Kristen Alvanson, XYZT, Urbanomic, 2019.
https://u000187904.photoshelter.com/index
excerpt
‘We’ve been told that there’s no difference between us and them.’ On this premise the protagonists of XYZT contrive a device capable of shuttling volunteers back and forth between the US and Iran, hidden from the watchful eyes of immigration police and state bureaucracies. Each volunteer will have a single opportunity to be received by a local host and to have a brief authentic experience of what it means to live as “them” before being transported back home.
Set against the backdrop of escalating hostilities between Iran and the US, and based on her experiences living in Iran at the end of the first decade of 2000s, Kristen Alvanson’s XYZT builds on the idea of a ‘dialogue between civilizations’ only to demonstrate the potentially outlandish ramifications that might follow from such a seemingly innocuous idea. An audacious cross-genre experiment, a firsthand memoir of what it means to see what ‘they’ see, and a science-fictional, non-standard engagement with anthropology, XYZT reveals fissures and cracks in what the media calls reality, but which in fact is liable to take on all the unpredictable features of a contemporary fairy tale.
An Interview with Kristen Alvanson
Unfolding the Middle East: Kristen Alvanson’s Nonad
Dreams and Fabrications (interview)
Since moving from United States to the Middle East, Kristen Alvanson has built a body of work which has developed ��� almost spontaneously ��� into an interconnected project entitled Cosmic Drapery.
Alvanson���s Cosmic Drapery Project has gradually gathered under the rubric of the Middle Eastern drapery, or to be precise, the Middle East itself as a manifest drapery: how is it possible to capture the enigma of the Middle East with all its explicit state formations and implicit nomadic folds through its textile history?��� or as Alvanson puts it, ���the unfolding of the enigma of the Middle East through its drapery.��� If the Middle East in its different formations is full of explicit organizations, implicit folds, sutures of heterogeneous establishments, surreptitious alliances or folds of oppositions, miniature twists and creases which evade relevant socio-political approaches, then drapery is a medium for diagramming the Middle East in its explicit and implicit dynamisms. In this sense, Alvanson���s artistic project suggests a re-nomadization of the Middle East through fabrics and their omnipresent pleats.
Comprised of three main categories (1) fabric studies / manifest draperies, (2) drawings / diagrams and (3) animation studies, the Cosmic Drapery Project currently includes five series, nomadic fabric chadors, spell chadors, flags, abjad-9 drawings and ninefold animations. The first three series are works with fabrics which themselves are divided into different sub-series based on their structures, colors, or forms of installations. Drawings and animations diagrammatically or dynamically elaborate the structures of the fabric works according to their social, political, religious and occult formations. This focus on schizophrenic orders and intricate categories can also be seen in Alvanson���s recent visual-essay for Collapse: Concept���Horror, in which she proposes that in order to tackle with deformities of nature (monsters), there should be a model or taxonomic medium which can bind all deformities without being exhausted. Rather than rectifying itself in the direction of hosting existing monsters or deformities, such a taxonomic model should precede monsters in generating deformities or anomalies. A fitting taxonomic model for monsters, Alvanson argues, must be built by a self-sufficient generative structure capable of producing deformities by which future contingents can be affirmed and hosted. For this reason, this aspect of Alvanson���s work can be artistically recapitulated in the light of her fabric orders, hierarchies of folds and drapery which capture the monstrosity of the Middle East in generating unheard-of formations.
The question of diagramming or taxonomic medium (model), for Alvanson, is not a search for finding a way to draw upon potential or actual resources of Now, for its true ambition is to develop a medium to cover the future contingents. Rather than being confined to potentialities-actualities of Now, Alvanson���s artistic persuasion is the exploration of things which are currently inexistent because they belong to deeply subterranean formations (i.e. they are elusively resistant to our current actualities or even potentialities). In other words, these subterranean formations (secret folds) are not accessible by actualities or potentialities of our existing establishments because they belong to the inner logic of their components and constituting elements. For example, in Alvanson���s nomadic fabric chadors, the state fabric (of the black veil) is sutured to nomadic fabrics in order to generate new formations. These formations are developed by anomalous folds between the state and nomadic fabrics and insinuating yet unknown or inexistent alliances or oppositions between the state and the nomad���s art.
