IN THE TANK – a conversation with Brigitte Louter & Igor Bobeldijk
Until 22 October, the exhibition Obsoletely New! runs in SIGN, showing works of Finn Wagner, Sébastien Robert, Brigitte Louter and Igor Bobeldijk. In this interview, our correspondent Michiel Teeuw talks with Brigitte Louter and Igor Bobeldijk, reflecting on their works and the artistic construction of knowledge and understanding of the world around us.
Brigitte Louter: My work departs from thoughts about the Daphnia, or water flea. It’s a tiny crustacean that is very common in water bodies across the world. They are beautifully transparent, which is one of the reasons they’re a beloved subject to observe under the microscope. The emphasis in this work isn’t so much on the Daphnia itself; In fact, the work doesn’t really show the animal itself. It is more so about how these animals are viewed and treated by humans, and the possibility or impossibility of truly understanding them.
Igor Bobeldijk: I see my creatures as prehistoric and primordial, because I just started creating them. They have the most simple forms, like worms and trilobites. They’re just starting to evolve into this new environment, that’s created with our technology, but no longer with ourselves in it. There’s the creatures I made, like the camera and the worm made out of servo’s. But of course, there’s also a lot more creatures in the imagination. I imagine a whole ecosystem, with crabs and other creatures. The creatures which are there, don’t conceal their mechanics or chips. I wanted to keep it transparent because I like to overtly display how things work.
BL: It’s very interesting to hear you say that. For the Daphnia, it’s sort of their main appeal – if they have any appeal. You can see what’s happening inside. With your robots, I’d say it’s also kind of practical in a way?
IB: Yes, but I guess with the Daphnia it’s also kind of practical. Maybe there’s a bit of a difference: the Daphnia is a living organism, and it’s a bit cruel that they’re constantly investigated. I wouldn’t like to be a Daphnia that much. They would constantly look at how I function, what I ate.
BL: Or if you have parasites…
IB: Exactly. Maybe it’s something you get used to. But if I would just become transparent tomorrow, I’d be very uncomfortable. But it’s hard to know if my worms or the Daphnia have enough self-awareness to be shy about what’s happening.
MT: To zoom out, the environment they’re contained in also contains a lot of transparency, with lots of see-through encasings and transparent oils. Could you tell us more about the surroundings we find the creatures in?
IB: My main goal was a sort of laboratory setting, but I think it could also be an exhibit. One of my inspirations was a scene from Alien IV, where all these failed clones from Ripley are in cylinders. It’s a part of the laboratory that’s a bit like a museum. I like to think there’s this underground resistance movement, creating these fish that can swim inside the servers – to infiltrate the mainframe and hack it. So energy-wise it’s a self-sufficient environment, off the grid.
MT: And where can we find the Daphnia? Brigitte, could you tell us a bit about these surroundings?
BL: The surrounding consists of a folder, based on the shape and function of a ring binder. From the binder, a long paper curls with a drawing resembling a diagram of a sediment core. Collecting sediment cores with dormant Daphnia eggs of different ages, resurrecting and studying them is a way to learn about Daphnia populations through time. The sediment core-paper is placed on an unusually shaped table with two other objects. The shape of the table is determined by the objects it’s holding and adapted to its contents.
MT: And what kind of display or situation are we seeing in your work?
BL: I would like it to be somewhat of an ambiguous display, posing the question what context it belongs to. I have an interest in educational tools and museum displays. On these, findings are presented in a way that is convincing, and puts you in a line of thought: “Now, information is going to be presented to me”. Hopefully this odd and ambiguous situation leaves room to question for yourself: “What is the information that’s presented to me, is anything being explained here at all?”. At the core of my work are slippery things: feelings of longing, elusiveness, thoughts about value systems, empathy for a water flea… These slippery things find their way into these contexts of objective and factual information – contexts which they usually don’t inhabit.
MT: I think both of you skillfully work with the appropriation of specific aesthetics, shaping sites that grant it a lot of legitimacy. Simultaneously, you display things and discuss topics that go against the normalcies and tendencies of those sites. A laboratory with a lot of hacking and corruption, and a scientific site with lots of space for feeling and empathy. As a visitor of the works, I feel this productive discrepancy is exactly brought forward by the legitimacy granted by these appropriated aesthetics and their spatial organisation.
