ISEA2010 Art Event Overview

The exhibition TRUST presents works from fourteen artists and artist groups that focus on different aspects of trust. The works make it possible to grapple with the contemporary meaning of trust and to explore its boundaries.

We distinguish between different forms of trust such as personal trust (in other people), system trust (in institutions and technical systems) and media trust (in images, media and presentation techniques). Communication and social action are unthinkable without trust – it forms the foundation for the functioning of complex societies, especially when they are not driven by the threat of violence. Trust is the retainer and the goodwill that we bring to a relationship: it embodies the expectation that the other will behave in a reliable manner although no explicit assurances have been given. Placing trust in someone means leaving him or her with a precious gift in the hope that it will be carefully treated and eventually returned.

Faith in institutions, societal structures and systems is aligned with, for example, money and its usage, equitable governance, reliable science and legitimate political power. In media, we trust that technical devices and presentation and communication aids will function properly to enable the kinds of communication and forms of expression that are expected of them.

For all of these forms of trust there is often little reason; the mass media prove to be instruments of propaganda. Science, research and technology are regularly seen to be unable to gauge or control the consequences of their actions, and economic and political sys- tems fail under the pressure of special interest groups and corruption.

When behaviour towards others, for instance between animals, is guided by instinct, no trust is required for the characteristic mechanisms of behaviour to function. This changes once intelligence and calculation come into play and people realise that their own behaviour is defined by thoughts and desires that are unknown to others, just as their motives are unknown to us.

That is when social actions begin to be guided by inner motivations such as fear of violence, needs, desire and gratification – or by trust in another person. When we know their motivations, we can evaluate our expectations of future conduct – trust is the medium of placing such hopes in another person.

The origin of any social situation is the encounter with others. In his project Nereida, Ariel Guzik endeavours to forge a positive relationship with his counterpart and enter into a dialogue. Nereida is an instrument through which Guzik hopes to communicate with cetaceans (whales and dolphins) for which he has, as intelligent and social creatures, the highest respect. The work is the result of a search for common ground and a medium to communicate with the whales. Trust in communication and its media is always accompanied by uncertainty about the awareness of the ‘other’. Only with the greatest caution, respect and the perspective of hope can such communication be attempted at all. Nereida is a monument to the longing for contact with another species through music. Given the finely-tuned senses of whales and the instruments through which Guzik interacts with them, the work marks a high degree of responsibility that is necessary in every relationship characterised by trust, and so points to the ethical dimension of communication.

A trusting relationship is only possible between two parties that know each other. This is what the project macghillie_just a void by the artist group knowbotic research, in which one can move through the city in camouflage, taps into. The figure of MacGhillie subverts this identity; neither the face of the wearer nor their body can be seen. MacGhillie is a vague presence, an anonymous figure without identity, a void in the social system. The project offers the chance to temporarily withdraw from the normal subjective position and ‘become MacGhillie,’ and so represents a fundamental questioning of interpersonal relationships based on trust. MacGhillie is not, as it seems, simply a tragic figure of failure: camouflage is a cunning instrument of self-empowerment and control over one’s social identity through its negation.

In her video performance One Day, Instead of One Night, a Burst of Machine Gun Fire Will Flash, If Light Cannot Come Otherwise Milica Tomić presents herself ‘as herself,’ a trustworthy and seemingly harmless person. We see a woman in everyday clothes who roams calmly through the city of Belgrade, holding a simple white plastic bag in one hand and a gun in the other. Along the way she visits unmarked locations where important events in the Yugoslav resistance to German occupation took place in the Second World War. Tomic seems completely casual about the gun – an item that, because of the inherent threat of violence, deserves mistrust. She overrides the intuitive distrust of weapons and manages to bring a dangerous object into a public space without it being able to exert its power and absolute dominance. In the attempt to build trust where there really is suspicion, this resonates with the impression of false confidence in someone who seems harmless but conceals dangerous potential. Through her performance Tomic succeeds in capturing this ambivalence of trust.

The work Otondro Prohori, Guarding Who from Naeem Mohaiemen deals with the use of communication media such as mobile phones and the internet in a situation in which the ruling political system is not to be trusted. The technical functionality of media encourages a naive trust in devices that should fulfill a particular purpose: phoning, photocopying, sending e-mail, accessing the internet, taking part in a social network, etc. However, the real use and the actual context of the application has a complexity that contradicts this naïve instrumental trust. The interception of telephones and the state or non-governmental monitoring of data traffic have long been an everyday part of digital communication. Mohaiemen’s series of images deals with this breach of trust through the example of the deception in everyday modern media in Bangladesh and their control by an authoritarian state. As enlightened users today, we are encouraged to distrust the media and forced to assume a somewhat schizophrenic perspective towards the private and intimate media that cause obvious leaks in our private sphere.

You need not be cynical to doubt the principle of trust in social systems. Often these systems are infinitely distant from benevolence and require suspicion as a necessary attitude. The theses in Konrad Becker’s text piece Trusted Realities spotlight the manipulation of truth, fraud and deception as counterparts of trust. The social philosopher Theodor W. Adorno suggested with his dictum “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly,” that there can be no free life as long as social conditions are characterised by a lack of freedom.

