orange text on charles

1 files changed, 73 insertions, 16 deletions

diff --git a/frontend/site/projects/museum/views/essay.js b/frontend/site/projects/museum/views/essay.js
index be5b6fa..63bbe44 100644
--- a/frontend/site/projects/museum/views/essay.js
+++ b/frontend/site/projects/museum/views/essay.js
@@ -51,7 +51,7 @@ class Essays extends Component {
   }
 
   goHome() {
-    history.push(`/last-museum/home/`)
+    history.push(`/thelastmuseum/home/`)
   }
 
   changeLanguage() {
@@ -150,42 +150,99 @@ const ArtistStatements = ({ essayId, index, isCurrent, language, onClose }) => (
   </div>
 )
 
-const NadimEssay = ({ essayId, index, isCurrent, onClose }) => (
+const NadimEssay = ({ essayId, index, isCurrent, language, onClose }) => (
   <div className={isCurrent ? "artist-detail visible" : "artist-detail"}>
     <div className="page-title" onClick={onClose}>About The L<span>ast Museum</span></div>
     <div className="page-subtitle">By Nadim Samman</div>
     <div className="page-content">
+      <span dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: ESSAY_TEXTS.nadim_intro[language] }} />
+      <ArtistGlobe />
+      <span dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: ESSAY_TEXTS.nadim_essay[language] }} />
+    </div>
+  </div>
+)
+
+const ESSAY_TEXTS = {
+  nadim_intro: {
+    "en": `
       <p>
-        <i>The Last Museum</i> is an exhibition that explores productive tensions between the putative ‘anywhere’  of the digital and its relation to local particulars. Deploying a hybrid offline-online format, the project invites an international group of artists to reimagine site-specificity, through a sequence of interventions that cut across both real and virtual domains. The artists are <b>Nora Al-Badri</b> (Germany/Iraq), <b>Juliana Cerqueira Leite</b> (Brazil), <b>Nicole Foreshew</b> (Wiradjuri Nation/Australia), <b>Jakrawal Nilthamrong</b> (Thailand), <b>Zohra Opoku</b> (Ghana), and <b>Charles Stankievech</b> (Canada).
+      <i>The Last Museum</i> is an exhibition that explores productive tensions between the putative ‘anywhere’ of the digital and its relation to local particulars. Deploying a hybrid offline-online format, the project invites an international group of artists to reimagine site-specificity, through a sequence of interventions that cut across both real and virtual domains. The artists are <b>Nora Al-Badri</b> (Germany/Iraq), <b>Juliana Cerqueira Leite</b> (Brazil), <b>Nicole Foreshew</b> (Wiradjuri Nation/Australia), <b>Jakrawal Nilthamrong</b> (Thailand), <b>Zohra Opoku</b> (Ghana), and <b>Charles Stankievech</b> (Canada).
       </p>
-      <ArtistGlobe />
+    `,
+    "de": `<p></p>`,
+  },
+  nadim_essay: {
+    "en": `
       <p>
-        <i>The Last Museum</i> connects disparate sites, spanning six continents and the virtual sphere. It is an experiment that deploys a unique exhibition design—embracing the overlapping <i>analog</i> and <i>digital</i> dimensions of a given location while, additionally, exploiting the unique potentials of each for dramatic effect. Altogether, <i>The Last Museum</i> comprises an epic <i>para-site</i> that is most accessible through a web  interface.
+      <i>The Last Museum</i> connects disparate sites, spanning six continents and the virtual sphere. It is an experiment that deploys a unique exhibition design—embracing the overlapping <i>analog</i> and <i>digital</i> dimensions of a given location while, additionally, exploiting the unique potentials of each for dramatic effect. Altogether, <i>The Last Museum</i> comprises an epic para-site that is most accessible through a web interface. 
