Shiny pink and cobalt blue: this is the geometry of colors of the ceramic tiles in the atrium that welcomes us to Palazzo INA by architect Piero Bottoni, in a blend of tiles and metals, illuminated by neon lights of matching hues. Truly an aesthetic pleasure in the most photographed concierge on Instagram at number 33 Corso Sempione, a skyscraper that follows the theories of the modern movement built in the 1950’s.

This architectural pearl temporarily hosts Matta, a milanese gallery founded by Giulio Rampoldi, Pierfrancesco Petracchi and Pietro Rossi. Matta can be described as polycentric, strategically-minded and adept at captivating with every move – consider the venetian proposal during this year's Biennale, within a well-known nocturnal speakeasy – as it has shifted locations multiple times, finding its expressive center in the meticulously curated square meters of Palazzo INA. An unprecedented, always site-specific exhibition program, international in scope, capable of both concealing and revealing itself, a decidedly unconventional project and therefore highly intriguing. In April, Fishphonics: Accelerando, a project by the artist Clara Hastrup, is set up in the Matta spaces.

““All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you””

— – Ghost in the Shell, 1995

Marée – Antonin Artaud, august 1922

Palpitante marée, marée pleine de corps,

D’os murmurants, de sang, de poussières d’écailles,

De lumières broyées, de coquilles d’étoiles,

Sainte marée qui rassembles les corps.

Marée profonde, astres tournants,

Écume, chair, miroirs où vont les anges,

, fumées aux volutes étranges

Où passent les miroirs des horizons errants.

[…]

Marée comme un nuage rond

Qui rassembles les horizons,

Replace parmi nous la dispersion des corp.

Clara Hastrup is a Danish artist graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts in 2021.

Her multifaceted and playful installative works invariably possess a complex and ludic character, evoking childhood games in spatial arrangement, while harboring a strong ironic and humorous component that harmonizes well with their distinctly dystopian and sci-fi style, all the while engaging in a discourse surrounding the function of the object.

In her practice, a blend of the biological and the electronic, there is a perpetual cascade of simultaneous occurrences: her creations are interwoven with connections that synergize the energy of the living with that transmitted by technology. Clara applies an “organic behavior” to her artistic exploration: This pursuit invariably aims to dismantle anthropocentric vanity, giving voice to those incapable of vocal expression, and rewiring interspecies relationships while reconfiguring their languages. She is careful to declare, from a humorous perspective, the changes that occur and will occur between humans and nature - plants, animals, fruits - , society, consumer objects, melodies, sounds and white noise and humans, all of which are ironically deposed from the egomaniacal and anthropocentric pedestal upon which they believe themselves to stand.

Clara revels in the reconfiguration of objects (cacti, blenders, transformers) to invert circadian rhythms, replicate the Butterfly Effect, and subvert traditional material relationships with new functions. Her works are meticulously timed, synchronized, and programmed via microcontrollers in a chain reaction, loops, and more or less controllable compositions, subsequently recorded in video documentation. Her installations thrive on their own energy autonomy, exhibiting "biological" needs and conveying a biopolitical message. As Clara explains, she came into contact with the curators of Matta through Emily Kraus, in London, and was subsequently invited to install her work in Milan.

Fishphonics: Accelerando

Compositions and process: controlled undeterminacy

A cacophony of blue hues, aquatic habitats, ambient sounds, swimming fish, and intertwined cables greet visitors at the entrance. The environmental installation is an ordered chaos of life, objects and cables, sophisticated biomechanical systems coexisting within Matta. A rhapsody in electric blue and biomorphic forms, entirely conceived by the artist.

The installative composition, breathing with its circadian rhythm, bares its nerves, revealing its mechanisms and operational modalities, resembling a living, pulsating entity within a surgical chamber. Yet, deciphering its meanings proves elusive: everything is orchestrated to be inherently unpredictable. It evokes the imaginary landscape of a videogame made flesh, with amalgamations of biological elements - sounds, fluids, and neural pathways - forged by sightless creatures.

