Sydney-based artist Sam Leach has curated Extropians, a new show at Sullivan & Strumpf Fine Art. The exhibitions brings together a group of artists whose work suggests ambiguous science fictional narratives. Leach spoke to Science Fictional about the ideas and themes behind the title.

What is an “extropian”?

Sam Leach: Extropians are people who believe that progress in science and technology means that humans will soon achieve some kind of immortality. The term derives from extropy – not quite, but almost, the opposite of entropy – it refers to the idea that life and intelligence will expand in an orderly way throughout the universe. The extropian view is sort of an extreme optimism about the future. I’m not totally convinced they are right, but I do like technology and I really like the optimism.

Tony Lloyd, Unique Form of Continuity in Space Time, 2009.
Oil on linen, 23×30cms.

Perhaps you could talk about the selection of works for the show – what were you looking for when you selected the artists and their paintings?

SL: I wanted works which addressed the relationship between humans and technology and I tried to think about that in a broadest sense. So there are paintings which have technology as their subject matter, as with Tony Lloyd and Giles Alexander. There are paintings in which painting itself is represented as a transformative technology as with Stephan Balleux. The show really emerged after seeing some works by Topologies (Donna Kendrigan and Chris Henschke) and, quite soon after, a show by Charles O’Loughlin. Topologies create objects which seem to appeal to a nostalgia for an historical form of futurism – beautifully crafted wood and brass instruments which present quite sophisticated optical illusions with scientific themes. Their works do not unreservedly celebrate science but they do set up a very romantic view of technology. In O’Loughlin’s work data analysis based on his own social interactions is used to generate charts which the form the basis of his abstract paintings. Ultimately he aims to gather enough data to be able to forecast his own life. I could sense some connection between these works and when I came across the extropians it began to fall into place. O’Loughlin’s wildly ambitious plans for his data – not to mention his use of his entire life in the cause of data collection – was related to the scientific heroism hinted at in Topologies’ work. The final piece fell into place with Michael Graeve and Toshiya Tsunoda. In their works technology is already being used to extend perception beyond the limits of “natural” or un-augmented human abilities.

It’s interesting looking at the contrast between the works seen individually and then as a group. Taken individually, the paintings work in a realist mode and might suggest an ambiguous narrative, together they have a very science fictional feel, as though the exhibition works together as an overall narrative – was that your aim?

SL: A proper geek would prefer the term speculative fiction. Yes, I do think the paintings and the especially the piece by Topologies have that feel. I love science fiction so it is probably not a coincidence that the art that appeals to me has some hint of that too. I did try to create the possibility for narrative by including works which hinted at history (Lloyd, Topologies), works which engage the viewer with the present (Graeve, Tsunoda) and works which hint at futures both near and distant (Lloyd again, Balleux, Alexander). Many of the works cover several of those at once, of course, so it is not as though it unfolds like a comic strip. In the best traditions of hard science fiction, multiple realities and timelines co-exist.

The term “speculative fiction” is credited to Robert Heinlein, who liked to call it “spec-fic” – but it seems the term has been subsumed back into the greater generic name “science fiction” – do you see a difference between the two terms? And how does that relate to the show?

SL: The term has drifted in and out of use for quite a while. Fans of this genre do tend to be enthusiastic so there are many thousands of internet pages devoted to discussing the nuances of these terms. For my two cents, I tend to think of speculative fiction as a slightly better description of the genre and a bit broader than than science fiction. Some of the most interesting books do not really go into science at all but look at alternate histories or social structures – Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, Philip K Dick and Neal Stephenson spring to mind. In this show, with one or two exceptions, there is no reference to any actual science. The works deal with the relationship between humans and technology without getting too bogged down in the actual gear mechanisms.

Charles O’Loughlin, September, 2009.
Gouache on paper, 49×45cms.

The imagery of science fiction tends towards a decidedly realist mode of image making – yet you’ve also included abstract works such as Charles O’Loughlin’s mandala-like ‘September’. Was there something in that juxtaposition that interested you?

SL: Absolutely. In the same way that I wanted works which specifically addressed the future, present and past I also wanted to look at artists who used a wide variety of modes in their work. O’Loughlin’s practice verges on performance. His works are really charts which present information, month by month, about who he meets, where and how often. When a painting of a graph is shown, or even several of them, it is really only a tiny fragment of his overall work, which presumably won’t be finished until he is dead or gives up. Or both. The paintings are presented together with books of coded data. Literally thousands of pages of the stuff. They hint at what these apparently abstract paintings represent but they are absolutely no help at all in recovering any kind of meaningful information from the charts. Where the realist paintings have a science fiction feel, O’Loughlin’s work feels closer to the way imagery is actually used in contemporary science – mostly for the graphic display of statistical information (and mostly unintelligible to all but the authors).

