Essays

Height Inflation: A Definition

height inflation /haɪt ɪnˈfleɪʃən/ n.

The systemic devaluation of any achieved vertical, spatial, or technological threshold at the moment of its attainment, producing a structural demand for the next. By analogy with monetary inflation — in which an increase in the supply of currency devalues each existing unit — height inflation operates on accomplishments: each new record, altitude, or benchmark immediately becomes the baseline from which the next is measured, rather than a terminus. The term identifies a mechanism common to capital accumulation, arms races, architectural competition, orbital expansion, and resource extraction, in which the impossibility of sufficiency is not a failure of the system but its operating principle.

Height inflation designates three interrelated processes. First, the process by which each newly achieved vertical, spatial, or technological height rapidly loses its exceptional status and demands a further, higher stage of expansion. Second, in geopolitics and technological modernity: the continual escalation of altitude, distance, and vertical reach as forms of power, prestige, extraction, and territorial presence. Third, the condition in which vertical achievement becomes self-reinforcing, so that no attained height — architectural, military, orbital, or planetary — is experienced as sufficient.

Unlike monetary inflation, which is measured quantitatively, height inflation operates qualitatively: it devalues not the unit of measure but the status of the achievement itself. A record-breaking altitude, upon attainment, ceases to function as an achievement and begins to function as a deficit — the distance between the present position and the next required one.

Etymology and Formation

The compound unites height (Old English hēahþu, from Proto-Germanic *hauhiþō, denoting vertical extent or elevation) with inflation (Latin inflātiō, a swelling or expansion; in economics, the sustained decrease in the purchasing power of a unit of currency relative to goods). The term transfers the logic of monetary devaluation-through-expansion to the vertical axis: just as printing more currency devalues what already circulates, achieving a new altitude devalues the altitude already reached.

Theoretical Coordinates

Harvey’s Spatial Fix. David Harvey (1982, 2003) argued that capitalism resolves crises of overaccumulation through spatial fixes: geographic expansion into new territories that absorb surplus capital and labour. Harvey’s spatial fix operates horizontally — capital spreads outward, colonizing new markets. Height inflation identifies the vertical analogue: when horizontal expansion is exhausted or contested, capital displaces upward — into taller buildings, higher orbits, deeper mines, further celestial bodies. The Artemis programme ($93 billion through 2025), lunar resource legislation, and deep-sea mining concessions are spatial fixes rotated ninety degrees. Harvey’s framework explains why capital must expand; height inflation specifies the axis along which expansion proceeds when the horizontal is saturated.

Virilio’s Dromology. Paul Virilio (1977, 1989) theorized dromology — the logic of speed as the primary structuring force of modernity. For Virilio, power belongs to whoever accelerates fastest; every new velocity renders the previous one obsolete. Height inflation shares Virilio’s logic of compulsory supersession but transposes it from the temporal to the spatial axis. Where Virilio tracks the acceleration of speed (horse → locomotive → aircraft → electromagnetic signal → light), height inflation tracks the escalation of altitude and reach (fortification → artillery → aviation → orbit → cislunar space → planetary surface). Virilio’s dromology and height inflation are complementary: the former describes the tempo of supersession, the latter its geometry. Together they produce a compound dynamic in which each new height must be reached faster than the last. But height inflation also describes what dromology does not: the transformation of the axis itself. The vertical, which was once the axis of spirit — the Gothic cathedral, Brancusi’s column, the ascetic’s ascent — becomes the axis of surveillance and control. The satellite is not a replacement of God; it is God’s operational inversion. Height inflates not only as distance but as meaning: each new altitude further desacralizes the vertical, converting it from a site of transcendence into a military-commercial interface.

Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction. Joseph Schumpeter (1942) described capitalism as a process of creative destruction in which innovation renders existing structures obsolete, generating growth through perpetual replacement. Height inflation identifies a specific morphology of creative destruction: each vertical achievement creates the infrastructure for the next while simultaneously rendering itself insufficient. The V-2 programme produced the propulsion systems that enabled the Saturn V, which produced the institutional knowledge that produced the Space Launch System — but each stage was experienced as inadequate at the moment of its completion. The obsolescence is not incidental to the achievement; it is generated by the achievement itself.

Marx’s Expanded Reproduction. In Volume II of Capital (1885), Marx distinguished between simple reproduction (in which surplus value is consumed and the system reproduces itself at the same scale) and expanded reproduction (in which surplus value is reinvested, compelling the system to grow). Height inflation is the phenomenological expression of expanded reproduction along the vertical axis: the system cannot reproduce itself at the same altitude. Each achieved height must generate the next, or the system experiences stasis as crisis. A 2% growth rate that drops to 1.5% is experienced not as growth but as failure. A Moon flyby ($93 billion) that does not lead to a Moon landing is experienced not as accomplishment but as deficit.