       </p>
       <p>
-        Each artist was commissioned to author a sculptural group, to be installed at an outdoor site of their own choosing. The choice was only limited by a request that it be associated with communication and connectivity. Final choices ended up highlighting both technical and more esoteric forms of transmission—and included a notorious hacker hangout (Berlin’s C-base), ancestral land in rural Australia, a down-at-heel electronics mall in downtown Sao Paolo, a neutrino observatory in the Rocky Mountains, and more.
+      Each artist was commissioned to author a sculptural group, to be installed at an outdoor site of their own choosing. The choice was only limited by a request that it be associated with communication and connectivity. Final choices ended up highlighting both technical and more esoteric forms of transmission—and included a notorious hacker hangout, ancestral land in rural Australia, a down-at-heel electronics mall in downtown Sao Paolo, a Cosmic Ray observatory in the Rocky Mountains, and more.
       </p>
       <p>
-        Each sculptural intervention was videoed by the artists, and the resulting clips (from all over the world) were handed over to a digital artist, <a href="https://asdf.us/" className="jules-link" target="_blank">Jules LaPlace</a>, who brought them together through a digital way-finding protocol; the exhibition’s ‘hang’. The public outcome, debuting as a pop-up window on the KW start page, is a website experience that unfolds as an interactive sequence of objects and places, navigable using bespoke tools. At times, these tools amount to additional (digital) artworks. Visitors will have a sense that that the exhibition is a wormhole, of sorts. 
+      Each sculptural intervention was videoed by the artists, and the resulting clips (from all over the world) were handed over to a digital artist, Jules LaPlace, before being brought together through a bespoke way-finding protocol; the exhibition’s ‘hang’. The public outcome, debuting as a pop-up window on the KW start page, is a website experience that unfolds as an interactive sequence of objects and places, navigable using bespoke tools. At times, these tools amount to additional (digital) artworks. Visitors will have a sense that that the exhibition is a wormhole, of sorts. 
       </p>
       <p>
-        Some of the featured locations are associated with infrastructure and the World Wide Web, others include waterways and climate. Uniting these seemingly disparate aspects, a conceptual leitmotif of visually <i>grounding</i> planetary networks and other globe-spanning systems will be evident. Call it a <i>web-site-specific</i> project—in the sense that both art and exhibition design re-imagines the stakes of ‘site-specificity’ for digital times. What this means is that <i>The Last Museum</i>’s ‘site’ is a layered reality or (to borrow a term from computational engineering) a ‘Stack’. Our exhibition-stack encompasses material facts on the ground, digital code, and softer site specificities—including those previously outlined by the art historian Miwon Kwon, such as ‘cultural debates, a theoretical concept, a historical condition, even particular formations of desire’. Each artwork in <i>The Last Museum</i> is a kind of a vector that intersects with all of the stack’s layers.
+      Some of the featured locations are associated with infrastructure and the World Wide Web, others include waterways and climate. Uniting these seemingly disparate aspects, a conceptual leitmotif of visually grounding planetary networks and other globe-spanning systems will be evident. Call it a web-site-specific project—in the sense that both art and exhibition design re-imagines the stakes of ‘site-specificity’ for digital times. What this means is that <i>The Last Museum</i>’s ‘site’ is a layered reality or (to borrow a term from computational engineering) a ‘Stack’. Our exhibition-stack encompasses material facts on the ground, digital code, and softer site specificities—including those previously outlined by the art historian Miwon Kwon, such as ‘cultural debates, a theoretical concept, a historical condition, even particular formations of desire’. Each artwork in <i>The Last Museum</i> is a kind of a vector that intersects with all of the stack’s layers.
       </p>
       <p>
-        For visitors, <i>The Last Museum</i> will offer a blurring between cinema and website interactivity. The ability to stay with a moving image for as long as you want, pushing the edit along at your own pace, is not normally available as a filmic experience. In fact, it is more a province of gaming. Other interactions will include releasing files for download, accessing texts, switching soundtrack variations and more. All of these things will be artist directed and thus in no way interpretive or secondary materials.
