Age of You, an exhibition at Dubai’s Jameel Arts Centre, reflects on how online immersion has irrevocably transformed our emotions and thoughts
This is Ground Control to Major Tom
You’ve really made the grade
And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear
Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare
Space Oddity, David Bowie’s intergalactic dream of the great beyond, was released in 1969, nine days before Apollo 11 completed the first manned lunar landing, and featured a fictional astronaut (Major Tom) and alter ego who would reappear in later works by the British musician. That split between embodiment and disembodiment remains prescient, and today, data visualisation projects like Oddityviz, which has deconstructed different aspects of the song (including the melody, lyrics, structures and emotions) into infographics that appear both as animations that live online and as engravings on ten custom- made records, serve as an example of the dichotomy between the digital and the physical.
This translation of persona into data is what anchors Age of You in its incarnation as an exhibition. Curated by Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Shumon Basar, it posits an ‘Extreme Self ’ – the individual multiplied and commodified, in digital artefacts and virtual afterlives. ‘Anyone over 40 knows what classic individuality felt like. Now it’s almost a handicap,’ reads a statement accompanying an image of Jarvis Cocker, a ‘selfie’ by the singer-turned-artist, fragmented through a mirror (Hong Kong Mirror, 2018). It gestures towards our splintered selves, disseminated in so many different guises online. Pierre Huyghe offers a deep (and dark) image of a facial reconstruction that sits somewhere between mask and machine (Self-portrait, 2019). Both works are suspended on vinyl boards, a series of which structure the narrative arc of the show.
Age of You ruminates on the idea that, for those of us with access to it, our immersion in the internet has irrevocably transformed our emotions and thoughts; and, ultimately, questions whether or not a world outside or apart from the internet still exists. ‘A dematerialized parallel of you already exists out there in the cloud…,’ reads a vinyl board, one of a series of aphoristic texts authored by the curators. Nearby, and as if to map ‘us’ out as sources of state surveillance, a wallpaper work by Yuri Pattison uses predictive AI technology to create nonrepeating lines of eye emojis, like a seemingly benign panopticon. Is there still potential for individual agency in a time of mass manipulation, when we are part of a pervasive network of corporate extraction, stats and views?
While the exhibition’s premise is that we already exist in the future – where there are far more algorithms directing our behaviour than glitches impeding us – the exhibition’s structure looks more like our analogue past. The vinyl boards, hung as ‘artworks’ and arranged like a maze of floating jpegs, are spreads from the curators’ latest book, The Extreme Self (a sequel to their 2015 publication, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present). Perhaps they gesture towards the vertical scroll of the online page, but their materiality suggests otherwise. And the images on show – produced in a manner that suggests low-res printouts and sourced from over 70 artists, designers, filmmakers, photographers and electronic musicians – seem less compelling than the textual elements. Here the true ‘images’ are book pages, which may, in their memetic form, reflect the ways in which online statements are flattened into images, but there is no sense of their potential virality. You’re simply left (intentionally or not) with a sense of how quickly the internet meme can feel dated as a format.
This is a show meant to be read. By interrogating the ways in which we can read an exhibition, Age of You posits that the radical shifts in our reality supersede our ability to apprehend them in language. There’s a ricocheting between the book, the exhibition that extracts from it, and back. There’s a ripple effect outside this exhibition, too – The Age of Earthquakes, for example, inspired The Extreme Present, an evocative 2019 exhibition curated by Jeffrey Deitch.
Even with the largely monotone installation, there are different layers of authorship: from the omniscient coauthored ‘memes’ to selected quotes from comment feeds sourced via Instagram (@_deepdiving_ writes, ‘Is 2020 over yet?’). The act of narration gathers force in Victoria Sin’s 2018 videowork Illocutionary Utterances, which depicts self-projection, drag and sweat. But the real performative stunner is Trevor Paglen’s video Behold These Glorious Times! (2017), which shows time-lapse grids that pair facial expressions with movement – ominous signs of automated emotion, machine learning and big data.
And despite the scarcity of 3D works in this show, a few works stand out in their exploitation of materiality. There’s a dramatic photographic sculpture of crumpled, double-sided prints draped on metal scaffolding, for example: Crowd Landscape (2021), by Satoshi Fujiwara, juxtaposes the heightened energy of human gatherings with harsh closeups of aging skin, blemishes and facial hair. Overlaid faces are altered to the very boundaries of recognition. Stephanie Saade’s series Digiprint (2019), largescale photographs of finger-smudged phone screens, reflects the dark mirrors of our smartphones and perhaps a need to disappear even as we leave traces everywhere.
Less abstract is Raja’a Khalid’s online history-page listing barre classes featured on the Physique 57 mindbody app, presented here on a hanging board. An image of an animated avatar by Cécile B. Evans (Haku, Hyperlinks or it didn’t Happen, 2014) questions whether our data should be given the legal rights enjoyed by natural persons, while Sara Cwynar delves brilliantly into the lives of objects in her video Soft Film (2016), an acid-coloured universe of online acquisitions. “Technologians are our magicians and wizards now,” Basar boldly tells me during a walkthrough. And yet there is a lingering sense that this exhibition focuses more on residues and artifacts in static moments divorced from the immersive pull of technology, in order to show its impact.
In the last ‘chapter’ of the show, Bowie’s face is presented as a backlit death mask bought from a makeup artist on eBay. The singer died in 2016, the year that Cambridge Analytica’s instrumentalisation of personal data in the Brexit and Trump campaigns would come to light – a turning point in our relatively short history of online mediation, which Basar calls a moment of innocence lost. “I think Bowie saw all this coming and he checked out,” he comments. As technological selves, wherein we are both ubiquitous and dissolute in our presence, it seems the only real death is in digital obsolescence.
The show culminates with a manhole emoji made vertical, appearing like a giant opening in the wall. It lends an optical effect of the darkness you could step through, if you dared leave Major Tom’s capsule.
Age of You at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, on view until 14 August 2021