The Ratchet Effect. In public finance, the ratchet effect (Peacock and Wiseman, 1961) describes the phenomenon in which government expenditure, once increased to meet a crisis, does not return to pre-crisis levels. Height inflation applies the same irreversibility to achievement: once a threshold has been crossed — architecturally, militarily, technologically — it cannot be uncrossed without a perceived loss of status. The United States cannot not return to the Moon after the Artemis programme begins, regardless of cost, because the failure to continue upward is legible only as decline.

Baudrillard’s Hyperreality. Jean Baudrillard (1981) argued that in consumer capitalism, signs detach from referents and begin to circulate as self-referential systems of value. Height inflation identifies the point at which altitude itself becomes a sign detached from any use-value. The Burj Khalifa (828 m) does not serve a function that requires 828 metres; it serves a sign-function — the communication of supremacy. The Jeddah Tower (1,000+ m, suspended) was not designed to solve a spatial problem; it was designed to produce a number. When altitude becomes a sign, it enters the logic of sign-inflation: each new sign must exceed the previous one, not because the referent demands it, but because the sign-system does.

Sloterdijk’s Vertical Tension. Peter Sloterdijk (You Must Change Your Life, 2009; Spheres, 1998–2004) introduced the concept of vertical tension as the anthropological foundation of civilisational striving. In his account, the human impulse to rise — spiritually, physically, architecturally — originates in ascetic practice: the saint, the monk, the mystic disciplines the body to transcend it. This is the ascetic vertical: height achieved through renunciation. Sloterdijk argues that modernity replaces asceticism with athleticism: the same vertical drive, but now fuelled by expenditure rather than abstinence. The Olympic record, the skyscraper, the rocket launch — all are exercises in vertical athleticism, in which height is achieved not through what is given up but through what is consumed. Height inflation marks the terminal stage of this transition: the point at which the ascetic vertical has been entirely supplanted by the athletic. Brancusi’s Endless Column — funded by local donations, built by an artist who waived his fee — is among the last ascetic vertical objects. The Artemis programme — $93 billion, cost-plus contracts, 140% over budget — is pure athletic verticality: height achieved through maximal expenditure. Sloterdijk would call this the profanation of height: when the rocket pierces the sky, it renders the sky technically flat, a layer to be traversed rather than a dimension to be contemplated. The vertical loses its distance — not its metric distance, but its phenomenological distance, its capacity to signify something other than itself.

Bachelard’s Topographic Inversion. Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space, 1958) established the archetypal topology of vertical experience: the attic as the site of the rational, the elevated, the spiritual; the cellar as the site of the instinctual, the dark, the buried. In Bachelard’s phenomenology, to ascend is to approach clarity; to descend is to approach the irrational. Height inflation destroys this topology. When nations begin to divide water ice at the lunar south pole, when safety zones partition the surface of the Moon into zones of extraction, when $1.8 billion in classified satellite contracts flow to a private company whose owner speaks privately with adversary heads of state — the cellar has been transferred to the attic. War, resource competition, territorial appropriation, dirty economics: everything Bachelard located below has been displaced upward. This is the topographic inversion that height inflation produces. The sky is no longer clean. It has been contaminated by horizontal terrestrial interests. Bachelard does not theorise height inflation; he theorises the condition that height inflation annihilates. His poetics of vertical space describes exactly what is lost when height becomes a commodity: the capacity of above to mean something other than more.

Domains

Architecture: Empire State Building (381 m, 1931) → World Trade Center (417 m, 1971) → Petronas Towers (452 m, 1998) → Taipei 101 (508 m, 2004) → Burj Khalifa (828 m, 2010) → Jeddah Tower (1,008 m, suspended). Each record devalues the previous. No achieved height generates lasting status.

Military doctrine: Ground fortification → elevated artillery → aerial bombardment → satellite reconnaissance → anti-satellite weapons → cislunar military architecture. Whoever holds the higher ground devalues the lower. The US Space Force, established 2019, institutionalizes the requirement that military height must always increase.

Orbital expansion: Sputnik (1957, LEO) → Apollo (1969, lunar surface) → ISS (1998, LEO sustained presence) → Artemis (2026, cislunar) → ILRS / Artemis lunar bases (2030s, permanent surface). Each orbital achievement generates not stability but the structural demand for the next mission.

