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GATE-1

Ian Margo

2024, digital video, multi-channel
color, sound 4:3, HD,
05:00min
artwork eroticism new media interface
language new flesh video abstraction entropy

GATE-1explores the relationship between bodies and their eroticization through concepts such as entropy, the "little death," and the New Flesh. It constructs bodies and endows them with gesturality (the gesture as operative flesh). These bodies interact within specific contexts: the body and the space / the space appearing as a field of death.

GATE-1
is the video-archive of the gestural performativity of the potential organism (Figure 1). It is originally composed of three organs capable of rotating, expanding, retracting, and moving through spaces. Figure 1 serves as a tool for the production and experimentation of performative (gestural) languages. F1 has been constructed as an eroticized organism: flesh in terribilità with an ultimate purpose. We observe it exhibiting itself, static, as if it were an object, during the first technical intervention. F1 mutates, seeks to advance, a fourth organ is added, and it crawls. Here, entropy comes into play.

GATE-1 begins on a crystallized hill shortly before dawn / about desire: it maps desire onto impossible geometries: "a circle under tension". The circle is broken under the sensible, as a phenomenon, it is brought to an Inside through performativity to cognitive constitution: intensifying the circle turns it into a spiral. Desire operates as force, the delimiting axes of the circle construct a spiral that is traversed. In GATE 1, the spiral appears as geological configuration of desire; the field of continuum, accretion until the collapse of organisms, the journey leads to an end (ultimate end / erotic end). 

The sign establishes coordinates on a map (statues and ice stone); position and production of desire. Object is that which is static in time and the cold and the linear temporalities that mark low entropy, that is, objectify, mapping multiplicities in a sort of homogeneous order.




related entries


Text Box: Eschatology of the Digital Visage
Algorithmic Flesh and Confessional
Aesthetics in the Work of Ian Margo

Giorgi Vachnadze


publication

(...) In this sense, its failure is generative. To fail to be computable is to refuse the enclosure of meaning. Margo’s work is, once again, not Turing-Computable, it’s Deleuze-Computable, that is to say; demonically machinic. To become unbaptized data is to remain in the domain of the Real. Like the Eucharist consumed without transubstantiation, the Wet Box leaves a pure residue, an aftertaste of what should have become body, and didn’t; it became flesh. The interface compounds the syntax error in stutters. The glitch is a processual breaking in execution and expectation. We expected sense. We were given endless remainder – lack...(more)