The rules of deception that Becker sets up, and the description of his efforts to conceal the falsity, signify a glaring need for security even in that state of falsity. Becker’s work thus offers a rigorous deconstruction of the principle of trust in a technologically advanced society where justified trust seems unimaginable and where only the certainty of false illusion is realistic.

The installation Desire of Code from Seiko Mikami also deals with the ambivalent confidence in security and surveillance systems. When visitors enter the installation, they seem to venture into the interior of a large machine. Numerous small robot arms attached to a long wall react to the presence of an observer with twitching movements. The arms follow every movement of the visitor and turn bright, watchful camera eyes towards their position. In a projection a kaleidoscopic myriad of image fragments can be seen, some current, some showing earlier moments from the installation space, and yet others coming via the internet from different cameras. Despite the apparent total surveillance, there is no feeling of mistrust – the system is transparent in terms of functionality and the communication channels are comprehensible. However, what remains unclear is what the machine intends to do or produce with the obtained information. You feel suspended in the animation, reassured by the constant attention and perhaps even comforted – trusting in the security being provided by a watchful eye. The fragile and twisting little robot arms suggest that the machine itself is more anxious and vulnerable than the observer. The machine doesn’t seem malicious, but confronts the viewer sincerely – like an animal.

More radical is the question that Verena Friedrich formulates with her installation ENDO about trust in technical control systems. Trust needs transparency and ENDO poses the question of trust in data and in its collection. An anonymous, incomprehensible, hermetic, closed machine unceasingly registers and documents data on its immediate surroundings. ENDO absorbs information, expropriates data, avoids a communicative engagement and stays instead silent, motionless on the floor and leaves the viewer in an uncomprehending helplessness. Is the data useful, perhaps, for the provision of a healthy indoor climate, as a safeguard against misconduct, or fire safety? It is nevertheless difficult to grant trust to this introverted apparatus.

Above all the mass media want to serve up manipulations and banal diversions – and yet we expect them to convey information that will help us to orient ourselves in this complex reality. Antoine Schmitt’s installation TIME SLIP is about the desire to not only learn about the past through the media, but also to get a grip on the future. TIME SLIP is based on computer software that modifies the grammatical tense of current reports from news agencies. Headlines are translated from the present or past into the future tense and reproduced on an LED ticker display. At the moment of reading, the desire to look into the future is satisfied. Lyrically and visually conveyed in the ‘language of global reality’ that is English headlines, a fascinating sense of knowledge is created about the future that one would like to believe. On one hand the headlines satisfy the desire for a good story and on the other, open up the logic of the underlying deception – especially if you are already aware of the current news. TIME SLIP is a simulation of an oracle, a prophetic machine. Here trust is employed as a desire, a small displacement and self-deception at the moment where knowledge of the truth of the message can be combined with the illusion of its futurity.

Our mistrust of the media doesn’t mean that we don’t consult them again and again, in the hope that a true, or at least good story is told. It is similar for us with our sense organs. For orientation in the world, we rely absolutely on our perceptual apparatus and it is difficult to mistrust or doubt sensations, even if we have learnt from experience of visual or acoustic illusions that we do not see, hear or smell everything as it actually is. HC Gilje’s video installation blinkleads us to an insistence on the truth of visual perception literally before our eyes. Viewers quickly understand that their perceptions are not to be trusted. The composition is designed for sophisticated and highly precise video projections to create impressions of optical illusions in the space. It is therefore all the more fascinating to observe how the perceptual apparatus processes what is presented, but takes it again at face value, even though a moment before what we saw was exposed as illusion. Finally, it is clear that we have nothing but our senses to rely on. Even if we are skeptical about the deceptions, the edges of light and reflections presented here are so clear that after a short period of doubt we want to trust our eyes unconditionally. blink asks us to: ‘Mistrust perception, if you dare!’

The question of confidence in our perceptions on one hand, and in science on the other, is also dealt with by the installation rota from Carsten Nicolai. In the room we see a tall, rotating, cylindrical mirror with a surface broken regularly by geometrically shaped holes. In the centre of the cylinder is a lamp spilling bright light through the holes which becomes moving spots of light on the surrounding walls. A text panel on the wall shows a table that describes the different frequencies of light at which altered states of consciousness are triggered in the viewer. The cylindrical sculpture is thus presented as a manipulation machine in the tradition of ‘brain machines’ of the 1960s. It remains unclear whether the information in the table is true and whether the alleged effects are actually provoked in every visitor. Finally, it is hard to determine at what speed the cylinder is actually turning. As in other communicative situations, the relationship between exhibitors and visitors is a risky undertaking. The visitor enters a potentially ‘dangerous,’ manipulative situation and must rely on the fulfillment of responsibility at the hands of a careful and cautious host. Or is this perhaps an example of those scientific experiments that manipulate their subjects under the guise of objectivity and transparency but actually follow a completely different and hidden interest in knowledge?