Joanna Lamb, High Rise 8, 2009.
Acrylic on canvas, 170×120cms.
From the companion exhibition High Rise.

Joanna Lamb’s latest paintings are also on show at Sullivan & Strumpf and seem like a very natural continuation of what you’re talking about. The title of her show Highriseseems to be a direct reference to J.G. Ballard, whose spirit is very much present in your show too. Was putting the two exhibitions together intentional?

SL: Funny you shoud mention that because I spent the weekend installing a rainwater tank and Ballard was never far from my mind. Sullivan and Strumpf will have to take the credit for bringing the two shows together. It is a really great juxtaposition. Ballard consistently asked questions about the way that technology and especially urban development might impact the human psyche. The extropians themselves seem pretty unconcerned about the possible psychological implications of extreme longevity or technological augmentation of the human. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they are optimistic about the implications. The image of the highrise perfectually captures the moment of transition between utopian vision and dystopian delivery, especially as it is shown in Lamb’s paintings with their idealised clean, hard edges and disturbing acidic colours. Since my show is upstairs from the highrise, maybe it could be thought of as a sort of tech version of the blood garden!

Giles Alexander, 1180 AD, House of God, 2009.
Oil and resin on canvas, 65×105cms.

You’ve often included technological objects in your own painting – how do you see your own work relating to the show?

SL: To be honest the show is a massive indulgence for me. I love the aesthetics of science and technology and to some extent this show could be subtitled “ideas I wish I’d had” or “works I wish I’d made”. The themes of nature and technology are important for me but the relationship between humans and animals is of equal importance. This show allowed me to really get stuck directly into the human/technology relationship via the entertainingly extreme position of the extropians. The other thing is that my own practice is primarily painting – trying to paint well is a very time consuming process and doesn’t leave a lot of room to engage with other modes of artistic production even though I am very interested in them. So it is great to be able to look at the themes and ideas I am interested in using objects, installation and sound works. Even if someone else made them.

Extropians, curated by Sam Leach, and High Rise by Joanna Lamb are at Sullivan & Strumpf, Paddington until December 13.

“Extropians believe that advances in science and technology will some day let people live indefinitely and that humans alive today have a good chance of seeing that day. An extropian may wish to contribute to this goal, e.g. by doing research and development or volunteering to test new technology.

“Each of the artists in this show relates to extropian values in some way. Topologies speak about using new and old technology to bring together science and art. In their works the artefacts of science are treated with something approaching reverence.

“Tony Lloyd and Giles Alexander make paintings which render a rational world of science and reality with emotion and a sense of awe which owes something to the treatment of the sublime in romantic painting. Charles O’Loughlin ruthlessly catalogues and analyses his own life, producing books of data and tantalizingly indecipherable charts. Stephan Balleux applies technology to the process of painting itself, producing works which are a detailed analysis of their own manufacture, yet at the same time creating works which are depictions of hybrid entities – transhuman creatures, part paint and part flesh.

“Toshiya Tsunoda and Michael Graeve use sound as a way to extend the normal range of human perception. Tsunoda’s use of contact microphones makes it possible to hear the normally inaudible vibration of physical materials. Graeve’s work uses hifi equipment and painting to produce interactions, interferences and resonances between human gesture and machine process.

“In these works technology is used to extend the possible range of human experience or hint at transhuman or post-human hybrids. The scientific process is mythologised in a way which, if not unquestioning, is at least optimistic about the possibility for scientific progress.”

Extropians: Sullivan & Strumpf Fine Art, November 26 to December 13, 2009

Image: Tony Lloyd, The Relational Aesthetics of Eternal Vigilance, 2009. Oil on linen, 23 x 30cm. SSFA

“In the 1970s and 1980s, the sci-fi art of Japanese illustrator Shusei Nagaoka graced numerous album covers and appeared in a variety of advertisements, magazines, and movie posters.” via Pink Tentacle

“In this image, we are looking at the core of the blogosphere. The dark edges show the reciprocal links (where A has cited B and B has cited A), the lighter edges indicate a-reciprocal links. The larger, denser area of the graph is that part of the blogosphere generally characterised by socio-political discussion (the periphery contains some topical groupings). Above and to the left is that area of the blogosphere concerned with technical discussion and gadgetry…”

Mapping The Blogosphere, DataMining, via Hip Flask

“Anthropology, perception psychology, neurology, phenomenological sociology, ethnomethodology and even ethology (in its study of imprinting in animals), all confirm the quantum mechanical and Existentialist view that the world we perceive is a Mickey Mouse cartoon our brains have created out of signals that arrive as raw energy at the rate of millions of bleeps per second. Which type of Mickey Mouse cartoon—or Homeric epic, or Soap Opera—we make of these signals depends on our genes (which species of brain we have—mammalian, serpentine, insectoid etc.), and next on our imprints, and our conditioning and “learning” or brainwashing by society, and these are perpetuated by our lazy habits and only sometimes modified or somewhat transcended by our efforts at creativity and higher awareness.

