“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. (…) Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts.”
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
Anti-Oedipus, 1972
“Our one source of energy / The ultimate discovery / Electric blue for me / Never more to be free / Electricity / Nuclear and HEP / Carbon fuels from the sea / Wasted electricity / Our one source of energy / Electricity / All we need to live today / A gift for man to throw away / The chance to change has nearly gone / The alternative is only one / The final source of energy / Solar electricity / Electricity / Electricity / Electricity / Electricity / Electricity / E . . .
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark,
Electricity, 1980
“Energy is fading also because basic physical resources such as oil are doomed to extinction or dramatic depletion. And energy is fading because competition is stupid in the age of the general intellect. The general intellect is not based on juvenile impulse and male aggressiveness, on fighting, winning, and appropriation. It is based on cooperation and sharing.”
Franco Bifo Berardi, The Future After the End of the Economy, 2011
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2752.
Seen from the sky, the city appears to be a large green surface, blistered in places where the vegetation seems even more dense, and pierced by a myriad of metallic, filigree structures, topped with panels glinting in the sunlight. Closer to the surface, metallic arms and pods tangle with plants’ leaves and trees’ branches. They support each other, they live in symbiosis. They form a techno-organic network providing oxygen and solar electricity while cooling the atmosphere. They brought an end to fossil and nuclear energies, to the new division of labor and to de-localised extraction. They also disintegrated the invented divide upon which humanity legitimated a millennial predation on the whole earth: the separation between human and more-than-human, between nature and technology, between subject and object.
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2023.
In the central courtyard of the Museumsquartier in Vienna, right next to a large pool, a metal structure stands on a wide platform covered with concrete slabs and rammed earth. It is summer, and the temperature reaches 36 degrees Celsius. Photovoltaic solar panels, light tubes, thin pillars and metal bars with broken or curved lines, converters, and other electronic components constitute the visible part of Judith Fegerl‘s sculpture, converter: habaï ne sï natena, se paï tanïmena, which is at once architectural, sculptural, technological, massive, fragile and rough. There is a particular emphasis on the branching, coupling and joining. Where pillars and bars join the ground, the electric cables they conceal – and which are partly visible higher up in the structure – run underground, connecting the machine to the power grid. The sculpture is indeed a functioning solar energy station, generating or consuming electricity according to a day/night rhythm, like a plant. During the day, solar panels capture solar energy and transform it into electric energy, which is then fed into the grid. At night, the light-tubes draw from the grid the energy they need to illuminate by emitting full spectrum grow light. During the day, the sculpture offers shadow. During the night, it offers (disco) light.
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The technoid sculpture oscillates between what it actually is and what it could be, entangled in a mesh of functions, references and projections. It winks to minimal sculpture without finish fetish. It alludes to surrealist bachelor machines in a techno fashion. It drives its evocative force from the science fiction imaginary. It could be a left-over prop from a dystopian B-movie, a techno-organic hybrid or a mechanical spider. It could be one of thousands mini solar power stations planted in a futuristic (not yet) green utopia. At the same time, it is an ironic piece of conscious design, offering comfort without guilty feeling. The w¬ay it circulates the energy in its (tentacular) body, converting solar energy into electricity and then electricity into plant light, the sculpture/machine also circulates references and assignations. Placed in the middle of a gated area for culture consumption and privileged leisure, it also provides a wry reminder that energy, alongside the technological, industrial and ideological apparatuses of extraction, exploitation, (delocalized) production and (uneven) distribution involved, are fundamental issues for the survival of many on earth.
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Energy is, generally speaking, the capacity to “do work”, i.e. “to act”. Energy in the sense of physical sciences is a measure of a system‘s capacity to modify a state, to produce work leading to movement, electromagnetic radiation or heat. In ecological and economic terms, energy is defined as a natural energy resource (wind energy, nuclear energy, solar energy, natural gas, etc.) or its product (electricity), when consumed by human societies for various industrial and domestic uses (transport, heating, etc.). In geo-political terms, the production, distribution and consumption of energy involves various forms of human and non-human labor, with significant environmental and social differential impacts. Judith Fegerl is interested in all these entangled aspects of energy – especially in the material and immaterial infrastructures connected to it.
All kinds of energy are present in her works – thermal, chemical, magnetic, electrical, mechanical and luminous. Some works are traces of burning electrical wires, others are traces of electrolysis processes on copper and aluminum plates. Some other function as devices in which energy is transformed and the process can unfold, live. converter doesn‘t mimic the production of solar electricity through photovoltaic induction, it actually performs it. Interestingly enough, energy production is always a transformation from one type of energy into another, electricity, more suitable for humans to use. Judith Fegerl’s works are traversed by (ongoing) transformations. Her aesthetics derive from electro-chemical processes and/or matter circulations that the artist initiates and partly controls (like electrolysis, combustion, electromagnetic induction), but which she cannot and does not wish to master completely, as she is precisely interested in the articulation between process and representation, between physics and chemistry, between technology and aesthetic, between microscale and macroscale, between visibility and invisibility.
