Web Residencies Post-Doom

After such a rough year, which called on all of us to think and act toward interdependency, I was spurred on by the many brilliant proposals, and humbled at the opportunity to be acquainted with so many vital and dynamic practices. It was a very difficult process to cull the four finalists from 279 applications. The jury emphasized how the project responded to the theme, and how it addressed a specific community or set of concerns within that framework; we hoped to see a convergence of the very-largely scaled to the very particular and intimate. As per the call, we prioritized proposals that centered accessibility. There were many outstanding projects, but we passed on them if they did not address accessibility as a primary concern, methodology, and politic. Last, we valued projects that seemed to bring much-needed support to the artist’s practice toward new expressions of exploration, research, and making. I am looking forward to seeing what the four residents will create during their residencies, and am grateful to the Akademie Schloss Solitude for inviting me into their community for this short time.

Web Residents

Digital Witchcraft – Automated Oracular Poetry
Danae Tapia / Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Danae Tapia will produce an online exhibition based on the oracular poetry that her Digital Witchcraft bot has been creating over the past few months.  This bot is coded in a grammar-generative language called Tracery and uses concepts from a corpus of the artist’s own dreams and exercises of automatic writing. It is an artistic instrument of posthuman literature in which the unconscious meets the computational realm.

The Endless Hallucinatory Love of the Riders at The Long Point of Death
Uma Breakdown / UK

Earlier this year, in a state of grief combined with a downswing of my mental pendulum, Uma Breakdown tried to write a short story.  They followed two riders who continually criss-crossed the North American continent via horse and wagon, surveilled by their reconnaissance drone, after some unspoken apocalyptic event. Their riders had a role. The role hidden in the patriarchal, colonial violence of »The Cowboy,« a role of love, palliative, and end-of-life care for animals and humans alike (think of Chloé Zhao’s The Rider and Valeska Grisebach’s Western).

Umm Al-Raml, Sand Narratives
Shirin Fahimi / Toronto, Canada

Umm al Raml’s Sand Narratives is an augmented reality project and a divinatory journey. The fictional persona of Umm al-Raml, the mother of sand, challenges the lack of female prophecy within Islamic literature and addresses divinators’ denunciation within contemporary Iranian society. Umm al Raml will be a fictional persona that appears virtually, and embodies the stories of women who experienced spiritualism.

Doomsday Cartography
Peter Polack / Los Angeles, CA, US

In political spaces and imaginaries, a sense of doom can make cooperative acts of refusal and exodus legible as strategies for survival. But this potential of doom is not exclusive to fugitive communities and undercommons – doom is also an inspiration for systems of control that perpetuate its conditions. This is exhibited by speculative scenarios devised by the Pentagon –  from its »Counter-Zombie Dominance« plan to its cinematic descriptions of a future of crime and need in »Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity« – which use doom as a backdrop to strategize counterinsurgency operations.

Shortlist

Between Dying and Death Is a Hum
AM Kanngieser / Melbourne, Australia

Death Kills the Emperor – a Performance for Audio and Text
Xenia Taniko / Berlin, Germany

DOOM_ROOM – who is game?
Rebecca Merlic / Vienna, Austria

{Valleys of wind}
Sînziana Păltineanu / Berlin, Germany