“The various “models” of quantum mechanics—and it is symptomatic that we dare not call them “theories” any more—are all in direct contradiction to common sense and to common sense-data (the Mickey Mouse cut-outs our brain constructs from the energy bleeps it receives). Each type of quantum model is at least as weird as Dali’s Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone.

“Is Schroedinger’s cat in the famous gedankenexperiment dead or alive, or both, or somewhere in between? Each quantum model gives a different answer to that crucial question, just as different quantum models tell us that an unmeasured particle is simultaneously spin-up or spin-down or both or neither. Heisenberg said Eintsein’s attempt to find out what such and unmeasured particle is “really” doing was “like the medieval debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” Why should an unmeasured particle not also be giving birth to a blind horse biting a telephone?

(The only particles we know anything about are the measured ones, which are shaped and to some extent created by the measurements. just as the only people we know anything about are the encountered ones who are shaped and to some extent created by our encounters with them. You knew that already, didn’t you?)

“Back in Joyceland, there is the Garry Owen mystery. Garry is a dog, and in the world of appearances one can even say Garry was a “real” dog. That is, he was whelped in 1888 and was owned by J. J. Giltrap, a Dublin breeder of pedigreed Irish setters. In a 19th Century novel, if Garry Owen appeared, he would be a definite and specific dog corresponding to the 19th Century delusion that a definite and specific “reality” exists somewhere apart from observers and observings. In the quantum comedy of Ulysses, there are three Garry Owens, or three Mickey Mouse cut-outs of the infinite space-time process called “Garry Owen,” each seen by one of three different observers: the first is a lively and endearing animal, the second is a surly and dangerous brute, and the third actually talks and even recites Gaelic poetry. This is the kind of attention to existential, phenomenological relativity that makes Joyce contemporary, whereas “realistic” writers are still living in medieval Aristotelian myth. Joyce’s multi-valued dog is as paradigmatic of our age as Schroedinger’s dead-and-alive cat.

“Elsewhere in this volume I enquire into the length of King Kong’s penis. My conclusions are relative to the context in which Kong belongs—the context of surrealism and dream—and are not consistent with the logic of Aristotelian “reality.” But to Aristotle a penis, like any other rod, has a “real” length which is “essential” to its “nature,” and we have known since Special Relativity (1905) that there is no such “real” length in experience, but only the various lengths (plural) of various observers or observing instruments. Like Dali’s Andalusian Dog and Joyce’s three-headed Irish setter, Kong’s penis and an Einsteinian rod are “in the eye of the beholder,” as it were. This is why all people with a good scientific education understand at once the answer to Zen Buddhist riddle, “Who is the Master who makes the grass green?”‘

Robert Anton Wilson, “Preface”. Rudy Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson & Robert Anton Wilson, eds.  Semiotext [e] SF. New York: Autonomedia. 1989. pp 18-19

Image: Edith Joy Rae, A nude with Mickey Mouse hair April 17. 09. Via Daily Painters

Josh Keyes, Entangle I, 2009
Acrylic on panel, 30″x40″.

Josh Keyes, Drifting, 2009.
Acrylic on panel, 30″x40″.

Josh Keyes, Totem II (Raven Steals the Light), 2008.
Acrylic on panel, 24″x18″.

Josh Keyes Paintings and Drawings

“The density of human life in cities breeds what Fritz Lieber dubbed “megalopolisomancy,” or city magic. With so many lives interconnected by time and space in one small area, you’re bound to start seeing ghosts. There’s something dark and mystical about urban life, where possibility shades into probability without much warning. Spasms of weath generate surreal structures and events; vast communities of artists build imaginary worlds in the middle of the street. If mirrored buildings can disappear into clouds, and shop windows promise perfect bodies draped in gold, why can’t vampires lurk in alleys and mutants live in storm drains?” Welcome to the Future Metropolis, io9

“Complexity Theory looks at how complex systems can generate simple outcomes. Consider the billions of cells that make up a person and yet they all manage to work together in such a way that the body works as a single unit. Our body works to keep us alive. We get hungry when we need food; we get thirsty when we need water. We can think and learn and we have a distinct personality. Something happens when large numbers of individual units come together and interact intensely with each other. New levels of operating just emerge through what is called self-organisation. By looking at a single human cell, you could not tell that it would be able to operate with other cells to form a human body.