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The contrast between the invisible dimension of energy and its magical power on one hand, its key position in human societies and geopolitics and its massive impact on landscapes and living spaces on the other hand, is of particular interest to the artist. Judith Fegerl works with materials, machines and technical devices which are part of the complex network transforming, transporting or transmitting energy. These materials (conductive metals, chemicals, electronic components, wires) and objects (industrial heat sinks, solar panels, electrolyte-filled tanks) are more common in industrial applications, than in the art field. Working exclusively with such materials and objects, the artist blurs the boundaries between scientific, technological, social and artistic production (or rather, again, here: transformation). At the same time, she puts into question the mere instrumental use of technical objects generally understood as tools, designed to optimize modes of resource extraction, material production, and cognitive and informational relay. Re-using old-fashioned or already outdated devices, by insisting on the non-efficiency of her systems, or by over-producing at absurdum, she also extracts technical objects from their destiny between development and decline, use and obsolescence und outwits the linearity of innovation, progress, and growth – at the core of Western techno-capitalist’s modernity. Through her works/machines, the separation between the technical, the social and the cultural disappears as she investigates the interplays between fiction and innovations, between progress and serendipity, between (gendered) scripts and leaks.
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habaï ne sï natena, se paï tanïmena (meaning: let us give back to nature, that which she has given us), the second part of the artwork title, links it to an ecological and techno-vernacular reflection. Unintelligible without a translation, it is derived from the film Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets, itself drawn from the comic book Valerian and Laureline by Jean-Claude Mézières and Pierre Christin. The sentence appears first during Valerian’s dream of a green utopian world, Mül, populated by peaceful anthropomorphic beings – the Pearls. The powerful and magic energy channeling through all bodies and elements in diverse intensities, mainly comes from pearls, but also from little (cherished) animals who are able to replicate them while metabolizing them. The energetical circuit is perpetuated through a ritual, where the pearls are poured into a well and Nathre is thanked for her gifts, with the eponymous aphorism.
The planet is destroyed in a war between other worlds (as a conscious collateral damage, as the life on Mül is considered “archaic”, hence “inferior” by a human admiral). The ecological-traditional utopia is annihilated by the explosion of bombs and the crash of spaceships coming from technologically advanced societies consumed by the race for power and their own capitalist-materialistic ideologies. The fable of the disappearance of a planet whose beings celebrate circularity, reciprocity, respect, frugality and conviviality – problematically presented in a quite naïve way in the film – echoes the destruction and/or invisibilization of vernacular practices, indigenous knowledge(s), and animist beliefs, from the colonial era to the present day by capitalist imperialist societies, in their search for energy resources, with the help of diverse technologies.
Judith Fegerl’s converter is linked to the grid and shares its energy with it – even though, in real, the global power grid integrates and distributes power from both green and fossil fuels. Judith Fegerl’s considerations on greener futures with local energy production and distributive economy, are accompanied by other levels of ecological thinking extending the definition of ecology to encompass social relations and human subjectivity as well as environmental concerns.
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What kind of technical beings could constitute an authentic and emancipative rupture with the anthropocentric and capitalist tradition, based on extraction, overproduction and accumulation, towards an ecological organization alongside lines of distribution, cooperation, conviviality and frugality? How can art contribute to a global shift from the instrumentalization of technologies and machines for the sake of the few and the capital, towards the consideration of their transformative power on societal, philosophical and ecological levels?
Ideally, converter should be placed for a longer period of time, on a spot where it can actually interact with the ecosystem around, serving as a support for plants growing in between its limbs or as a shelter for insects or birds. The integration between organic and electro-mechanical elements – for now visible in the aesthetics of the work and its plant-like dual rhythm night and day – sustains the idea of a confluence and co-evolution between realms that always have been opposed by humans.
Through her sculpture/machine, Judith Fegerl offers a post-natural counter-narrative to the neo-liberal extraction and predation, shaking us out of our complicities in those ideologies, inviting humans to imagine a more sustainable future, based on local self-sufficiency, decentralization and embeddedness. Ultimately, she triggers our capacity to imagine new social relationships and new forms of cooperation with the more-that-humans, acknowledging that we are living in a vibrant world.
“[T]echnical objects participate in building heterogeneous networks that bring together actants of all types and sizes, whether human or nonhuman. But how can we describe the specific role they play within these networks? Because the answer has to do with the way in which they build, maintain and stabilize a structure of links between diverse actants, we can adopt neither simple technological determinism nor social constructivism.
Madeleine Akrich, The De-scription of Technical Objects, 1992
“There are thoughts we can anticipate, glimpsed in the distance along existing thought pathways. / This is a future that is simply the present, stretched out further. / There is a not-yet-thought that never arrives – yet there we are thinking / it in the paradoxical flicker of this very sentence. / If we want thought different from the present – if we want to change the present – then thought must be aware of this kind of future. / It is not a future in which we can progress. / This future is unthinkable. Yet we are, thinking it. / Coexisting, we are thinking future coexistence. Predicting it and / more: keeping the unpredictable one open. / Yet such a future, the open future, has become taboo. / Because it is real, yet beyond concept. / Because it is weird. / Art is thought from the future. / Thought we cannot explicitly think at / present. Thought we may not think or / speak at all. / If we want thought different from the present, then thought must veer toward art.”
Timothy Morton, Beginning After the End, in Dark Ecology: For a Logic of a Future Coexistence, 2016
“Far from appearing antithetical to the human organism and set of values, the technological factor must be seen as co-extensive with and inter-mingled with the human. This mutual imbrication makes it necessary to speak of technology as a material and symbolic apparatus, i.e. a semiotic and social agent among others.”
Rosi Braidotti, Cyberfeminism with a Difference, 1996