Jenna Sutela and Geocinema: NO NO NSE NSE and Making of Earths

Jenna Sutela
NO NO NSE NSE 

Jenna Sutela’s exhibition NO NO NSE NSE at Kunsthall Trondheim is the artist’s first major institutional solo show. Through Sutela’s latest series of works, including newly commissioned photograms developed specifically for this occasion, the exhibition explores artificial intelligence and in particular the relation between randomness and control in organic and inorganic systems.

Science fiction is a recurring theme in Sutela’s work. So is the quest to go beyond the limits of human-created language, both by delving into artificial intelligence and machine learning, and by turning towards technologies as shamanistic devices or possible mediums to channel alien semantics. 

Sutela’s work urges us to consider other, nonhuman, species as intelligent beings, such as the Physarum polycephalum slime mold. This single-celled yet “many-headed” organism is known as a natural computer. It is used, among others, to study complex human infrastructures such as the Tokyo railway network. Sutela proposes her work with slime molds as a model against anthropocentric hierarchies, to point instead to decentralized organization and a deep connectivity of consciousness and the material world.

The exhibition features Sutela’s experiments with inserting fermenting foods into the “guts” of a computer to generate unforeseeable reactions. Her work I Magma revisits the history of using lava lamps as random number generators and looks for patterns, signs and meaning in the moving blobs of liquid color in a mobile app. Sutela’s lava lamps are made in the shape of her own head. For Kunsthall Trondheim, she produced new photograms based on these neuroplastic portraits.

NO NO NSE NSE invites viewers to approach machines not as models or expansions of the human mind, but on their very own terms. 

A publication with new texts and interviews by Lars Bang Larsen, Stefanie Hessler, Lars TCF Holdhus, Caroline A. Jones, Allison Parrish, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers will be co-published by Kunsthall Trondheim, the Serpentine Galleries and Koenig Books.

Thank you for the generous support to: Finsk-norsk kulturinstitutt, Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder, Moderna Museet, Serpentine Galleries.

Geocinema
Making of Earths

Moving images and photographs created by individuals around the world document the surface of the planet in ever-greater detail. Taken together they operate as a decentralized cinematographic apparatus. In the exhibition Making of Earths, the collective Geocinema (Asia Bazdyrieva and Solveig Suess) explores the longue durée of the modern trope that the future is manageable. 

Geocinema’s first solo show expands on their previous work on geosensing as a planetary cinematographic device. Building on research conducted primarily in China and Thailand, with a focus on the Belt and Road initiative, Bazdyrieva and Suess unpack how the idea of a controllable future unfolds through images across geographies and media. The exhibition is organized in three zones: the Forecaster, Calibration, and the Stitcher. Examining the political, social and economic effects of the technologized, distributed eye, Making of Earths includes videos, a podcast with media theorist Jussi Parikka, and reference literature by TJ Demos, Jennifer Gabrys, Ute Holl, Xiao Liu and Parikka, among others. 

Jenna Sutela and Geocinema’s exhibitions are curated by Stefanie Hessler, director of Kunsthall Trondheim, with assistant curator Katrine Elise Pedersen, and mark the beginning of the Kunsthall’s second phase. 

Public programs
April 1, 2020: Seminar “AI Imaginaries”
The seminar brings together artists, technologists, data scientists and media scholars to reflect on the power of AI across fields. Participants: Agnieszka Kurant, Yeshimabeit Milner, Allison Parrish and others. Location: Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Partners: NTNU ARTEC and Norwegian Open AI Lab. 

April 1, 2020: Lecture performance by Geocinema
In this lecture performance, Geocinema considers the vast geocinematic apparatus – cell phones, surveillance cameras, satellites, geosensors—as generator of a new form of distributed, machine-aided intelligence. Organized in collaboration with Meta.Morf.

April 22, 2020: Book launch Jenna Sutela. NO NO NSE NSE