+      For visitors, <i>The Last Museum</i> will offer a blurring between cinema and website interactivity. The ability to stay with a moving image for as long as you want, pushing the edit along at your own pace, is not normally available as a filmic experience. In fact, it is more a province of gaming. Other interactions will include releasing files for download, accessing texts, switching soundtrack variations and more. All of these things will be artist directed and thus in no way interpretive or secondary materials.
       </p>
       <p>
-        Rather than being a one-off exhibition, <i>The Last Museum</i> will ‘tour’ as a pop-up window on the start pages of partner institutions for fixed periods. In line with the project’s rejection of an ‘anywhere, anytime’ web imaginary, each touring iteration will acquire a new chapter—with an additional artist/site from the host institution’s country added to the navigable chain. As long as our colleagues’ are interested, it is possible that <i>The Last Museum</i> may tour and grow indefinitely—like the content of the web itself.
+      Rather than being a one-off exhibition, <i>The Last Museum</i> will ‘tour’ as a pop-up window on the start pages of partner institutions for fixed periods. In line with the project’s rejection of an ‘anywhere, anytime’ web imaginary, each touring iteration will acquire a new chapter—with an additional artist/site from the host institution’s country added to the navigable chain. As long as our colleagues’ are interested, it is possible that <i>The Last Museum</i> may tour and grow indefinitely—like the content of the web itself.
       </p>
       <p>
-        This project was conceived during the first wave of COVID-19, amid heightened tensions between the conditions of physical lockdown and globe-spanning telecommunication. Although utterly international, its production required no travel for persons or artworks. When the exhibition opens, audiences will not have to travel to view it. While the development of such a format is not supposed to replace gallery experience, it is at least suggestive for how to approach a growing question in the museum sector: namely, how do analog artworks and digital space can come together a meaningful way? In fact, this is only half of the question: We must also explore how digital artworks can relate to analog space. <i>The Last Museum</i> attempts to work on both problems at the same time, creatively, playing with the issue of translation and re-representation in a bi-directional manner.
+      This project was conceived during the first wave of COVID-19, amid heightened tensions between the conditions of physical lockdown and globe-spanning telecommunication. Although utterly international, its production required no travel for persons or artworks. When the exhibition opens, audiences will not have to travel to view it. While the development of such a format is not supposed to replace gallery experience, it is at least suggestive for how to approach a growing question in the museum sector: namely, how do analog artworks and digital space can come together a meaningful way? In fact, this is only half of the question: We must also explore how digital artworks can relate to analog space. <i>The Last Museum</i> attempts to work on both problems at the same time, creatively, playing with the issue of translation and re-representation in a bi-directional manner. 
       </p>
       <p>
-        At its core, The Last Museum explores how tangibility and distance interact, how things that seem fixed in place might (or do) escape in various forms. In a sense, then, it clear that we are dealing with an issue as old as art itself (albeit, employing contemporary tools). At least one of the exhibition’s artists, Zohra Opoku, explicitly takes up an art-historical precursor for the crossing of spatial and metaphysical thresholds. The Egyptian Book of the Dead is her inspiration for a series of interventions in a half-built mortuary in Accra, Ghana. Draped with screen-printed fabric, the unfinished site is (literally) shrouded in images that stimulate reflection on how stillness and passage come together. In this work and more, the <i>The Last Museum</i> hovers somewhere between life and death, lockdown and escape.
+      At its core, <i>The Last Museum</i> explores how tangibility and distance interact, how things that seem fixed in place might (or do) escape in various forms. In a sense, then, it it clear that we are dealing with an issue as old as art itself (albeit, employing contemporary tools). 