“A city also has a large number of intensely interacting units. This time human beings form the units. Once again, we would not know from examining a single human being that they would gather together in the millions to form cities. It is an emergent property, so that a city takes on a life or a personality of its own, which has self organised out of the interactions of all the people who live in the city.We cannot predict what a complex system will evolve into. When we think about it, all life from the smallest cell to the largest animals are complex adaptive systems and life always provides us with a mystery.”

Complexity Pages

“One of the 8 works I created for the Data Art Show at the Pink Hobo Gallery in Minneapolis. All these pieces are a pun on the new craze for data visualization. The goals of data visualization as I understand them are to make complicated issues more understandable, to make obscured connections visible and to reveal hidden patterns in the data. After all these tasks have been solved ideally the result should be aesthetically pleasing as well. But when I look around what is being done in data visualization today I have the suspicion that in many cases the design is more important than the actual information and that the use of data is more an excuse to justify the use of aesthetics. Since I do not have a problem with aesthetics for their own sake in these pieces I deliberately took the opposite direction. Since I wanted to create something visually interesting I made up my own data which would give me the desired results. All these works are the result of generative algorithms, so all the elements and their connections are actually data and not something I assembled manually in Illustrator.”

Quasimondo, Dada Visualization 1, 2009. Via Flickr

“In 1934, the architect Albert Speer proposed “A Theory of Ruin Value”, on which Ruskin’s hopes and Hitler’s dreams could be based. Speer explained this theory in his memoirs:

“The idea was that buildings of modern construction were poorly suited to form that ‘bridge of tradition’ to future generations which Hitler was calling for. It was hard to imagine that rusting heaps of rubble could communicate these heroic inspirations which Hitler admired in the monuments of the past. My ‘theory’ was intended to deal with this dilemma. By using special materials and by applying certain principles of statics, we should be able to build structures which even in a state of decay, after hundreds or (such were our reckonings) thousands of years would more or less resemble Roman models. To illustrate my ideas I had a romantic drawing prepared. It showed what the reviewing stand on the Zeppelin Field would look like after generations of neglect, overgrown with ivy, its columns fallen, the walls crumbling here and there, but the outlines still clearly recognizable. In Hitler’s entourage this drawing was regarded as blasphemous. That I could even conceive of a period of decline for the newly founded Reich destined to last a thousand years seemed outrageous to many of Hitler’s closest followers. But he himself accepted my ideas as logical and illuminating. He gave orders that in the future the important buildings of his Reich were to be erected in keeping with the principles of this ‘law of ruins’.” [1]

“What Speer and Hitler proposed was to build monumental architecture in the present in a way so that the ruins of those buildings in a thousand or more years time would still be impressive and speak favourably about the time when they were built. Unlike the motivation behind the building of the pyramids in ancient Egypt, it was not the preservation of monuments that was the ultimate aim of the builders, but their controlled decay. Whereas the architects of landscape parks of the 18th and 19th centuries built new ruins, those of Hitler’s Germany were asked to build new monuments which would, over the course of thousands of years, mutate into appealing ruins by themselves.

Although “it is probably impossible to build so as entirely to avoid the ultimate effects of pleasing decay”, the ‘theory of ruin-value’ requires that the aura and aesthetic appeal of the ruined building in the future would already be present in the mind of its architect. The prospective memory implied in such reasoning takes into account natural decay and cultural ignorance over very long time periods. Hitler and Speer drew the inspiration for the ‘theory of ruin-value’ mainly from the impressive ruins of Classical Antiquity in Greece and Italy. But as Speer’s colleague Friedrich Tamms knew, prehistoric megaliths are potentially no less admirable ruins. Applying the ‘theory of ruin-value’ to the origins of megaliths, it is an interesting thought to imagine that they, too, were built with a similar prospective memory. The builders of megaliths may have anticipated the natural and cultural forces which they would be exposed to in the centuries and millennia of their ‘life-histories’. Those megaliths which survived until the present-day have often lost their earthen body as well as much of their precious and sacred content; they are partly overgrown and their stone surfaces are weathered. But megaliths have also become striking monuments with a patina and a strong aura emanating from them. Friedrich Tamms argued that an incomplete and therefore unused building can be particular impressive, because any practical use of it stands in the way of an appreciation of its pure form.” [2]

A Theory of Ruin Value [1] | [2]

Image: Hisaharu Motoda, Neo-Ruins: Ameyoko, 2007. Via Pink Tentacle.