In Alvanson���s nomadic fabric chadors, spontaneous formations, folds or configurations between these fabrics diagrammatically ��� albeit implicitly ��� suggest different structures generated by anomalous connections between the state and nomadic entities. As deeply subterranean structures, these formations are unfolded by the remobilization of the state and nomadic entities in regard to each other. Despite their persistent socio-political insinuations, the majority of these formations between the state and nomadic entities do not have any corresponding counterpart in the existing actual (or potential) socio-political formations of the contemporary world. Therefore, Alvanson���s manifest drapery suggests creative formations between the state and the nomadic which are either deemed as inexistent according to actual / potential socio-political establishments of the contemporary world, or irrelevant according to the existing world���s status quo. If the implicit socio-political formations of Alvanson���s nomadic fabric chadors do not have a corresponding equivalent among actually registered social or political structures, they are not in line with what is called relevant or responsible art. If such implicit and subterranean formations cannot be accessed through our existing structures, either through analogy or recourse to the existing socio-political establishments as points of reference, then what we have here is a persistent irrelevancy which is deeply political. Yet in order to be radically political, this irrelevancy must first constitute a line of resistance toward the cultural, social or political actualities / potentialities of our world. It is this irrelevancy or subterranean (inexistent) relevancy which forms a resistance toward establishments of the current world order and hence becomes political. Since for Alvanson creating this line of resistance ��� embodied as irrelevancy to the current order of actualities ��� is a matter of artistic creativity, then the political is only generated through the artistic, not the other way around.
Rather than dwarfing art by drawing upon existing socio-political resources or established formations, Alvanson���s art questions the legitimacy of existing orders in revealing the grounds on which they have erected or from which they have emerged. This is why the resistance of the Middle East toward all globally appropriate socio-political models or establishments as an obscure formation with a subversive irrelevancy has become an artistic idea for Alvanson���s cosmic drapery project.
Similar to her differentially assembled teratologic model Arbor Deformia in Collapse IV, Alvanson���s cosmic drapery project is not supposed to remain chained to the actual or potential formations or deformations (monstrosities) of the world, but to subvert them with currently inexistent formations. Having in mind that inexistent is in this case is that which cannot be afforded by or correlated with the actual or potential formations of the world we live in. Examining Alvanson���s Cosmic Drapery Project in light of her essay on monstrous taxonomies rather than taxonomies for fitting monsters opens up an entirely new dimension in regard to her art where the idea of responsible or political art is undermined in an utterly subtle and creative manner. This subversion and counteraction against relevant art and appropriate politics is carried out on behalf of a radical and speculative creativity which is the medium of the politics of resistance.
If contemporary responsible art has assumed that the artist should emphasize on relevancy of art in regard to sociopolitical and cultural formations, then art today has never been more irresponsible. A sufficient example is the image of an artist who in persuasion of relevant and responsible art attempts to envelope current and existing affairs in his art; but in doing so he debases the art by turning it into the subject of socio-political or cultural affordability of foreign events and environments. Under the politico-economically charged anthropomorphic assumption that anything can be reduced to a sensible phenomena or material and consequently can be afforded regardless of its inner logic, contemporary (responsible) art has become an obnoxiously humanitarian field in which every affair or event can indeed be a theme for an art exhibition, incorporated with art and be relevant. This is firstly, a complete failure to grasp the autonomously creative ethos of art as that which vitiates relevancy or the supposed relationship-dependent world of events and phenomena which has been constructed upon the existing potentialities and actualities of our world. Secondly, the idea of a responsible or relevant art has a purely moralistic consequence in regard to producing a generation of artists and viewers for whom art needs to be relevant in order to safeguard their position in regard to an ever expanding universe and an unfolding world of events which fundamentally exceed the capacity of our existing models or mediums of inquiry. In short, the idea of relevant art is the idea of correlating the status quo human with the contingent and alien world out there through reprogramming art with a bankrupt and already disintegrated socio-cultural system. It needs a lot of inhuman indifference or intense sympathy for sappiness to ignore the tragicomic status of the contemporary relevant / responsible art (such as this) where artistic creation is always the matter of making a bad mixture between folly and marketable sensibility, but always with different ratios: an artist responsibly heeds the latest exhibition call on War, Terror or the Middle East (having in mind that they are not that different) by presenting a machine gun from WWII or pulling a condom over a fake or defunct bullet. In line with the principles of responsible art which dictate that the artist should be up to date with current global affairs and project them in the art, another artist makes art with a relevant theme while he has never been exposed to the Middle East other than through his appropriate media or perhaps through the immigrant Middle-Eastern cabbie.
