| Bad Infinity 2.0 |
| Xero, kline & coma |
| 30.4.16 – 22.5.16 |
Frustrated, angular glitches, anomalies in the cohesion, a bad infinity, ruptured stuttering, incoherent voices, jumbled and incomplete, a fractured montage of detritus, flickering accompanied by only partial legible notations. Our desperate scrutiny of this debris suggests a frustrated ruptured temporality.
What was once thought proven can now only be imagined, partially glimpsed in a grammatical joke. With familiarity we assemble a semi coherent palliative that we cling to despite its insufficiencies to patch the rupture and illuminate the shadows of the void.
Utilising a parasitic methodology of re-appropriation, re-composition, and recombination “No Mere Pathologies” weaves the detritus of contemporary media into a densely collaged, often chaotic chorus of images narratives and texts.
Invoking phantomic ruptures in the apparent cohesion of the world we inhabit and in doing so asking questions regarding presence, ownership, and existence, which are deeply necessary in the contemporary neoliberal imaginary.
LINKS TO
https://www.xero-kline-coma.com/archive/BadInfinity/BadInfinity.html
| ‘The 21st century is perhaps best captured in the ‘bad’ infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporalityThe 21st century is perhaps best captured in the ‘bad’ infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.’ Mark Fisher We live our lives in a duality of speed and stasis. One in which our working lives seem to be ever more dominated by micro-tasks and feverish networked bureaucracies, counterpointed with a cultural gridlock akin to the frozen time of the animated gif. In neoliberal consumer capitalism the future has stalled in the pastiche of retromania. The fractured drift of the perpetual loop and the harsh regression of the gif animation with its belligerent stutter both in their own way present a new modality. This is a rupture in our understanding of time, a new paradigm, a variant ontology, and a recursive action that is unlike Hegel’s indefinite progression as indefinite reiteration. In Bad Infinity, Pendrell and Trafford juxtapose a jarring imaginary of the underlying temporalities of the neo-liberal unconscious. Weaving together the just out-of-reach, yet that which is constructive of contemporary subjectivity; from the fantasies of data farms and psychotically impassioned global artificial intelligence structures, to the fractures ghosting through our navigation of the confederacy of phantoms stuck in time. | |