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          ADOGDOMDOGGEREL                      
INSTA     10:46:15








GODMODADOGGEREL



This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod,
And there is in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of.
Some oracle
Must rectify our knowledge.


As with the confused mariner Alonso in Shakespeare’s The Tempest the prevailing
metaphor for understanding nature has always been architectural. Whether it is
the altar or the icon, interlocution requires a device. What is more familiar to
the reader, than the cliché of pulling back the curtain or, more on point,
crossing the threshold, moving from darkness into light, and the ritual therein?

Science, and its particular rubric, has over centuries evolved to mirror this
same reliance on delineation. Bernard Siegert, channeling the 19th century
architect Gotfried Semper’s observation that the first architectonic gesture was
that of the fold, reminds us that science was initially a question of keeping
time in pursuit of navigation. That shelter marks the human experience of
seasons, protecting us and also predicting, in a way, times cycle and the many
ways the calendar will come to dictate culture in carnival and religion.

For Siegert, the fold is synonymous with the door and its predecessor the gate,
a tool that in his words “turns the hunter into a shepherd…” and with that the
door becomes a synthesis of technology and consciousness, “of a coevolutionary
domestication of animals and human beings.” And much like the churchbell—marking
the hours of preindustrial society—the fold has helped shape both space and time
leading us to the modern present, echoing the symbol of the serpent and evincing
digital tech’s language of switches.

It is here that we also locate art and its collision with science, as a device
that, like the door, serves primarily to assist humans in creating and
controlling space. This is the origin of the exhibition title “Godmod,” a term
that today evokes gaming but that stretches back to prehistory in its purpose
and politic. The implication of any modification, whether in gaming, gender,
alchemy, or clowning, is one of distinction, and for Siegert, distinction
presupposes “not only an observer who observes this distinction but techniques
that process this distinction and therefore first make observable the unity of
the things distinguished.” Embedded in this statement is the definition of
“unity” or perhaps more bluntly, origin, a fraught concern weighed down by
history and human chauvinism but one at the root of science.

What is our shared language for untangling this febrile evolution? What once was
called pneuma? What tools, what modifications to the architecture of our shared
environment / game space can be imagined as a bridge between these players?

This entangled past and question of the future has today resurfaced with
profound urgency as laid out by Bruno Latour whose term “hybrid” reflects this
attempt to describe the proliferating intersections of living and non-living
agents.

Implied in this choreography of things is that there are still methods, erotic,
technological, absurd, that can be activated to engender this relation -- what
Anselm Franke calls a second “first contact” of the moderns with everyone else.
Might this meeting be a stage? A new doggerel to re animate our “business more
than nature”?

The dogdom doggerel is the voice of the oracles, still present, and it is these
actors that GODMOD dogdom doggerel will highlight in the group exhibition
arranged in response to the Getty initiative “PST ART: 'Art & Science Collide'
scheduled for fall of 2024, curated by Anna Wittenburg and Nick Herman.