club, Ed Fornieles, Joshua Citarella, UBERMORGEN, Brad Troemel, Jalal Toufic, Eva and Franco Mattes, Paola Pivi, Marguerite Humeau, Davide Quayola, Egor Kraft, and Nora Al-Badri.

But what of the term “Technocene”? It denotes a way of thinking about the contemporary from the perspective of art, addressing how the overwhelming prevalence of technology in all corners of life (and death) becomes the subject of cultural reckoning. A significant feature of this moment is a preoccupation with periodization—not least “Anthropocene,” “Capitalocene,” “Chthulucene,” and so on—which is arguably a result of tech both preserving and putting to work everything that can be datafied: unsettling our place in time. The Technocene is punctuated by anachronism: from a cryogenically frozen human head awaiting reanimation, to the roars of prehistoric mammals echoing through museums; from a...