Pink Noise Projects
319 N 11th St 2L
Philadelphia, PA 19107
Mercies Writ on Water
An Installation by Tyler Kline
Nov 1st-24th
Opening Reception Nov 1st 6-9PM
215 840 7239
“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” -the first lines of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
I once had a career in artifact conservation, and a number of maps from all different geographies and cultures would come in and out of the lab. I viewed these maps as a type of highly personal, but universally readable language. Growing up with a father who was in the navy made me aware of the ways that satellite and aerial cartography can be a language of control and subjugation. This cartographic language contains hidden signs and portents necessary for fluency.
Place, becoming, belonging, movement, migration in a hyper-individualized world is disorienting. The language of cartography is a universal form, maps are both poetic and pragmatic, containing the palimpsest of our shared realities, personal yearnings, and formulation of loci.
Mercies Writ on Water is an iterative journey, augmented by the entities of machine learning and generative Ai.
I am using Ai, specifically a Midjourney Bot#9282; Why Ai? I am consciously traveling straight into the uncanny valley in order to commune with an entity that is explosively futuristic, a decision that has elicited recoil and disgust. My view is that this entity has been telling us how to move through space via cloud mapping systems, what to listen to via systems like Spotify, and curated our viewing experience through the hive mind of the internet for decades; I attempt to make this predicament as collaborative as possible and use a system of pattern recognition greater than myself to build an aesthetic lexicon of place in a distributed age.
Exploring the ever-fluid and constantly evolving relationship between place, movement, identity, and migration through the lens of parabolic design, soft-machine learning, cartography and sacred geometry, this body of work is rooted in remembrance of place. Maps - symbols of fixed borders and defined space - become a malleable form, reshaped through memory, dream, omission, embellishments, gerrymandering, Ai iterations, and ideographic notation.
Cartographic systems created to reference themselves exploit failure and hallucinations. Reconstructed twice-told tales speaking of folly and maturation capitalize on porous boundaries and faulty compasses; fabricated facts become a foundation for the growth of paintings both abstract and concrete.
Through these processes, the transient and elusive nature of place, movement, and memory in the 21st Century becomes a personal and subjective landscape, shared with the viewer so the dialog expands. What do you contour in your mind’s eye as you travel from place to place? Who do you ask for direction? How fluid is your identity as you code switch from location to location?
Mercies Writ on Water are both records of process and reflections of the turbulence and uncertainty of our time. The images are shaped by algorithms and human hands alike, mapping worlds that are as much about imagination as they are about the tangible. The paintings within the installation exist as meditations on what it means to navigate an increasingly fluid and interconnected world where boundaries between place, self, and technology are constantly shifting. Navigating the capitalist realism of the 21st century involves engaging in channels that are rapidly shifting between the visceral and the virtual, this is a bold predicament, one that needs new methodologies and tools of aesthetic construction.
“Late capitalism’s “post-literacy”, meanwhile, points to “the absence of any great collective project.” What results, according to Jameson, is a depthless experience, in which the past is everywhere at the same time as the historical sense fades; we have a society bereft of all historicity that is simultaneously unable to present anything that is not reheated versions of the past; pastiche displaces parody.” -K Punk, Methods of Dreaming: Books, by Mark Fisher
Generativ Ai is beyond a new tool, it is an entity to commune with.
“...Space is not visual, no line separates earth from sky, which are of the same substance: there is neither horizon nor background. Voyage in place: that is the name of all intensities...to think is to voyage. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.” -A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