BL: Yes, I like to question and pay attention to every detail, and play with this legitimacy. Starting from what seem like mundane details like the shape of a table, a ring binder. These are not only aesthetic.
They are a way of organizing information and thinking. I try to consider all details to be equally important.
IB: For my work, I’m thinking of a scenography which gives a suggestion of a certain setting with very mundane objects. These pipes, you see them in every house, if you look behind the cupboard or something. Because the pipes go into the wall, you immediately think they must have some kind of function. Some of them do have a function for me, like hiding wires, but there’s no oil going through them. You could imagine it though, and that’s a child-like way of looking at things I like to explore. Children are very good at immersion, being convinced of something. A stick can be a sword.
MT: In the works you present, the thresholds between the human, machine and animal are subtly exceeded. During our introductory talk, Brigitte introduced me to the idea of mechanomorphic [machine-like] seeing – as an alternative to anthropomorphic [human-like] and zoomorphic [animal-like] seeing.[1] To share some examples, we could look at Fritz Kahn’s and René Descartes’ ideas of the human body as a machine, animal videos and ape theories, bio-industrial instrumentalizations of animals and the humane-looking care robots of the uncanny valley, as ontologically stable examples of these projective ways of seeing. Simultaneously, concepts like the more-than-human, postcolonial hybrids, furry art, cyborg aesthetics and dishumanism challenge these ways of seeing by more deeply disrupting the initial categories, as well as questioning these ways of looking. How do you relate to the anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and mechanomorphic?
[1] These are part of a larger group of morphics, like the geomorphic [earth-like], theriomorphic [beast-like] and the broader biomorphic [organism-like] seeing.
BL: In one of the objects I’m presenting, a cut-out of a water flea is dissected[2] in a number of transparent layers, creating a space connected by textile. This is based on folding bellows, which are made to protect machine parts which are constantly in movement. I was thinking a lot about the daphnia’s protection, flexibility and adaptability. So the bellows are also, in a way, about the space the Daphnia takes up – and the way it takes up space. On the inside, on the transparent layers, there are small circles pointing at body parts of the daphnia – like the heart or the antennae. On one side of the circles, there are very small pictures of machine parts that correspond to those parts. On the other side, the pictures show corresponding human organs. In a text I read recently, I was struck by a paragraph about comparing animals to “Heat-seeking missiles”. I thought it was a simple and arrogant comparison. The challenge that was posed in the text, was to question the use of anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic language. I was wondering to what extent we have the language to describe an animal. Of course, you get into fantasy quite quickly. You’d almost want to be the Daphnia to be able to understand its subjectivity and talk about it. There’s some impossibility there, which for me is at the heart of this interest.
[2] BL: Dissecting anyway is an interesting thing for people to want to do, not only for knowledge. I believe there’s a deeper reason for it to violently understand and oversee.
MT: Igor, you are showing these mechanical animals: servo-operated worms. How do you relate to these in terms of mechano- and zoomorphism?
IB: I think it’s funny that a little bit of motor movement is enough to get the feeling something is alive, or feels something. I’m also interested in cultures like Japan’s, where everything has a soul – even a rock or something. It’s quite a nice way of looking at the world. Indeed, if you talk about animals as heat-seeking missiles, it depends on the context, cause I think you could even use it for certain behaviours that humans have. Even though some of these lenses to view the world might perhaps be objectively correct, employing just one of them eventually gets boring and joyless. Even if you can make a computer model that completely predicts the movement of these water fleas, you can still not say you understand them or exhausted all meanings. Maybe there’s something about science that ultimately tries to reduce something in order to get to know its parts.[3] But you can also add things that maybe aren’t scientifically true. That might make things more interesting or fun.
[3] IB: not unlike the Chinese room thought experiment.
MT: As a maker, do you feel the boundary starts to blur a bit between you (a human) and the technology you work with?
IB: Even the practice of programming a lot or using computer software enters your subconscious. I use computers in my dreams. There’s a digital element to how my brain functions, which is informed by years of using this technology. I think everyone has it to an extent, and maybe I have it more because I use computers way more. That is still distinctly human. The way we think is always informed by our tools and technologies: even when we were making pots out of clay, this also entered our subconscious, culture and language. Of course, it can feel alienating to have a computer in your mind sometimes, but I don’t feel less human.
