In a brief movie about crisis, liminality, witchcraft and quantum physics, artist Solveig Settemsdal and manufacturer and author Melkeveien level a spirited review of the materialist relationship inbetween topic and things.
the i sea, the mostrecent video work from London-based artist Solveig Settemsdal, owes its structure to one of the veryfirst verses of 14th century poet Dante Alighieri’s legendary poem Inferno, the veryfirst part of The Divine Comedy: “in the midway of this our mortal life I discovered myself on a darkened course, astray.” Working in reaction to what Settemsdal terms “a terrific flattening,” the artist takes objective at traditional, materialist theories of the observable universe, looking towards speculative fiction, alternate designs of understanding and the modern condition of the image at a time in which truth can be stated to be unfolding in both virtual and physical area atthesametime, for a brand-new method to appearance at the world from a position of psychological and actual entanglement. “It’s about understanding, for a reality, that at most points in the previous, in the location into which I was born, I would haveactually been burnt as a witch,” states Settemsdal about the movie. “It’s about quantum physics, however most of all and most notably, it’s about relationships, how we see and are seen, how we modification and are altered. And I puton’t believe you requirement to understand about any of these things when you watch it.” Drawing specific impact from Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli’s current book Helgoland, which information his ideas on quantum mechanics and relational analysis, veryfirst industrialized by Werner Heisenberg while remote on the titular island in the North Sea in 1925, the i sea establishes Rovelli’s desire to relocation away from “naive materialism,” rather working towards, in the physicist’s own words: “a theory that accounts for a structure of the universe that clarifies what it is to be an observer in the universe – not a theory that makes the universe depend on me.”
Settemsdal, like Rovelli, is vital of a design of understanding in which the all-knowing subject runs outside of the observable universe, giving existence through categorisation and labelling of the things the subject observes make up the materialist universe. The artist draws parallels inbetween this point of view and Rovelli’s review of cubism within Helgoland. “Rovelli is especially scathing about cubism – as developed around an ‘I’ that understands, for which the world carriesout, and a self that, with its ego, is insomeway outside of nature,” discusses Settemsdal. “Cubism anchors truth to a subject of understanding, being outside of nature and understanding finest due to holding the leading of the present food chain, which has led us to our existing precipice,” a precipice the artist asserts is characterised by, “a terrific absence of compassion and neglect for life.” In the opening minutes of the i sea this design of understanding is rightaway countered, our point of view as the audience of Dante’s dark forest instantly obscured by knotted hairs forming on a perpendicular airplane of truth. This is then evenmore madecomplex with another entity’s point of view, shining torch light on the quotidian things of another, synchronised existential area – a brick wall, a green yard at night. Ever present throughout the work is the extensive darkness of the North Sea, which both Settemsdal and Rovelli take as a case researchstudy for the drawbacks of the ignorant materialist conception of the world. “The seas were thoughtabout quiet and utilized as a toilet (still the case) however stopped being quiet when we established hydrophones that might choice up noise waves undersea,” states Settemsdal. “Suddenly whatever speaks, however we still puton’t understand.”
Within the world of the i sea, the silence of the sea is filled with a continuously altering rating by Kristian Møller Johansen, the manufacturer understood as Melkeveien, whom Settemsdal at art school in Oslo back in 2005 which pulsates inbetween spooky low-end environment and shuffling artificial beat science, as though flickering inbetween 2 clashing viewpoints of the exactsame scene, produced utilizing analog drum makers, organismic and monophonic synthesisers and recordings of electromagnetism, consistingof recordings of fluorescent lighting from elevators and phone cubicles. Muddled in-between these pointofviews on the world, we are provided with a actual eye, uncomfortably looking back at the audience, a mirrored image of the participatory observation we as the audience are ourselves knotted within as we view Settemsdal’s work. In this method, the artist shines a light on what she views as a absence of compassion for both the audience and the seen, illuminating a higher significance on both the functions of the observer and the observed as active shapers of the universe, collapsing the difference inbetween artist and audience, inbetween reader and author in a bold relocation versus the liquifying of the materialist world into material. “There is a terrific flattening takingplace, with all human experience compressed onto screens, all things condensed into language and human culture, whatever endingupbeing 2nd, 3rd hand experience,” asserts Settemsdal. “We are informed, we puton’t feel. We wear’t play. We are so lured to escape into a tidy digital future dream, which appears progressively unsustainable as we battle to keep the lights on.” In action, the artist presumes a various method to believe and feel through the world, to run from a point of view inextricably knotted within the world.
Gesturing towards one possible alternative, Settemsdal conjuresup Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a brief story by Jorge Luis Borges centring around a trick organisation, Orbis Tertius, accountable for the production of the imaginary city of Uqbar and its imaginary legend of Tlön, a legendary world in which a materialist understanding of the universe is declined in favour of subjective idealism. Tlön is a world which is comprehended “not as a concurrence of items in area, however as a heterogeneous series of independent acts,” a world in which, throughout the course of the brief story, appears to be growing out of the boundaries of the trick organisation’s imaginary universe and leaking into the universe in which Borges himself populates. A comparable phenomena can be observed in the i sea, in which a series of things, patched together from LEDs, wires, silicone skin casts from toy animals stitched together and egg yolks suspended in area, are superimposed on top of and in inbetween the different pointofviews of the universe we are revealed. “As in Borges’ Tlön, the dream is taking over truth and