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An exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art creates new myths for a new technological world.
A man and a baby enter a dark cave and settle in front of the flashing colours and shifting foci. The baby is sitting, like a gargoyle, while its father lolls across one of the oversized pillows.
No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 (2015) is a three-channel video made by Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic, with Todd Basco as the recurring image of mythical Thai figure Naga. It presents a nebula of personal, mythical and political narratives that are constantly shifting, rotating, dreaming around each other.
The scenes include an elderly woman waiting for something; a surgical procedure; the sensational event of the Thai youth soccer team trapped in a flooding cave; a close-up of the eye of a rabbit soft toy slouched against a wall; a soldier resting on a scooter in front of a billboard; dancing figures covered in paint; and the recurring image of the Naga, a serpent that can take the form of a human. The peripatetic currents are best viewed from a low vantage point – the adult body needs to be relaxed, the mind unconcerned with outcome.
When discussing his work, Arunanondchai refers to “invisible systems … things that feel like ghosts and occupy certain spaces of superstition”. He explains that “storytelling is real. It is part of reality-making.”
After a few minutes the baby is scooped up by Dad and put on his chest. They look into each other’s eyes, the baby with its back to the screens, the light projected onto the father’s face. It’s a grand and elemental scene among works where the primordial and the mythic are explored in an attempt to find a human self through the black mirrors of technology.
In a National Public Radio (NPR) transcript by Lauren Sommer, I recently read about Humboldt squid, whose patterns remain largely invisible because they live in almost total darkness more than 300 metres below the ocean’s surface. According to one researcher, they create “backlighting for the patterns by making their bodies glow, like the screen of an e-reader” and probably share “all sorts of cool information”.
The way “squid crowd together in large, fast-moving groups to feed on small fish and other prey” provided a clue to my experience of Ultra Unreal, an exhibition at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Apparently when you watch these squid, “it looks like frenzy, but if you pay close attention, they’re not touching each other”.
According to its curator, Anna Davis, Ultra Unreal brings together the works of six artists and collectives “whose world-building practices are connected to nightlife ecosystems across the globe”. The exhibition examines how mythologies can be used to reveal hidden histories and reorientate visions of the future: “Influences from religion, neuroscience, ecology, artificial intelligence, myth, gaming, and queer club cultures collide in this multi-sensory exhibition that ricochets between a dizzying array of stimuli.”
The show is made up mainly of videos and a couple of underwhelming sculptural displays, including a room of inflatables by Saeborg. The colourful latex and painted dioramas of Slaughterhouse (2021-22) and Pootopia (2020-22) “highlight issues of gender-based power and control in human and non-human lives”, according to the wall label. The scenes, which were originally props for performances at the Tokyo nightclub Department H, include dung beetles surrounded by a plethora of poo, frozen sperm harvested by a yellow-haired farm lass and some humping pigs.
I can imagine these works in a nightclub, as a set for a television show or corporate environment. But there was something befuddling about their presence here. Between the wall graphics, streamlined forms and playful issue-tackling, Saeborg’s inflatables feel like an “edgy” concept dreamt up by marketing: activism in the age of WeWork?
This was likewise the case in the neighbouring installation DOKU the self (2022) by Lu Yang, who, according to the label, “generates virtual environments to contemplate the nature of consciousness, suffering, death and rebirth”. “DOKU is short for Dokusho Dokushi, a line from a Buddhist sutra meaning ‘born alone and dies alone’. For Lu, this line reflects the human experience and the solo quests and deaths of many gaming characters.”
The set-up of monitors, showing animated imagery and gaming characters, and a related large wall print, had me feeling like I was in the booth of a gaming or tech trade show. The fluorescent lights added to this feeling but weren’t enough to convince me that there was more to this show. I was being sold something but beyond the half-baked philosophy, I couldn’t work out what.
There was a disconcerting quality of emptiness between these rooms, which I think comes from a resignation to the world as a series of emojis and sound bites, where ideas and issues become consumables to be grabbed rather than grappled with. It can feel like art and museum culture being reduced to a game of optics and social credit points – being seen to care about everything while not being bothered about the substance.
In the largest room of the exhibition is Club Ate’s ANG IDOL KO / YOU ARE MY IDOL (2022). For me it had an intensity and emotional range that set it apart from the other works. The imagery takes place across a pair of enormous screens that resemble giant smartphones. At the quietest point in the 29-minute video, which emerges out of the loudest and choppiest section, we see a vast muddy landscape, a stage of mythic proportions with the sun sinking behind it.
A figure inside an oversized carapace with a shiny copper hue moves along the screen, vaguely echoing a neighbouring mud crab. The human crab stalks furtively while waiting for its prey, an unarmoured figure that enters from the right. The embrace that follows – the prey seized and overwhelmed while the sun watches, drowsily indifferent – was the lasting image from this exhibition.
In the high-intensity eating ceremony of YOU ARE MY IDOL the camera places the viewer among a group of naked folk gorging on noodles, eggs and other sloppy substances from a body-shaped pile of food on a banana leaf. They fondle, feast and luxuriate in ambiguity, sometimes appearing as vampires, while sharing stories about mythological creatures, including the Babaylan, which are “queer and trans shamans in the Philippines who act as intermediaries between visible and invisible worlds”. It’s pretty over the top and there are moments when the theatre isn’t quite convinced of itself, but there’s a curious power and grip to this work.
Humans love to sit in dark spaces and share stories. World-building and gaming sit comfortably along the axis of art and story, with its focus on myth and utopia. What Ultra Unreal ultimately leaves me asking is, in the age of ultra-marketing and artificial intelligence, who gets to tell our stories and therefore to build our worlds? How do we maintain agency in a world increasingly governed by private and invisible interests?
Through its multi-sensory stimuli and flashing lights, Ultra Unreal offers viewers an opportunity to reflect on how quickly the human brain is transforming under the influence of computation and big tech, while at the same time reflecting how predictable, unchanged and, perhaps, how unexceptional we are as a species.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 13, 2022 as "Black mirror".
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Patrick Hartigan is a Sydney-based artist.
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