Fishphonics consists of two aquarium tanks illuminated by an array of identical light sensors, intricately Connected and entangled with disorderly logic, converging into plastic boxes positioned beneath the tanks. Within the tanks, blind tropical fish swim unaware. From these tanks, dignified as objects of art and contemplation, tangled cables emerge, connecting to xylophones and metallophones, which in turn are linked to elevated tambourines. The movement and light-controlled motion: this is how sound is produced. Light beams capture the random movements of the fish through photoreceptors positioned at the bottom of the tanks. They are connected via wiring to transformers and microcontrollers, which, in tandem with the instruments, react to activate sound, thus creating a random, aleatory, and unique harmony of notes. The perpetual and sightless movement of the fish generates sound, captured by the microcontrollers.

As Clara explains us, the fish are easily available tropical aquarium fish from aquarium shops. They have been selected because of their behaviour and physical properties, as characters. The size of tank and light beams have been matched to their sizes and movements: “They won’t perform a narrative but they have instinctual behaviours which will repeat themselves again and again and are reliable. It is really a collaboration between objects and how they can come together through a sort of empirical research in my studio”.

Fishphonics echoes the stylistic cues of Fishdriver (Run Free) 2021, a site-specific sculpture wherein upon a fish's contact with a beam sensor in the tank, a yellow 1:24 scale RC Lamborghini would be ignited, racing along the track and triggering other ultrasonic sensors that activate and deactivate hairdryers, vacuum cleaners, kettles, showers, foot spas, rotating houseplants, soundtracks, and more.

When asked about the reason behind the combination of the biological, action, and machinery in her work, she will tell us that she doesn’t have a particular fetishism for the digital and technological devices themselves, but they are such a big part of our world, so she employs them:

“The transparency in the work and it’s making is important to me as well as the combination of the digital and analog. I try to make everything that goes into the production - all the mechanics behind - visible, to visualise the cause and effect as much as possible and allow for the illusion to hide in plain sight. In that sense it is also a strategy of disorientation”.

Clara defines herself as interested in breaking down hierarchies between things, animate or inanimate, and she uses everything that is available in order to look for new relationships or connections. She is particularly interested in the fragility of the natural world and how to articulate this complex relationship in different ways:

““Working with organic and living things often demands a lot of attention and maintenance; it changes over time or behaves unpredictably. It is a way of diverting logic and handing over control to something else. My work is stochastic: It often creates a state of suspense where there is a potential lingering for a shared moment of serendipity.””

Within the glass walls: who's inside, who's outside?

Though played with humorous tones, Fishphonics is the embodiment of existential thought: we exist, we're unaware, we're controlled, we make noise, and we'll continue to proliferate. The piece acts like a video game crashing, where returning to the previous level isn't possible, only advancing to the next. Alternatively, it mirrors a scientific trial, governed by attempts, regulations, and constraints (the glass walls of the aquarium). Could the electricity be cut off? Does a symmetry exist between our neural electricity and the alternating current sustaining the installation?

The dynamic between the organisms within the tanks - juxtaposed with our external perspective - serves as a contemplation on the relational paradigm between ourselves, art, and the exploitation of life's diversity, eschewing finality in favor of divergence and distance - transition supplants connection, contradiction supplants harmony.

Vital energy leads us back to the possibility of "touching life" [1], encompassing it, imposing it upon us within our spaces of reflection, in this case a gallery. We are consistently fixated on our own temporal framework, often neglecting the "time of the Other" [2]. The life stream flows through the rhapsody of its movement, an undulating current interlaced with living flesh, forever and solely beheld by human eyes. An “epiphany of a rhapsodic being” [3].

Given that the flawless structure of the display allows for existential ponderings on the body, technology, and life, Fishphonics reveals the enactment of a “subtle violence”, coercing the unaware animal (or perhaps not?) into becoming an object of art and observation.

Blending elements of a scientific laboratory project and a bestiary, it's akin to hacking their movement, orchestrating a musical interplay with their shadows and their swift reproductive capabilities, continuously cloning themselves in an endlessly identical manner. Isn't this the same process we are replicating on our bodies, digitally and physically, to redefine the boundaries of our technical and futuristic potentialities? What utility does a clone serve in the era of artificial technical reproducibility? It's an integral part of the ongoing process of becoming cyborgs, augmenting ourselves, and optimally utilizing new nanotechnologies. Kinda portraits of Levi-Strauss's “savage thought” that, by its very nature, is never unnatural [4].