       </p>
-    </div>
-  </div>
-)
+      <p>
+      The exhibition opens with <i>The Glass Key</i> by Canadian artist <b>Charles Stankievech</b>. Its interactive sequence features original footage, found video, and textual fragments drawn from various literary sources. The scenes were captured at a cosmic ray research station, situated on top of a snowy peak in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. It was here that the artist installed a number of stones—variously half-buried in ice, lodged in a cliff-side fissure, and balanced on a summit. As the exhibition visitor browses Stankievech’s moving-image documentation of these situations (sometimes overlaid with pop-up videos), they also hear a complex soundtrack—a harmonic drone in deep spatial reverb; high pitched crackles created by solar radiation; and a heartbeat that spells out the texts in the rhythms of Morse code.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+      In light of the mountain site’s dedication to cosmic searching (and sensing) as well as related   references in the pop-up videos, <i>The Glass Key</i> would appear to dramatize a telescoping spatial perspective: That is to say, it seems to explore an oscillation between macro-cosmic perception (looking outwards on a grand scale, towards stars and galaxies) and, conversely, the contemplation of epic depths in the micro-cosmic domain (of quarks and so on). One of the pop-ups is a 3D scan of the interior of SNO Lab—a Canadian neutrino observatory located 2km underground. By linking one of the world’s deepest human facilities (for exploring the sub-atomic realm) with a high-altitude observatory, Stankievech trains viewers’ sights on post-digital image-culture concerned with the cosmos. This is an image-culture whose universe(s) can only be sensed by super-computers. (Visitors may recall the World Wide Web’s origins at CERN, another subterranean facility, as they contemplate the emerging tech being developed at SNO Lab.) And yet, as the artist’s contribution implies, this is an imaging-culture that is no less given to paradox than archaic traditions—despite its technological sophistication: 
+      </p>
+      <p>
+      Indeed, <i>The Glass Key</i> asserts that contemporary cosmology retains a link to the ancient conflation of macrocosm and microcosm. He deploys a historical icon for this conceptual inversion – a triangle within a triangle - in a HyperCard software animation. The symbol itself was the subject of a discourse by the early Twentieth Century esoterist Rene Guenon (author of The Glass Key’s inaugural textual fragment), specifically concerning a putative ‘cave within a mountain’: Whereas the outer triangle’s only corner on a vertical axis symbolically corresponds to a visible summit, the inner triangle’s peak is inverted, facing downwards, indicating a second hidden peak—whose magnitude is of no less import for the spirit.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+      While showing a LIDAR scan of a Mayan pyramid that he captured in the Yucatan, Stankievech pairs a statement by Robert Smithson from <i>Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan</i> (1969). The text addresses the creative perspective afforded to caterpillars (by virtue of their scale, one presumes), the double or <i>mirrored</i> aspect of certain stars, and the entrance to abyss. Stankievech’s contribution continues in this fashion of dense intertextuality. While, to some degree his piece presents an overwhelming series of intellectual hyperlinks (rabbit holes that lead one far from an initial starting point) there is an underlying meditation on the fact that connectivity is a paradoxical technical (if not mystical) side-effect of bunkering, digging in, and locking down.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+      <b>Nora Al-Badri</b>’s <i>AFU. This is Not A Hacker Space</i> pictures 3D printed sculptures installed in two of Berlin’s legendary hacker hangouts—the Chaos Computer Club, and the c-base ‘spaceship’. The items are based on scans of ancient Egyptian and Babylonian idols from various museum collections whose source files were recovered (from their digital storerooms) by unauthorized techniques. Al-Badri has altered some of their forms and transformed them to all female gendered spirits. Best known among this collection of liberated archaeological data idols is a bust of Nefertiti, which the artist famously expropriated from Berlin’s Neues Museum by surreptitiously scanning it, only to release the file into the online wilds—initiating a public debate about free use of information relating to cultural patrimony. 
+      </p>
+      <p>
+      Within these hacker spaces, Al-Badri’s all-female deities speak to the visitor–of their agendas for hacker culture. As, in the artist’s own words, ‘coloured cyber-feminist’ queens and goddesses, they have come to claim sovereignty over making and data activism; over museal and computer culture at large. Placed within the underground temples of digital politics, these new idols propose a revaluation of women’s past, present and future role in our information society. In some respects, they serve to (symbolically) exorcise the familiar spirts of misogyny from this realm. It is an occupation; a takeover. 
