do you want to quit? intimacy,site,self

Morehshin Allahyari Hannah Quinlan and Rosie HastingsAngela Washko

More Information:https://uag.arts.uci.edu/exhibit/do-you-want-quit-intimacy-site-self

curated by Erin Gordon January 13 - February 10, 2018University Art GalleryUniversity of California, Irvine

In his essay “Screened Out,” Jean Baudrillard displayed skepticism over matters related to the realm of possibility elicited by the screen, or the proxy that connects its users to one another. He writes, “...the video image—and the computer screen—create a kind of immersion, a sort of umbilical relation, of ‘tactile interaction’....You move as you like, you make of the interactive image what you will, but immersion is the price to pay for this infinite availability, this open combinatorial of elements.”2 The relationship between self and screen are theorized as inherently corporeal as they become intimately intertwined, and although his essay rests on observation and speculation, the screen as a mediator of human relationships is exemplified through the interaction-based communities that have formed through the screen as a site of mobilizing information. Similarly, the network is representative of a multitude of screens that allow communication between humans and

machines to occur. The performance of tangible and intangible labor is similar to Alexander Galloway’s definition of networks as a “chain of triumph” and a “web of ruin.”3 The dichotomous nature of the network as a site of “triumph” and “ruin” is unstable, and our identities, or our selves, directly play into shaping the network’s eccentricities with the relationships that are formed through it and with it.

In drawing together intimacy, site, and the self, it is important to address these three concepts as a response to the “network” in terms of technology and the Internet but also the “network” as conceptual framework in the same way theorists like Galloway have discussed it. The red, blue, green, and yellow cables that line the interiors of Google’s data centers make for a picturesque scene. The buildings often sit upon hillsides or near water, with photographs taken at the apex of sunset. These are some of many possible

“...your words are no longer merely what you have to say—they are your very pres-

ence, they’re what manifests you in the virtual world, and how you use them,

consequently, tends to shape that world’s perceptions of you in much the same way how you look frames what the real world

thinks.”—Julian Dibbell, My Tiny Life: Crime and

Passion in a Virtual World 1

physical elements of what constitute a network. The servers that fill those buildings are what we ultimately connect through when we connect to the Internet. To move away from and back to the material example of the network is necessary in framing the exhibition Do You Want to Quit? Intimacy, Site, Self, as the general function of the network, as a way to transport data, is ultimately representative of the exchange of information between bodies. However, the bodies that deviate from cisgender (people whose gender identity aligns with their assigned sex at birth) hegemonic masculinities have a larger barrier to overcome when engaging in the network—this results in emotional labor as a means of mediating oneself when an Internet or non-Internet-based community exhibits threatening behaviors against these othered identities. The works by Angela Washko, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, and Morehshin Allahyari that comprise Do You Want to Quit? operate in reaction to their objects of inquiry—the network in one of its many forms and the emotional labor that takes place between intimacy, site, and self. They question what it means to embody and be embodied by technology beneath the weight of very real, human emotions that develop through and with the screen. In referencing screens—and our registering of the material communicated through those screens and the network—I am more interested in the tripartite agreement between the intimacies exchanged through our selves and the screen as it functions as a site.

IntimacyThe physical body has become almost conflated with digital identity, and if the body is object-like, anxiety becomes the central affect around which we orient objects, situations, and our bodies.4 In speaking to anxiety and intimacy as a reverberation, I will first refer to it generally as a way of physically or emotionally engaging in connection with another human being.5 Sociologist Arlie R. Hochschild defines emotional labor as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display.”6 To feel is to experience an affect as an external manifestation of that emotion through the physical means afforded by the body.  

Overwhelming feeling is my immediate response to Angela Washko’s work. The artist observed a vast lack of critical engagement with the “manosphere,” a feminist colloquial term for a network of men who believe they are actively oppressed by feminism. The techniques of

Pick-Up Artists (also known as PUAs) have been widely adopted by members of the manosphere: Men that feel jilted by their ability to date women are often attracted by the promise of power over and, to an extent, intimacy with women. Through the written word, the exchange of communicative gesture occurs from the typing of fingers (or verbal dictation) to the screen. That said, text that is received by its intended or unintended audience is left to both sides of the screen. Perhaps this is where a kind of “game” takes place—the game of using the network as sites for research, information exchange, or casual social situations. Washko’s recent works have directly engaged with her research on the manosphere and its warped conceptions of power.