In the present epoch, we are earnestly appraising simulations as a systematic formula for processing information and grasping reality: "We are entering the anthropomorphic era of technology, the data-driven society, the super-ego of the 21st century" [5]. Alternatively, one might characterize it as an intensified, extreme, and radical form of anthropomorphism, wherein our efforts are directed towards reshaping everything in alignment with our cognitive capacities. Thus, we devise mechanisms inspired by our cerebral patterns, intended to be faster (accelerando…), more efficient, and reliable, with preferably predetermined outcomes. An unprecedented anthropological and ontological statute emerges, where the human figure is subjugated to the equations of its own artifacts, with the primary objective of serving private interests and establishing a societal organization based primarily on utilitarian principles.

What is it like to be silent as a fish?

Sound acts as a form of interpretation of the "savage thought" discussed earlier, serving as the sonic embodiment of perpetual motion and the silent contemplations of the animal, which can only be translated by reshaping it into a human perspective. It's a subversive language, as it cannot be converted into value, performance, or profit today.

“The glass between us and the fish serves as an ‘ontological wall’”, as Clara says, “a surface which exemplifies the dynamics between the observer and the observed. At the same time, the work can be viewed through a lens of absurdity, where the familiar, materials and relationships are turned upside down. In the work, the fish are not a 'material', but on the contrary they are handed the baton”.

"There is no desire, and thus unconscious, in man, entirely absent in the animal, unless this is the effect of the human unconscious, as if due to some contagious transfer or some silent internalization (which, moreover, still needs to be accounted for), the domesticated or tamed animal translates into itself the unconscious of man. Seeking to distinguish unconscious drive from instinct and the 'genetic' boundaries within which the animal dwells." [6]

So, Clara’s artworks carry an ethical message: to remind the subject, us witnesses, of our status as mere guests, hostages, yet not subjugated, like the fish. But is this enough to break the Cartesian tradition of the animal-machine devoid of language and response? The ethical message revolves around denial: the fish is in a tank, we are not. Perhaps. A subversion of the subject who chooses to the subject who is chosen, in a dialectic of desire that always originates from man, from his "spectacles" and his machines, through an installation that is digital programming not entirely programmable.

To some extent, everything is the antithesis of repetition, “everything is difference” [7]: sound can never repeat itself identically, fishes continue to innovate in unpredictable directions, and their offspring may be born, perhaps, at an unspecified moment in the future; we, as spectators, shall perpetually behold from diverse temporal and spatial perspectives.

The sound

Auralizing the sonosphere

How many variations could the fish potentially make within these set parameters?

Accelerando: not solely a musical concern, but a question of coerced cohabitation. How many fishes will there be in a month? How many of us will there be in a month?

Sound serves as the biological memory of life's motion. When unrecorded, it becomes a consciously introspective entity, casting doubt upon our present comprehension of originality, individuality, and entitlement over things.

Brian Eno and David Toop, among the first, had observed that a sound piece of experimental music tends to operate like an evolutionary process. It begins with a specific set of organizational structures that are then delivered over to random, chance, or algorithmic mutations and environmental effects. This process is usually open-ended, without any necessary stopping point. If the traditional (human) composer is akin to an omnipotent God, who structures and controls all aspects of a musical performance, fish in Fishphonics are the experimental composers and in the same time becomes equally an observer, like us.

“Where the process of composing was changed from making choices to asking questions: this philosophy of non-intentionality has become a resource, rather than a way of life, for many musicians currently working with electronic media” [8]. Capacity to loop small segments of music and gradually move the start point of the loop, with each new loop applying the same process to itself to create a nest of loops, all working within the differing boundaries of its parent loop to create constant evolution.

Clara adds to our reflections that in Fishphonics there is a subtle reference to Borges "The Library of Babel" from 1941, the story of a hallucinatory universe shaped like a library, where each book consists of four hundred and ten pages; each page contains forty lines, and each line comprises approximately eighty letters. In Clara's poetics, this concept also links to the Infinite Monkey Theorem.Inizio modulo

The potential of Acelerando

Clara's artwork operates through precise logic but is entirely played "in potentiality”: accelerating. Conceptually, it connects with the electronically accelerated culture of the late twentieth century - from a Baudrillardian perspective.

