Automated Subject (Entities that want to become other entities)

plexiglass, color print on paper, nylon, iron bars, 4x3m, 2016

The installation “Automatic Subject” is a speculative view of the possibilities of transformation, expansion or rejection of subjectivity. Loosely based on certain topics and thought experiments found in the books of Stanislaw Lem and Andrei Platonov, it presents a world in which traditionally conceived human subjectivity is expanded to a universal scale, in order to include all entities that can be thought of. Extending the concept of automation to the field of consciousness facilitates including absolutely all into privileged areas, thus constructing a new universal concept of “all of us”. Automation can be interpreted in such a concept as loss of control, in a metaphorical sense as the abandonment of control over decisions about what and who is the subject. The name itself also indicates the possibility of challenging thinking as a process that generates itself. It wants to be something other than what is imposed on it.

Automated Subject is a new work created for this exhibition. Loosely based on experiments and projections of the future that Stanislaw Lem and Andrei Platonov developed in their Science Fiction novels, it offers a speculative look at the possibilities of altering, extending or denying the very idea of subjectivity. Human subjectivity has no relevance in
the future world these authors depict; humans continue to exist, but the agent of consciousness has been displaced in a broader cosmic and technologised context, as is the case of the vortex in Lem’s Solaris. Automation is seen as a process of emancipation that radically transforms subjectivity. What the artist has constructed is not an illustration of existing philosophical ideas but rather a weird combination, modulation and appropriation of them intended to address the meaning of automation in the field of consciousness. It is not only about a possible non-dystopian future, but also about the past and the present. The installation consists of a ribbon-like sculpture made of pieces of paper that meanders through the exhibition space at eye level. Visitors are transformed into active readers, forced to continually crane their necks and step backwards and forwards in order to grasp the meaning of the words and images printed on this paper trail. Like a line of thought the artist seeks to make tangible, the installation is a sort of mental diagram, a labyrinthine cartography made up of superpositions that deliberately splinter, fragment and perforate the artist’s discourse.

Anne Faucheret 2016

Script:

Commune of Solar Radiation
WE
Universal Union of Rocks
Alliance of Atomic Friendship
Putrefaction Cooperative
Association of Genderless
United Living Organisms
Voice of the Non-Speaking
Forward Together!
To All who Belong Nowhere, a Defensive Swarm.
Association of Non-Biological Evolution
No More Humiliation Commune
Representation of Digital Swarms
Federation of Legal Subjects
Parliament of Brain Secretions
Republic of Intermatter Friendship
Alliance of the Forgotten
Equality Communist Cooperative

Physics for pupils:
The conscious brain is a biological machine that shows us what exists and what does not.
Outside, in front of our eyes, there is only an ocean of electromagnetic radiation, a wild, powerful mix of various wavelengths. Most of them are invisible to us and will never comes part of our model of reality.

The physical universe itself possesses an intrinsic potential for the emergence of subjectivity.

The world has never been officially confirmed and therefore does not legally exist. And even if it were confirmed, had statutes and written proof of its existence, such documents could not be trusted, because they would be issued on the basis of a declaration, and the declaration must be signed by the applicant. And how can such an applicant be trusted? And who would verify the identity of this applicant before he submitted his application?

Images can be regarded as a kind of secretion of the cosmic nervous system or as some kind of dream. And these secretions and dreams can be understood as a cybernetic control of the brain functions. It is a notion of a dreaming cosmic brain, which is cybernetically controlled by such images.

Man was a privilege, now there are no privileged, now there are only all of us, automatic subjects.

There is no longer any history, only the past, which is available in the memory and therefore made present.
Where everything has become the present, there is no longer any future. That which used to be the future is now the present possibilities of play.

What do other automatic subjects think about this?
What other automatic subjects?
There is nothing faster than the automatic subject; even light is not as fast! The universe is grasped as a whole as well as its parts, there and back in time. The automatic subject is exempt from particularities, from gender, from its essence, from its origin, from immobility, from suffering, from ignorance etc.

When speaking, we use antiquated human language with its singulars and plurals and persons. That is why we combine and alternate them. Human language is my inheritance, his birth, our past.

It is not about the jam tomorrow, but a critique of the present.
How much longer will we pretend that art means something?

This is dreamt by us, automated entities. We take into account here all our preferences, passions, orgiastic delights and capabilities to such an extent as we like.

We know about each other and therefore we unite. And ‘we’ means all of us. Someone sleeps, but it doesn’t matter to us; let them sleep, they can join later. Sleep inside sleep reinforces dreams.