Alvanson���s Cosmic Drapery Project has gradually gathered under the rubric of the Middle Eastern drapery, or to be precise, the Middle East itself as a manifest drapery: how is it possible to capture the enigma of the Middle East with all its explicit state formations and implicit nomadic folds through its textile history?��� or as Alvanson puts it, ���the unfolding of the enigma of the Middle East through its drapery.��� If the Middle East in its different formations is full of explicit organizations, implicit folds, sutures of heterogeneous establishments, surreptitious alliances or folds of oppositions, miniature twists and creases which evade relevant socio-political approaches, then drapery is a medium for diagramming the Middle East in its explicit and implicit dynamisms. In this sense, Alvanson���s artistic project suggests a re-nomadization of the Middle East through fabrics and their omnipresent pleats.
Comprised of three main categories (1) fabric studies / manifest draperies, (2) drawings / diagrams and (3) animation studies, the Cosmic Drapery Project currently includes five series, nomadic fabric chadors, spell chadors, flags, abjad-9 drawings and ninefold animations. The first three series are works with fabrics which themselves are divided into different sub-series based on their structures, colors, or forms of installations. Drawings and animations diagrammatically or dynamically elaborate the structures of the fabric works according to their social, political, religious and occult formations. This focus on schizophrenic orders and intricate categories can also be seen in Alvanson���s recent visual-essay for Collapse: Concept���Horror, in which she proposes that in order to tackle with deformities of nature (monsters), there should be a model or taxonomic medium which can bind all deformities without being exhausted. Rather than rectifying itself in the direction of hosting existing monsters or deformities, such a taxonomic model should precede monsters in generating deformities or anomalies. A fitting taxonomic model for monsters, Alvanson argues, must be built by a self-sufficient generative structure capable of producing deformities by which future contingents can be affirmed and hosted. For this reason, this aspect of Alvanson���s work can be artistically recapitulated in the light of her fabric orders, hierarchies of folds and drapery which capture the monstrosity of the Middle East in generating unheard-of formations.
The question of diagramming or taxonomic medium (model), for Alvanson, is not a search for finding a way to draw upon potential or actual resources of Now, for its true ambition is to develop a medium to cover the future contingents. Rather than being confined to potentialities-actualities of Now, Alvanson���s artistic persuasion is the exploration of things which are currently inexistent because they belong to deeply subterranean formations (i.e. they are elusively resistant to our current actualities or even potentialities). In other words, these subterranean formations (secret folds) are not accessible by actualities or potentialities of our existing establishments because they belong to the inner logic of their components and constituting elements. For example, in Alvanson���s nomadic fabric chadors, the state fabric (of the black veil) is sutured to nomadic fabrics in order to generate new formations. These formations are developed by anomalous folds between the state and nomadic fabrics and insinuating yet unknown or inexistent alliances or oppositions between the state and the nomad���s art.
In Alvanson���s nomadic fabric chadors, spontaneous formations, folds or configurations between these fabrics diagrammatically ��� albeit implicitly ��� suggest different structures generated by anomalous connections between the state and nomadic entities. As deeply subterranean structures, these formations are unfolded by the remobilization of the state and nomadic entities in regard to each other. Despite their persistent socio-political insinuations, the majority of these formations between the state and nomadic entities do not have any corresponding counterpart in the existing actual (or potential) socio-political formations of the contemporary world. Therefore, Alvanson���s manifest drapery suggests creative formations between the state and the nomadic which are either deemed as inexistent according to actual / potential socio-political establishments of the contemporary world, or irrelevant according to the existing world���s status quo. If the implicit socio-political formations of Alvanson���s nomadic fabric chadors do not have a corresponding equivalent among actually registered social or political structures, they are not in line with what is called relevant or responsible art. If such implicit and subterranean formations cannot be accessed through our existing structures, either through analogy or recourse to the existing socio-political establishments as points of reference, then what we have here is a persistent irrelevancy which is deeply political. Yet in order to be radically political, this irrelevancy must first constitute a line of resistance toward the cultural, social or political actualities / potentialities of our world. It is this irrelevancy or subterranean (inexistent) relevancy which forms a resistance toward establishments of the current world order and hence becomes political. Since for Alvanson creating this line of resistance ��� embodied as irrelevancy to the current order of actualities ��� is a matter of artistic creativity, then the political is only generated through the artistic, not the other way around.
Rather than dwarfing art by drawing upon existing socio-political resources or established formations, Alvanson���s art questions the legitimacy of existing orders in revealing the grounds on which they have erected or from which they have emerged. This is why the resistance of the Middle East toward all globally appropriate socio-political models or establishments as an obscure formation with a subversive irrelevancy has become an artistic idea for Alvanson���s cosmic drapery project.
