For over ten years, Nadim Samman, the Curator for the Digital Sphere at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, has explored the response of contemporary artists to the often dehumanizing and socially alienating effects of emerging technology. His exhibition “Poetics of Encryption”—a name shared with his 2023 book published by Hatje Cantz—is a culmination of that decade of research and features the work of thirty-nine artists including Rindon Johnson and enorê. With its focus on the inherent inscrutability of corporate technology despite ever-increasing claims of user transparency, the exhibition suggests that within the informational overload, we should not lose sight of the human.
WHEN I FIRST MOVED TO BERLIN, in 2012, I felt that there was a vital dialogue taking place, with artists examining the social dynamics of technology and the internet’s impact on our collective future. One of the first shows I did with Import Projects, the Berlin nonprofit I cofounded, focused on how artists were relating to emerging technologies and the insane headspace that they produce. The show included Ryan Trecartin, Shana Moulton, Ed Fornieles, and more—artists whose work still feels contemporary today. Back then, that conversation was called “Post-Internet,” a term that’s been misused to the point where I don’t really recognize it anymore. For me, Post-Internet was always a critical concept. It should never have been converted into a matter of style; it was a research agenda, examining how digital change is upending our experience of cultural life.
We have thirty-nine artists and around sixty artworks in the “Poetics of Encryption” exhibition (it was more, but American Artist and Morehshin Allahyari chose to withdraw their works in support of STRIKE GERMANY’s boycott of German cultural institutions for suppressing expressions of solidarity with Palestine). Just about all of them were made following the advent of surveillance technologies like Google Earth in 2005 and Google Street View in 2007, and in the aftermath of the first WikiLeaks revelations—a period in which a more critical view on the internet and politics of visualization began to take hold in popular culture. These platforms are now central to many aspects of our lives, and are some of the main drivers of contemporary experience. We are told they are opening up the world—making it more transparent—but we have very little understanding of how they work. And even if we could understand these systems, we’re unable to alter them or provide feedback. It is profoundly alienating. This feeling is stoking the cultural mood, and artists are picking up on it. They are creating work that expresses the anxiety, paranoia, and political rage we have around opaque tech.
All day long we stare at phones and computers. The screen is a supposed portal to other places and sites, making the device effectively disappear while we use it. We sometimes imagine that it is this transparent bridge, but it’s quite the opposite. One of the oldest works in the exhibition is a three-meter-tall black sculpture called anti by Carsten Nicolai, which is an upsized version of the rhomboid that features, famously, in Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 woodcut Melencolia I. Erwin Panofsky described the symbolic valence of this object as figuring the limits of human knowledge. If you look at Dürer’s original artwork, you see that something akin to a blurry face appears on its surface. This pseudo-face is the cause of some speculation: Is it really a face? If so, whose is it? I think of this rhomboid as a premonition of the iPhone, offering users their portraits in its black mirrored glass. Nicolai’s work speaks to the contemporary affect around inscrutable devices and systems. I would not call it melancholia but something more paranoid and cynical.
Most of us cannot write code, but we have to find a language to talk about these feelings. We need acts of translation, and I think artists are supplying images and metaphors that we can use as a common currency. These metaphors are alternatives to those offered by corporations.
Like the book, the exhibition is split into three main chapters: Black Site, Black Box, Black Hole. Each one sets up a different framework for exploring where an intelligent, embodied human is placed in relation to the “inside” of technology. In Black Site, you’re locked in, captured, contained, buried alive. It’s the classic image of Neo in The Matrix; tech is using you and harvesting your data. You find yourself within the “crypt” in “encryption.” On the flip side of that you have Black Box, where you’re locked out. You want to know what’s going on, you want to penetrate to the heart of the matter, but you can’t. You are blocked, either through your own lack of technical knowledge or by those who have created a proprietary scenario.
The third chapter, Black Hole, is a mash-up between Black Site and Black Box. We know that black holes undo the fundamentals of space and time, so in this model there’s no way of knowing if you are inside or outside. What makes sense and what is nonsense? What is past, and what is present? It’s a post-truth situation, which encapsulates the chaos of everything being networked, without a center or unitary perspective. In a work featured in this section, American artist Joshua Citarella trawls the message boards of 4chan, Reddit, and other such platforms, collecting designs for flags that express young people’s political self-identifications. The designs he has collected combine wildly opposing discursive systems in a sort of schizophrenic mélange: “Islamic, fascist, anarchist, steampunk!” They seem so absurd, but why? Because they are attempts to fit different filter bubbles within one another. By collapsing incommensurate universes into a single image, these oxymoronic “e-deologies” end up reflecting contemporary conspiracy mindsets, like QAnon.
Silicon Valley says that the world is opening up, that infinite knowledge is available and through information technology we can discover just about whatever we want. But we’re actually living in a proliferating landscape of black boxes. No one can be fluent in every code or system. As tech grows more specialized and intricate, is there a way to discuss it in the language we use with our families, our friends, our lovers? There’s an amazing young artist from Brazil called enorê in the show. In her video Holding Death Close, the narrator is moving through a kind of game world, seeking their deceased mother in digital purgatory. You’re put in the position of watching this first-person gameplay, but you don’t actually get to play it. It’s a really lyrical dream. Watching it makes me think that a rebound is coming. People want humane values, to consider: What is dignity? What is kinship? What is society? And what is love in a post-human future? What happens to the narratives that predate digital technology, the narratives we’ve built our institutions around, even the very concept of justice itself?
One of the questions this show attempts to answer is, amidst the profusion of technical systems, how do we keep the human in the center of the picture? As the language of technology grows more obscure, it’s going to become increasingly important to bring together the scattered elements of what was once our shared reality. That for me is the poetics of encryption. Artists are already using generative AI as a tool to reimagine our relation to the perennial big ideas. Like: What is identity? What is spirituality? What is cultural heritage? How can the human resist the fast-moving disruption to our lives and to our long-standing imaginaries? These are the questions that need considering, as the ever-increasing speed of digital change has a profound and nonreversible effect on our lives.
—As told to Duncan Ballantyne-Way