Nicolai’s work opens up a complex discourse about truth, perception and ethics that includes a critical assessment of the confidence in one’s own senses: could our perceptual apparatus, our brain and mental state really be nothing more than an automatically responsive, controllable system?

One method of ascertaining reality is the imitation of the found world. Sophie Bélair Clément tries this in her Choir piece for 24 voices attuned to the spectrum of frequencies of a sodium lamp powered by 60 hertz. The sound of the technical device is simulated by the most fundamental instrument – the human voice. An audible drama unfolds of generous, persistent efforts to obtain an accurate imitation of the sound, and of the subsequent failure in the face of the technological precision of the lamp. This drama is marked by the fact that it addresses the banal tone of a fluorescent tube, which is actually a waste product and commands little attention.

The kind of empathy needed to take this sound so seriously in an aesthetic sense and then guide a chorus in the singing of it is also needed for entry into a communicative relationship. The desire to acquire technology and control its effects in a highly technological world is increasingly urgent and reflected in the longing for another entity that can be trusted, whether person or system. The desire of becoming-lamp, of not only singing but also shining, puts forward a humorous attempt at a human variation of technological simulacra.

A deep immersion in technically produced simulacra is offered by digital animation in film and computer games. In Lonely Record Sessions, Joan Leandre has edited together scenes from such games into a linear video. The virtual worlds seem highly charged emotionally and make use of a cinematic visual language in scenes of the city and countryside. These mood shots aim to create a particular emotional state. The scenes never relinquish their status of simulated image, always remaining clearly artificial. It is obvious that the emotion is not produced by real things, but occurs in response to a construction. The deliberate mistrust of the image causes a mistrust of one’s own emotions when viewing the work and reveals just how dependent we are in our responses to certain visual and auditory patterns. In these sessions, any interaction and control over the course of the story is removed, and we are forced to experience the intrusion presented by the pseudo-emotions of the images.

With his installation Memory Cone, Julien Maire has found a strong metaphor for the relationship of images and memories, and for the precarious status of our memories. An open visible device that is, however, in its complexity almost impossible to comprehend, invites us to make a photo visible in a projection through moving and compiling strips of white paper. This photo appears to be a private document with possibly great emotional content. But in the face of such a confusing technical system in which it is not clear where the image is actually being created, is it possible to really believe this picture? The image and its origins remain mysterious and even if we see that our interaction can appear in the image, we are separated from it by a border that is not only technical, but seems to be emotional as well. And if the images cannot be trusted, can one trust one’s memories? The everyday desire to conserve and construct memories by means of media can only be fulfilled if we believe in the veracity of images – a veracity that cannot be proven ultimately. Like these pieces in front of us, the shards of our memories have to be laboriously assembled before they again fragment and lose their solid form.

Media transmit content. They make it possible to experience something that is absent, or past, or that cannot be sensed with our perceptual apparatus. Conventional radio converts specific electromagnetic waves into acoustic signals that can be perceived by the human ear. In everyday use, waves which are broadcast by a transmitter, are received and heard as music, sound or spoken word. Joyce Hinterding deals with a frequency range that is affected by the rather random and secondary electromagnetic effects of natural and technological phenomena. There is something improbable and uncanny about how she presents an electro-acoustic reality that can be made audible by antennas drawn in graphite. This is not a kind of techno-animism, but simply antennas for one part of the reality spectrum that manifests itself and can be experienced through the medium of these drawings.

The part of the spectrum that the antennas pick up is very specific and depends on the individual form of each antenna. The drawing creates its own specific signals from this reality, which, in this particular form, is heard only through the specific shape of the antenna – a slightly differently drawn antenna produces a different signal from the same place. This could be described, albeit a little clumsily, as an aesthetically motivated spectrum – constructivism: it is not initially the objectivity of the electromagnetic spectrum that matters, but rather the drawing that corresponds to a unique aspect of the spectrum. Hinterding’s drawings are an expression of a desire for communication as well as an expression of trust in this communication.

Hinterding’s trust in the world of devices has a different quality to the trust in a ‘normal’ antenna, calculated and constructed according to the rules of radio technology. She puts trust in drawing as a world-disclosing technique that produces an instrument for an operation in the spectrum of reality at degrée zéro of media technology: graphite pencil on paper. Her drawings are an expression of the desire for communication and of the confidence in this communication.

In the winter of 1967/68, the sociologist and systems theorist Niklas Luhmann worked at the former Social Research Centre of the University of Münster in Dortmund on his study of ‘trust’. This work is still one of the key theoretical texts for our exhibition theme. In his book, Luhmann describes precisely the mechanisms and functions of trust both between individuals and in complex social systems. He writes in the spirit of the cybernetic social systems of his time, foregrounding the question of the functioning of systems through the illusion of trust. But is this ‘real world’ actually a world without trust? Or is it a world that should again reconsider personal trust after spending decades on perfecting its trust in systems alone?