Similar to her differentially assembled teratologic model Arbor Deformia in Collapse IV, Alvanson���s cosmic drapery project is not supposed to remain chained to the actual or potential formations or deformations (monstrosities) of the world, but to subvert them with currently inexistent formations. Having in mind that inexistent is in this case is that which cannot be afforded by or correlated with the actual or potential formations of the world we live in. Examining Alvanson���s Cosmic Drapery Project in light of her essay on monstrous taxonomies rather than taxonomies for fitting monsters opens up an entirely new dimension in regard to her art where the idea of responsible or political art is undermined in an utterly subtle and creative manner. This subversion and counteraction against relevant art and appropriate politics is carried out on behalf of a radical and speculative creativity which is the medium of the politics of resistance.
If contemporary responsible art has assumed that the artist should emphasize on relevancy of art in regard to sociopolitical and cultural formations, then art today has never been more irresponsible. A sufficient example is the image of an artist who in persuasion of relevant and responsible art attempts to envelope current and existing affairs in his art; but in doing so he debases the art by turning it into the subject of socio-political or cultural affordability of foreign events and environments. Under the politico-economically charged anthropomorphic assumption that anything can be reduced to a sensible phenomena or material and consequently can be afforded regardless of its inner logic, contemporary (responsible) art has become an obnoxiously humanitarian field in which every affair or event can indeed be a theme for an art exhibition, incorporated with art and be relevant. This is firstly, a complete failure to grasp the autonomously creative ethos of art as that which vitiates relevancy or the supposed relationship-dependent world of events and phenomena which has been constructed upon the existing potentialities and actualities of our world. Secondly, the idea of a responsible or relevant art has a purely moralistic consequence in regard to producing a generation of artists and viewers for whom art needs to be relevant in order to safeguard their position in regard to an ever expanding universe and an unfolding world of events which fundamentally exceed the capacity of our existing models or mediums of inquiry. In short, the idea of relevant art is the idea of correlating the status quo human with the contingent and alien world out there through reprogramming art with a bankrupt and already disintegrated socio-cultural system. It needs a lot of inhuman indifference or intense sympathy for sappiness to ignore the tragicomic status of the contemporary relevant / responsible art (such as this) where artistic creation is always the matter of making a bad mixture between folly and marketable sensibility, but always with different ratios: an artist responsibly heeds the latest exhibition call on War, Terror or the Middle East (having in mind that they are not that different) by presenting a machine gun from WWII or pulling a condom over a fake or defunct bullet. In line with the principles of responsible art which dictate that the artist should be up to date with current global affairs and project them in the art, another artist makes art with a relevant theme while he has never been exposed to the Middle East other than through his appropriate media or perhaps through the immigrant Middle-Eastern cabbie.
We’re both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don’t understand. - david cronenberg, eXistenZ
The early XYZT was not yet reliable. The displacement ratio was high. -Kristen Alvanson, XYZT
Two books of theory-fiction in, and Urbanomic’s K-Pulp series may just be the most thrilling literary outlet of the moment. The first, Simon Sellars’s Applied Ballardianism was an out-there JG Ballard primer, exploded memoir and surprisingly science-fictional narrative all at the same time. At least it took me by surprise that I was so taken in by its memoirist clothing. For someone rather keen on the self-conscious insertion of reality into fiction – the bookish game playing of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, to Paul Auster’s literal authorial presence in City of Glass or the subtle and miraculous auto-fiction of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy – I clung to Sellars’s untruths longer than I might usually have. Although in the end, the picking apart of what can be considered real and what might be unreal is of little actual interest to me; I don’t require such lines to be drawn. That there’s very often more truth in fiction than in fact is a notion I’ve embraced most of my adult life.
Perhaps my submission to Sellars has to do with where the text’s entry point is. Sellars begins with the memoir and the thesis, and gradually submerges those into novelistic waters. Kristen Alvanson, on the other hand, almost does the opposite. XYZT is clearly a novel from the outset, albeit one that is deeply informed by her experiences as an American living in Iran during the 2000s. That’s not to say that many novelists don’t already draw from their life as a matter of course (take Philip Roth’s body of work) or as a staging area for flights into fantasy (consider William Burroughs and the descent into Interzone). Something other is at play here though. The infection of fiction occurs at a deep narrative level within XYZT, its disruptions transmit as warnings rather than exercises in meta-fiction.
Indeed Alvanson uses XYZT as a means to probe at the precarious world in which we live, its fictional walls reconstructed as our reality. That this reality is then broken down by a deep cover fiction virus makes it seem as if the infection has escaped the boundaries of the unreal. It’s rather like the layers of reality within David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, with its disorienting cuts between states; it becomes increasingly challenging to assert if one is within the real or the constructed, and indeed whether it matters anymore. By the end of the book, eXistenZ itself is (perhaps) revealed as a key to unlocking the meaning behind the technology known as XYZT. It’s a subtle nod which nevertheless packs a punch of recognition.