+      </p>
+      <p>
+      Of course, the analog being of such ancient sculptures (the original bust of Nefertiti, for instance) is resolutely unique. In reverence for this uniqueness, or irreplaceable originality, museums pursue an active care-for that parallels mummification. Indeed, if the museum liberated the funerary object from its tomb, it did so only to re-entomb it within a display case and conservation system—while developing proprietary directions for interpreting and accessing the scope of its powers. However, as Al-Badri’s work seems to imply, the release of these objects’ digital doubles into the world beyond the purview of the historical museum effectively re-animates them—as beings with new potential: The digital doubling of the icons recharges their god-like stature, perhaps, because of their spatio-temporal superpositionality: They are here <i>and</i> there; static, mummified, <i>and</i> simultaneously active. They transcend binary definition. And this may be the reason that their ‘cyber-feminist’ being overcomes masculine (gendered) computation.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+      <b>Juliana Cerqueira Leite</b>’s objects were installed in an electronics retail neighborhood in downtown Sao Paulo. Made of plaster, they are fragmented, repeating casts from the artists own body—principally her mouth and hands. Set amid cables, screens, and piles of hardware, they bring a tactile counterpoint to the ostensible transparency of the screens on sale. This effect is compounded by the replacement of the website cursor with the artist’s own finger, dipped in plaster (a motif that gives another sense to the <i>digit</i> within the digital). Over such imagery, pop-up videos comprising found footage add a degree of visual and sonic cacophony. These clips variously relate to the production and repair of electronics components, global shipping routes, and 3D printed human organs. In addition, each scene features a disembodied mouth (the artist’s own), yammering a stream of conscious monologue. Echoing the performance in Samuel Beckett’s <i>Not I</i> (1972) this mouth/voice is, in turns, hectoring, pleading, reactive/afraid. It is a compulsive speaker. 
+      </p>
+      <p>
+      Overall, Leite’s contribution explores the question of boundaries between bodies and the techno-prostheses through which they access the digital sphere—how they blur into it, functionally, or, at times, awkwardly. Her work conveys the impression of a body broken up, distributed, reproduced, soldered onto others; a recombinant body, with some parts that operate autonomously. Foregrounding a certain abjection within this techno-embodiment, the work’s mood runs contrary to the valorization of the cyborg in recent theory. The Santa Ifigênia neighborhood where the video was shot is situated close to the main area in Sao Paulo where crack cocaine is sold and consumed. It is not a coincidence, Leite claims in her artist statement, that the tech industry refers to everyone as users. If there is something speedy, compulsive, and monstrous in the video’s affect, it arises from our—the user’s—all too familiar compulsions.  
