fieldware
Ian Margo
2025, digital video,
color, sound 16:9 4K,
11:00min
artwork LLMs new media interface language cybernetics video abstraction economy
(...) fieldware is a linguistic exploration of the object and its potential constitution through sign and mediation. Addressing openness and the complex-hole, this project generates experimental avenues around abstraction as the production of meaning. Through ‘what comes off’, ‘fieldware’ emerges as a redundancy, a broken rhythmic play, a collapse of vanishing lines, presenting field and ware, background and background, thus working the sign as a gesture that stretches over a flat line until it is interrupted by the brutal form of the immediate...(more)
Vertigo²
Alexandre Montserrat
15.06.2025.SF.CA
publication LLMs memory language cognition abstraction policy
(...) Historical representation's progressive unmooring from positivist certitude, its recognition as a discursively and mythically shaped domain, discovers a potent contemporary inflection with Large Language Models. Such systems appear, offering less passive archival functions or neutral narrative conduits, more formidable ‘writing machines’ actively operationalising the construction of historical understanding. An LLM, in this capacity, presents an unprecedented historiographical agent. It moves beyond recording or interpreting the past to effectively generate textual instantiations, guided by an intrinsic, data-derived logic...(more)
Third Extension,
a brief essay on technology and language
Ian Margo
23.03.2025.BC.SPpublication artwork LLMs new media cybernetics language video abstraction economy
(...) “third extension”digital video, color, sound, single channel, 1080p 16:9 08:42min) emerges as an aesthetic exercise of abstraction and artificialization of the face through these recursive dynamics of encoding and recoding the sign. In this way, it proposes the staging, through images and text boxes, of a multidimensional relational environment that constructs dynamics of resignification and production of faciality. This project explores the aesthetics of the opposition between environments that are not given but are part of an ongoing construction by accumulation...(more)
After Notre Dame
/ burning_church / techno-linguistic program for the Artic CircleArash Farhadi
12.01.2025
publication collaboration cybernetics language memory abstraction economy computation interface policy theory-fiction
(...) When the ocean retreats, an extensive desert emerges / the museum lies across it, 9 days on foot, 1 more day for the cult. We studied the cathedral's blueprints hoping to find signs of the assassination / my beloved new face is built upon abstract machines. It narrates the face being performed, the burning territory / in a dream, the cathedral was burning. The verticality of the structure / the verticality of the fire / manifested the mediocrity of the fall, its numbness. We imagined forests surrounding the ruins of what we had annihilated / burning_church rises from my beloved new face or, rather, detaches from it, taking the form of a museum in a desert; you will reach this -final- place, and, once arrived, there will be nothing left to do / Arabesque Dune / the face in burning_church emerges around the mask - "worship of the body" / body in flames / the flute inside Saddam’s bunker, and the air runs out...(more)
the wet box
Ian Margo
2025, digital video,
color, sound 16:9 4K,
10:10min
artwork LLMs new media interface language cybernetics video abstraction economy
(...)the wet box is recursion that fails / the object (solid, geometric) cannot be defined / the body conforms to exteriorities, wrapped, faces wrapped. the wet box is a cyberspace cut like a spiral, an incomplete turn. Fracture of language, possibility of opening. “If a horse is plasticized, it cannot be ridden”. Technology is part of feedback systems that constitute cognition...(more)
Ruins without nostalgia
Marcos Parajua
2024.SP
publication memory language abstraction
(...) What remains after an event? Does language prevail over an image or a sound in presenting “that which remains”? Edmund Burke invokes Milton: “(Over) many a dark and dreary (valley) They (passed), and many a region dolorous; (Over) many a frozen, many a fiery Alp; Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens, and shades of Death”. Burke contends: “This idea or this affection caused by a word (Death), which nothing but a word could annex to the others…”.1 In this saying, the ways of romantic visual arts are too articulate to lend proper care to indeterminacy. Retrospectively we might argue that Burke contemplated abstraction exclusively as “thought” realised in language but I´d rather follow a different inquiry. Burke also conceives descriptive language an insufficient correlate of the object described; this, he observes, is not a problem of clarity but intensity. To bridge the difference...(more)
my beloved new face
Ian Margo
2024, digital video,
color, sound 16:9 4K,
06:00min
artwork faciality LLMs new media interface
language cybernetics video abstraction economy
(...) my beloved new face / burning_church ushers in a demonic scenario; the face arrives, a synthetic technology, a network-hole that possesses agency. The face of the father, the face of the son / a body that mutates after the invasion of the home-territory, recodes the economy //οἰκονομία//. my beloved new face / burning_church is a failed invasion, vastly spread over a viscous surface, corrupted by the narrative of history and its maps and its signs. It burns over the desert, the enlightened models crumble, the light comes now from [digital fire] in low quality. It turns back on itself, on a still-frame that documents a moment of collapse. The face is an artifact, an inanimate demon, a technical system of...(more)
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-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...(more)