Structurally, XYZT presents untitled entries that form an ongoing narrative, interspersed with titled chapters that are essentially short stories focusing on different characters. The mechanics of the XYZT tech is gradually revealed across each of these threads. It is a teleportation device that allows individuals to travel across great distances almost instantaneously. This much is clear quite early on. The device’s creators, Amir and Kade, aim to test it by conducting a cross-cultural experiment between the USA (where they are based at MIT) and Iran (their home country). Volunteers are sent to “hosts” in the other country, where they are given three hours to have an authentic experience of how the other lives. However, like Jeff Goldblum’s teleportation experiments in The Fly, the results are not predictable in every instance.
XYZT may be viewed as some sort of corollary to China Miéville’s The City & the City, although that text presented a situation where two distinct cultures literally occupied the same geographical space. In XYZT, Alvanson bridges a significant geographical distance with invented tech to insert people into the lives of others. The character of Estella becomes the reader’s constant, as she attempts to solve the mystery of XYZT, a trail of which has been left behind by her sometimes-colleague Amir, who is now missing. The trail begins with a mysterious black box, which of course cannot remain closed. Upon opening the box, “without knowing why, [Estella] felt an awful, vertiginous sense of responsibility at what she had unleashed.”
It would seem that the use of the technology has not so much let something out, as punctured the places where reality is thin. The first time this occurs is a beautifully disorientating experience. An American called Greisen is sent to Yazd, but finds himself outside the urban area, in a derelict part of the Old City. Javad, a sort of amateur archaeologist in the fortune and glory mode, is attempting to get into the underground water system beneath a two-hundred-year-old house, and enlists Greisen’s help. Up to this point, Alvanson has alluded to a teleportation device, so science-fiction is on the table, but that doesn’t prepare the reader for the sudden manifestation of Persian myth. The characters are even more unprepared to deal with this shifting reality. Underground, they encounter treasure beyond their wildest dreams, yet it is guarded by a demon known as a deav. The deav will allow them to take as much treasure as they can carry – for he has more than enough – but he warns there will be consequences. They nevertheless accept his terms and fill their pockets, but it transpires that the deav wants their eyes. Greisen tries to appeal to the demon’s sense of logic: if they are blinded they will be trapped down here with him forever, and surely he doesn’t wish that. “The deav thought for a moment. He didn’t want them hanging around, but he did want their eyes.” So he takes one eye from each of them and the pair are swept “away once and for all” after attempting to leave.
A subsequent chapter has two American tourists in seeming peril, about to be cooked and eaten in a Bazaar restaurant. Although it turns out this is merely a joke perpetrated by the host’s uncles, all bets are off after the deav. Neither is it only the case that mythology encroaches upon the world in which we live. There’s a vital chapter (“Arkham: A Rat in the Rafters”) where an Iranian finds himself not in the America he was expecting, but instead in an America of cosmic unease. The dimensions of the house, he discovers, are impossible and he must conclude that he has landed in a Lovecraftian universe. We also get some important information about the tech: “XYZ for Euclidean coordinates and T for Time – but how could he travel to a place that didn’t even exist? Slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable.” It’s intoxicating stuff.
XYZT is a book concerned with the potential of cross-cultural human interactions, but also its apparent failures. Kristen Alvanson wonders at the imaginative drive it takes for us to create and the dangers inherent in such creations. She has written a fearless investigation of the outer-limits of human experience, a deep dive into now that takes in mythological pasts, fictional pocket universes and dystopian high-tech futures. It’s nothing less than One Thousand and One Nights reconfigured by Primer and as such will be pored over for years to come. - Stewart Gardiner
https://concreteislands.com/points-unguessed-and-unimaginable-kristen-alvansons-xyzt/
Kristen Alvanson is an American artist and writer, living in the US. In the 1990s she was the owner of HOUSE, a club and streetwear store in New York’s East Village that sold her clothing designs and other underground brands, as well as music by emerging House, Techno, Drum & Bass and Breakbeat producers. In the 2000s she lived in Iran and Malaysia. Her essays and artworks have been published in journals and anthologies including Collapse: Journal of Philosophical Research and Development; Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction; The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities; Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary; Aesthetics After Finitude; New Humanist; Umelec; Specialten; and Frozen Tears. She was a contributor to Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, writing the opening chapter and creating the cover design and diagrams for the book. She has participated in group/solo art exhibitions in New York, Tehran, Shiraz, London, Istanbul, Berlin, Vienna, Singapore, Kessel-Lo, Zürich and Vilnius.
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