In her work DO NOT ENTER (Room Sixteen of Panther Modern), an avatar of the artist gestures wildly within an ambiguous environment. The screen darkens, and a modified version of the voice says, “There is nothing you can make that is safe from being seen.” Washko’s correspondence with Roosh V., a leader within the manosphere, and, adjacently, with members of the manosphere itself makes her vulnerable to the violent rhetoric of the network. It is the “web of ruin” Galloway speaks to, although her most recent project The Game: The Game—a game and dating simulator created with Ren’Py, a free software engine—speaks to the agency that is often stripped from the women who interact with individuals who seek the help of PUAs. The game has a kind of ludic malleability that comes with visual novels; the main character is a woman who has come to the bar to meet a friend after a work day, and the PUAs with whom this character interacts come equipped with vitriol and a multiplicity of end objectives for the player. To say that the main character occupies an abject space is an understatement; Xiu Xiu’s soundtrack is increasingly anxiety-inducing as each PUA blocks the player’s path through the bar, and this harassment, though much differently experienced in real life, is affective and jarring.

SiteWith UK Gay Bar Directory, the camera—a GoPro—is the primary spectator; it gazes out into the room from its position in a discrete corner of the bar, quiet and unassuming. What is the camera waiting to see? The bar itself is empty, with soft dance music and cascading lights that shine upon the bar’s occupants in

a hypnotic rhythm. Archiving an object or place through visual means is an attempt to preserve it for future use, and Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings began filming over one hundred gay bars in the United Kingdom for this purpose. With their choice to strip the typical demarcating elements of the archive (such as naming and categorizing practices) from their documentation of the bars, the bars themselves become inhabitants of a hostile space through the emptiness that encapsulates them. The decline of spaces for queer communities has been a subject of the duo’s research; they found gentrification was pushing gay bars in the UK out of business due to societal and economical factors that made it impossible for the bars to stay. However, to film an unoccupied gay bar is to encapsulate the memory of a feeling or experience despite the anxiety elicited by its emptiness. 

In speaking to a queered spatiotemporality, artist and theorist Allucquére Rosanne “Sandy” Stone writes about falling in love with her prosthesis, or the act slipping in and out of disembodiment and between identities when confronted by technology. She says, “For all intents and purposes, your ‘root’ persona is you. Take that one away, and there’s nobody home.”7 Quinlan and Hastings’ UK Gay Bar Directory continues this thread of disembodiment and physical displacement of identity, allowing a communal social space to be isolated from its community with the camera. Its function as a space for the exchange of information between queer bodies is subverted with its emptiness, and the archive, as it strays from conventionality, creates for its publics what queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz refers to as “the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”8 It is both a physical and intangible labor that preserves a node of the network for a community who will still want access to it when its doors are closed. The gay bar, as a representation of “another world,” speaks to the artists’ necessity to vacillate between the viscerality of the space and its inevitable erasure.

Self Morehshin Allahyari’s practice functions as a site for using technology against disruption and distance. Allahyari’s video In Mere Spaces All Things Are Side By Side I captures the experience of using the Internet in a developing country through reconceptualizing a long-distance

relationship that took place while the artist still lived in Iran. The space the video occupies is fictional, as the artist reconstructed the fantasy space of the instant messaging chat based on pure speculation of what a virtual space would look like. She speaks through the screen name “morehshina” with a timestamp displayed after the screen name as if we were watching a film with subtitles. This is ultimately a visualization of a relationship. It is quiet and careful, yet jarring when the screen cuts to black with an ambient screech. Because Net Neutrality in the United States is currently fraught with bureaucratic opposition, one cannot help but think of the dissonance a sub-optimal Internet connection might cause in our many relationships.

To ‘re-Figure,’ to use Allahyari’s term, is a feminist act of recontextualizing the fundamental nature of these figures of storytelling. Over the last three years, her practice has evolved with the use of open source 3D modeling software and printing. Allahyari and her collaborator Daniel Rourke coined the term “Additivism,” a portmanteau of “additive” and “activism” to shed light on using 3D modeling and printing as a radical tool in response to destruction (it is typically presented with a hashtag for purposes of circulation—#Additivism). The project She Who Sees the Unknown is a continuation of the artist’s research into narratives of colonialism and oppression as well as Middle Eastern female figures of mythological origin. Her methodology is rooted in speculation, in that she performs research on her intended objects without an actual physical representation to draw from, enmeshing research into practices of performance, recreation, and storytelling. Allahyari uses “poor images” to do this—as Hito Steyerl uses the “poor image” to draw out a Marxist critique of the accessibility of imagery on the Internet—and without the “poor image,” she would be left to completely imagine a physical presence and space occupied by a nonexistent sculpted object.9 Her reconciliation of compiling a speculative archive with the actual archive itself is very much a self-driven project of monumental scale, calling forth what it means to “manage”; the term comes from the Latin word manus, or “hand.” “Hand” is quite precarious, as it denotes having power over an object through the act of holding it mentally or physically, and in Allahyari’s work, she does both.

Notes1 Julian Dibbell, My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998), 230.

2 Jean Baudrillard, “Screened Out,” in Screened Out, trans. Chris Turner (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2014), 315-16.