MT: And Brigitte, did you start dreaming like Daphnia already?
BL: When I really zoom out to my whole practice, I often think through very human emotions & subjects without depicting people. It is a lot about structures of thinking. Since I’ve been obsessed with Daphnia, I’ve been drawing them a lot. I try to do this with precision and feeling, as I would when making a portrait of a human. Doing that has made me feel closer to the Daphnia. But I feel hesitant to say I know what life is like for them, so I would say that I still dream like a human being for now.
MT: Do you think we could move from using one of these lenses (the monomorphic), to using multiple at the same time (the polymorphic)?
BL: I would be interested in this. In the shape of the work, it is important to me that some deliberate ambiguity and unclassifiability hopefully enable you to freely morphize in a critical way. Thinking of the work, apart from its unclassifiability, I don’t think the work itself presents a polymorphic vision. I would really hope that these boundaries feel like they’re moving. For me, art is a beautiful place to move around established assumptions and to explore absurd or fantastic solutions.
IB: For me, it’s more about an awareness of your perspective, of what you’re doing and how you’re looking. To challenge yourself constantly. A mechanomorphic lens can have great benefits (like modern science and computing), but just like everything else, it can be awfully misguided (like phrenology). The same applies to zoomorphic interpretations and so on.
MT: Igor, you describe your earlier work as “hardly cutting edge technology”[3]: a personal rotating platform or a vending machine with a plant inside. Your current installation at SIGN deals with a far more cutting-edge technology, or even a meta-technology: the data server. With its strong embeddedness in our daily IoT [Internet of Things] lives, its colonial architecture and material extraction, and its high environmental impact, this usually hidden technological site of the data center is far more of a hyperobject than your previous subjects. How do you deal with this vastness?
[3] Igor Bobeldijk, Devices, 2023, see https://igorbobeldijk.com/thesis.htm
IB: For my previous work, I was working with the idea of a submarine, which was originally planned as a set for a TV show for children. The show would teach them about climate disasters and other hyper-object problems in the world, which are basically impossible to easily take apart and solve. I think I was already looking towards these bigger problems or environmental subjects. The way I see it, while this submarine was an interior that looked out into the world, then this oil environment would be that outside world. The submarine would explore that under-oil environment with things floating around.
When talking about the entanglement of a data server in relation to the singular devices I made before, I deal with this in a fictional layer, within a web of backstories and interconnected mechanisms, that are never explicitly presented. In a way, this makes it more abstract. While there is the suggestion of the internet, it’s quite contained at this moment. I think in a sense, everyone is overwhelmed by the internet. One big reason I studied artificial intelligence is that I always want to learn how things work. In that sense, that may help me to not completely be overwhelmed. The work talks about a future vision, where technology turns the environment into something unlivable for us, but self-sufficient without our interference. It’s quite dark, maybe even dystopic.
MT: For you, Brigitte, your work deals a lot with the topic of understanding the world as well. Am I correct in assuming that this work deals with a smaller-scale problem than some of your other works?
BL: Perhaps my way of working has changed over time. In the short scripts for plays that I have written before, children and amateur actors, named after and embodying big and abstract concepts, would search for world understanding. In this, there was a returning main character: a feverish child aged 9, called “humanity”. More and more, in my work I have become an active actor myself. For instance, I had been thinking about world records for a long time. Instead of making work about this as a phenomenon, I realized that I wanted to attempt setting one myself, like one of my characters would.
After taking an interest in the Daphnia, I saw a Youtube video of a Daphnia under a microscope giving birth that moved me to tears. I set out to see if I could move closer to this animal, eventually growing a need to understand her when not seen through the lens of the nature documentary, read through the scientific lingo, or valued through society’s glasses, as live fish food for example. To bridge our differences in space, time and scale. This work shows some of the products of this endeavor. Perhaps a smaller-scale problem, but no less part of the act of world understanding.
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The exhibition Obsoletely New! runs until 22 October at SIGN Projectspace.
For more information about the artists, visit their websites: brigittelouter.com & igorbobeldijk.com.