Clara experiences the concept of musical acceleration as an approach both literally and metaphorically:

“I was interested in a slow sonic acceleration over time - impossible to experience at once. As the fish species I selected for the piece are naturally rapid breeders the musical concept of accelerando and the idea of a population growing exponentially merged”.

Therefore, understanding the randomness of interconnections is important to avoid catastrophic accelerations.

In his "The Transparency of Evil," Baudrillard spoke of how "we are infinitely torn apart in the same broth of runoff”. Silence is that “syncopation in the circuit, that slight catastrophe of the time of anguish, of haste, which ends up emptying every one of our schemes”. The acceleration of our activities is like a metastasis, "we dilute ourselves in homeopathic and infinitesimal doses in the overall solution” [9]. Like all exchanges, if they are too rapid, they end up coexisting in a general indifference because we are not (yet) human beings capable of accepting and doing everything simultaneously.

Time is consistently perceived in an exponential manner, in potency, a mode of comprehension emblematic of the post-digital revolution, assimilating the entirety of the world and its actors. A frenzy that does not accept the indeterminate, the risk, the malfunctioning prototype, which does not lead to research and development and profit. The trend is to minimize waste and maximize time-energies, sweeping ethical issues under the rug.

The schizophrenia of capitalism, a process of subjectivization of alliances, destruction of dissimilar multiplicities. This reminds me of the concept of the "drama of anthropopoiesis" [10], conducted by us narcissists who gaze at ourselves in the water to try to see our own face and our egomaniacal mythology. "Man is always driven by a disquieting passion: that of generating artificial doubles of himself," as Eric Sadin writes, "of conceiving something that mirrors his mental processes and creating something powerful, a sort of perfect biological and intellectual armor through techno-scientific computational models” [11]. Man is always in the loop, that is, within the decision-making process, the only one capable of having the power to enunciate (only his) truth in his artificial paradises.

Technical reproducibility now transmutes into genetic reproducibility. The fish inscribe an imperceptible code in the water, discernible solely through the resonance of instruments. The evanescence of the fish's sequential movement perhaps aims to thwart hierarchies among species and our technophiliac inclination toward anthropocentric control. A music both fortuitous and assertive: the antithesis of a rationality yearning and starved to accommodate us, to prefigure our desires, and to institute an algorithmic tempo in our daily existence. We inhabit the opposite of our rationality's contentment, which, in a neurotic fashion, endlessly seeks to rectify the course of events and guide them toward a falsely elevated state; we only experience the present in the guise of "wholesome immediate satisfaction," regardless of the destiny of everything else.

Clara Hastrup’s Fishphonics: Accelerando embodies an installation sustained by its energy autonomy, conveying a dual message of biopolitics and irony, immersing observers in its circadian rhythm, and reflecting the biological and energetic essence of technologies. Perhaps, for once, what happens at Matta does not concern human beings.

[Tyrell]: The facts of life... to make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been established.

[Batty]: Why not?

[Tyrell]: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutation give rise to revertant colonies, like rats leaving a sinking ship; then the ship... sinks.

Blade Runner, 1982

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[1] Antonin Artaud, Il teatro e il suo doppio, Einaudi, 2000

[2] Emmanuel Levinas, “Il tempo e l’altro”, Mimesis Edizioni, 2022

[3] Antonin Artaud, Il teatro e il suo doppio, Einaudi, 2000

[4] Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Il pensiero selvaggio”, il Saggiatore, 1968

[5] Eric Sadin, Critique of Artificial Reason, Luiss University Press, 2019

[6] Jacques Derrida, "The Animal That Therefore I Am”, Feltrinelli, 2021

[7] Gilles Deleuze, “Differenza e ripetizione”, Raffaello Cortina Editore, 1997

[8] Christoph Cox, Daniel Warner, “Audio Culture: reading in modern music”, Bloomsbury USA Academic, 2004

[9] Jean Baudrillard, “The Transparency of Evil: essay on extreme phenomena”, SugarCo, 2018

[10] Francesco Remotti, “Making Humanity: The Dramas of Anthropopoiesis”, Laterza, 2013