+      </p>
+      <p>
+      <b>Zohra Opoku</b>’s contribution was shot in a half-built mortuary in Accra, Ghana. The ruin’s rough walls set the stage for her installation of various printed fabric artworks, whose pictorial motifs were inspired by the Ancient Egyptian <i>Book of the Dead</i>—a corpus of spells concerning the deceased’s passage into and through the afterlife. The textiles hang shroud-like over concrete and iron rebar, as distant voices and street noise are heard echoing through the structure. Lightly moving in a draft, they depict branches, faces, masks, hands, and eyes, often riffing on hieroglyphics. Once again, <i>The Last Museum</i> returns to the funerary. In this instance, to a location where a body is prepared for entombment. And yet this location is itself unfinished—and will remain so.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+      With respect to such limbo, we must note that <i>The Last Museum</i> shares its title with a semi-fictional memoir written by the cult author and artist Brion Gysin—a sometime collaborator of William Burroughs, perhaps best known for his psychedelic light-sculpture the <i>Dreamachine</i> (1962).  His late text <i>The Last Museum</i> (1985) paid tribute to the famous Beat Hotel in Paris—the haunt for an artistic community who were committed to exploring both geographical and inner space. It was a place he knew well.  Gysin’s literary experiment was a pioneering leap into the grey area between documentation and poetic license, before reality TV and fake news. Perhaps indicating the significance of this in-between status, the story was (metaphysically) set in the <i>bardo</i>—the Tibetan Buddhist state of <i>intermediate</i> existence between two lives (death and rebirth). Circling again, at the level of plot, around the theme of displacement (or ungrounding)—an American investor plans to buy the hotel and transport it across the Atlantic to be re-built in the vicinity of the San Andreas fault. A suggestive allegory for how personal memories, past lives, and documentation intersect on the plane of individual psychology, Gysin’s Last Museum could not have anticipated the spatial and temporal bardo that is the World Wide Web. It is this planetary infrastructure that constitutes, perhaps, the final break with a spatial imaginary already shaken by the telegraph, telephone, and so on in the preceding century and a half. Throughout our Last Museum, states of being between life and nonlife (first broached in ancient religious texts) are staged as live issues in the digital era. Indeed, the works in this exhibition talk about the space between a life recorded by digital technology and the digital afterlife or archive (Nefertiti on the move). But can one die in the digital realm? Does the digital museum not encompass everything? Beyond a museum without walls, is it not a museum of every possible wall?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+      <b>Nicole Foreshew</b>’s contribution features ‘message sticks’, installed in a riverbed on her ancestral land in rural Australia. The objects are an indigenous method of communication mostly legible to members of her people, otherwise resistant to easy exogenous reading. Work stages, then, a method of site-specific communication that is as old as any memory of the land—and which predates the modern ‘invention’ of Land Art. Site is about so much more than material. It is about meaning, a fact that Foreshew’s work foregrounds. In some respects her sculptural objects resist the logic of all-seeing accumulation of information. Even though these message sticks are shown, they escape the colonial gaze, somewhat. Through her work, perhaps, Foreshew ask what a digital archive <i>really</i> comprehends. While re-presented through online, her objects resist.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+      <b>Jakrawal Nilthamrong</b>’s contribution is set in Thailand’s northern mountainous region near Chiang Mai, a site recently devastated by annual wildfires which envelop the area in a choking haze. Set among burning fields, his sculptural interventions are reconstructions of the type of time-release release burners built by arsonists, whose purposes in setting the blazes are heavily contested and politicized. Scenes of fire creeping up the mountainside transition automatically in step with a numeric real-time count of world population shown at the edge of the video. Speculatively linking the fires to global population growth, Nilthamrong indicts the ecological and economic pressures impinging on local actors—farmers, foragers, and residents with competing relations to the land and air. Mesmerizing images of fire onscreen offer a smokeless encounter with the incendiary contradictions of a contemporary social-economic order that pits basic human subsistence against environmental sustainability on a planetary scale. What is emphasized here through the modest figure of a clothes peg clipped to a tangle of wires is the technological mediation of these tensions—indeed the material condition of our social interconnections.   
+      </p>
+      <p>
+      Through the artistic positions and interactive staging, <i>The Last Museum</i> explores the drama of site-specificity in light of <i>the digitization of place and its re-presentation online.</i>
+      </p>
+    `,
+    "de": `<p></p>`,
+  }
+}
 
 const ArtistGlobe = () => (
   <div className="globe">
@@ -194,7 +251,7 @@ const ArtistGlobe = () => (
       {ARTIST_ORDER.map((key, index) => {
         const artist = ARTISTS[key]
         return (
-          <div key={key} style={artist.globePosition} className="number" onClick={() => history.push(`/last-museum/${artist.start}`)}>
+          <div key={key} style={artist.globePosition} className="number" onClick={() => history.push(`/thelastmuseum/${artist.start}`)}>
             {index + 1}
           </div>
         )