3 Galloway grounds his conceptualization of the network in the tragedy Agamemnon. See Alexander R. Galloway, “Networks,” in Critical Terms For Media Studies, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 281.

4 Jacques Lacan claims that social situations and arranges revolve around anxiety, the “central affect,” in Seminar XVII. See Joan Copjec, “May ’68, The Emotional Month,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Zizek (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2006), 106.

5 Shaka McGlotten, Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013), 1.

6 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 7.

7 Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), 2.

8 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1.

9 Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux 10 (Nov. 2009).

Morehshin Allahyari is a media artist, activist, educator, and curator. Her work deals with political, social, and cultural contradictions, documenting personal and collective struggles humans face in this century. Allahyari’s Dark Matter is a series of 3D printed sculptures that form humorous, merged juxtapositions. Underlying the humor, however, is the reality of authoritarianism: the objects chosen (dog, dildo, gun, necktie, satellite dish, etc.) are representations of things censured by the Iranian government – possession of which puts one at risk of harassment, incurring fines or incarceration. Her Material Speculation: ISIS series uses digital fabrication technology to reconstruct artifacts destroyed by ISIS in 2015. The project has achieved wide acclaim for proposing 3D printing technology as a tool both for resistance and documentation.

Allahyari’s work has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops including Centre Pompidou in Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, Pori Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Museo Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, Museum für Angewandte Kunst, and Material Mexico City. She has been an artist in residence at Carnegie Mellon STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (2015), Autodesk Pier9 Workshop in San Francisco (2015), and BANFF Centre (2013), among others. The many publications featuring her work include The New York Times, Huffington Post, Wired, NPR, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, Dazed Digital, VICE, Neural Magazine and Al Jazeera. Allahyari is the Co-Founder of the Experimental Research Lab at Pier9/Autodesk. She is currently a Research Resident at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, New York.

Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown: Huma, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Upfor Gallery.

Morehshin Allahyari, In Mere Spaces All Things Are Side By Side I, video still, 2014 - 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Upfor Gallery.

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings live and work in South East London. They graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2014. Their work centers themes of queerness and resistance, and includes an ongoing project @Gaybar, wherein the artists rematerialise the historic gay bar as a container for queer practice. Selected solo/duo exhibitions include Fuck Me On The Middle Walk, Truth and Consequences, Geneva (2017); GENTRIFICATION, presented by Daata Editions and Zuecca Projects, 15th Venice Architecture Biennale (2016); How to survive a flood @Gaybar, DRAF Studio, London (2016) and Cruising Extinction, @Gaybar, Oslo 10, Basel (2015).

Selected group exhibitions include (X) A Fantasy, DRAF, London (2017); Coming Out, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2017); Utopian Voices Here & Now, Somerset House, London (2016); No! I Am No Singular Instrument, Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2016); Curators’ Series #9: Ways of Living by Arcadia Missa, DRAF, London (2016); CONDO Cinema (screening), Genesis Cinema, London (2016) and S, Arcadia Missa, London, (2015). Their video archive of the gay bars of major U.K. Cities – The UK Gaybar Directory – has been recently acquired by The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, UK Gay Bar Directory, video still, 2016. Courtesy of the artists and Arcadia Missa

Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, UK Gay Bar Directory, video stills, 2016. Courtesy of the artists and Arcadia Missa.

Angela Washko is an artist, writer and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in spaces frequently hostile toward it. Since 2012, Washko has operated The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, an ongoing intervention inside the most popular online role-playing game of all time. Washko’s most recent project, The Game: The Game is a video game presenting the practices of several prominent seduction coaches (aka pick-up artists) through the format of a dating simulator. In the game these pick-up gurus attempt to seduce the player using their signature techniques taken verbatim from their instructional books and video materials. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

A recent recipient of a Franklin Furnace Performance Fund Grant, a Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier Grant from the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and a Rhizome Internet Art Microgrant, Washko’s practice has been highlighted in Art in America, Frieze Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian, ArtForum, ARTnews, The Hairpin, VICE, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, The New York Times, Neural Magazine and more. Her projects have been presented nationally and internationally at venues including Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milan Design Triennale, the Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennial and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Her writing has been published in Creative Time Reports, FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, NTIK, Neural Magazine, VASA Journal on Images and Culture, .dpi, ANIMAL, and more.

Angela Washko, The Game: The Game, game still, 2015-2017. Courtesy of the artist.

Angela Washko, The Game: The Game, game stills, 2015-2017. Courtesy of the artist.

Special Thanks:Morehshin Allahyari, Hannah Piper Burns, Arcadia Missa, Virginia Arce, Juli Carson, Kelly Donahey, Antoinette LaFarge, Maura Murnane, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Bonnie Ruberg, Allyson Unzicker, Upfor Gallery, Angela Washko, and Bruce Yonemoto.

layout and design by Maura Murnane

printed at Main Graphics, Irvine, CA

all rights reserved 2018