With artworks by Danica Dakić, Zachary Formwalt, Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner and Benedikt Terwiel

The fetishization of error and malfunction seems an almost ubiquitous phenomenon in the world of media art. If artists keep finding new ways to undermine the predominant technocratic system, they often remain committed to exposing and utilising the tiny cracks in this system. The Curse of Smooth Operations investigates the potential of an artistic position that stands diametrically opposed to such fetishization. The festival exhibition at the IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture] does not deal with the beauty of error, but with the horror of things working perfectly well. The artworks featured here do not linger on the subversive potential of tiny bugs, but focus on the oppressiveness of a totalizing system that is immunised against malfunction and able to perpetuate itself ad infinitum.

An underlying thread that runs throughout these works is the suspicion that all systems may ultimately depend on something that cannot be systematised. For a system to keep on systematising, something has to be left out or kept from view. This missing piece is no side-effect, error or bug, but rather an integral feature of the structure itself; a blind spot without which the system would not be able to sustain itself.

The film Constant (2020) by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, locates the blind spot in a place that is the exact opposite to that of Emily. The film explores the socio-political histories of technologies of measurement. As such technologies develop, what they evermore fervently push out of sight is not the system itself, but rather the irreducible role of the human subject within this system. For a technology of measurement, such as the metric system, to present itself as perfectly objective and egalitarian – the same for everyone – any trace of human intervention must be eclipsed. The film’s recurrent use of a 360° perspective becomes an inscription of this eclipse into the very medium of the film itself: what such a ubiquitous perspective persistently keeps occluded is the unique spot of the person holding the camera.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/35949