Financial markets: Stock indices function as height-inflation instruments: each «all-time high» immediately becomes the new baseline. The Dow Jones Industrial Average crossing 40,000 (2024) was experienced as an event for approximately one trading day before becoming the floor from which the next record is measured.

Resource extraction: Surface mining → deep-shaft mining → deep-sea mining → asteroid mining → lunar mining. Each exhausted stratum compels descent to the next or ascent to a new body. Height inflation is bidirectional along the vertical axis.

Technology: Moore’s Law — transistor density doubling approximately every two years — is height inflation expressed as a temporal function. Each generation of microprocessor renders the previous generation inadequate, not because it has ceased to function, but because the threshold of adequacy has shifted upward.

Attention economy: One million views (2015: event) → one million views (2026: failure). The metric inflates; the threshold of significance rises; the same number signifies less with each passing cycle.

Structural Properties

Irreversibility. Height inflation does not permit voluntary descent. A nation that has achieved orbit cannot relinquish orbital capability without experiencing this as decline. A corporation that has achieved a market capitalisation cannot accept a lower one without triggering crisis. The ratchet turns in one direction.

Auto-generation. Each new height produces the conditions for its own obsolescence. The V-2 produced the Saturn V; the Saturn V produced the Space Shuttle; the Space Shuttle produced the SLS. The chain is not driven by external demand but by the internal logic of the infrastructure itself.

Asymmetric temporality. The ascent is slow and expensive; the devaluation is instantaneous. The Burj Khalifa took six years to build. It was surpassed as a project (by Jeddah Tower) before its completion. The Apollo programme took eight years and $25 billion (1969 dollars). Its achievement was devalued within a decade when funding was redirected and capability atrophied.

Document-precedence. In advanced stages, height inflation operates through legal and financial instruments that establish the next threshold before it is physically achieved. The Artemis Accords (2020) legislate the extraction of lunar resources before any extraction has occurred. The SPACE Act (2015) grants property rights over materials not yet retrieved. The document inflates the height before the rocket launches.

Distinctions

Height inflation ≠ progress. Progress assumes directional improvement toward a goal. Height inflation describes a system in which the goal recedes at the rate of approach.

Height inflation ≠ arms race. An arms race is bilateral; height inflation is structural and can operate within a single actor competing against its own previous achievement.

Height inflation ≠ escalation. Escalation implies intentional intensification. Height inflation is systemic — it operates whether or not any actor intends it.

Height inflation ≠ growth. Growth can be stable and sustainable. Height inflation is inherently unstable: it requires continuous acceleration to maintain the perception of stasis.

Counter-Examples

Objects and practices that resist height inflation are structurally significant precisely because of their rarity. Brancusi’s Endless Column (1938, Târgu Jiu, 29.35 m) has not been surpassed, replaced, or rendered obsolete because it was never indexed to a threshold of achievement. It was funded by local donations; the artist waived his fee. It participates in no economy of vertical supersession. 

Liza Kin Berlin, April 26, 2026

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The Basket and the Transponder

In the summer of 1666, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb placed Shivaji Bhonsle under house arrest in Agra. The Maratha king had come to court as a vassal; he left as a prisoner. The logic of the empire was simple: visibility is capture. To appear before the throne is to be contained by its framework. For several weeks, Shivaji feigned illness and began sending large baskets of sweets to the poor and to holy men — a gesture of piety, of thanks for prayers offered on behalf of his health. The guards grew accustomed to the baskets. They inspected them, then stopped inspecting them. One evening, Shivaji climbed into a basket. His son climbed into another. They were carried through the gates of the imperial capital and disappeared.

The historian Jaysinghrao Pawar spent decades returning to this event — and to the broader administrative genius of the Maratha state — with a single insistence: this was not a miracle, not divine intervention, not the romantic cunning of a folk hero. It was management. Shivaji had built a system — an intelligence network called Harkara, a decentralized administrative structure that could function without him, a naval infrastructure along the Konkan coast designed not for battle but for passage. The basket was not a trick. It was the moment when an institutional capacity, built over years, executed its function. The escape from Agra was the output of a system, not the inspiration of a man.

This distinction matters enormously for understanding what India is doing in March 2026. The dominant geopolitical vocabulary — swing state, strategic autonomy, multipolar balancing — treats New Delhi’s current posture as a position, a stance adopted in response to the Hormuz crisis. Pawar’s framework suggests something different: that what looks like agility is actually infrastructure, and that infrastructure of this kind was not built for this crisis. It was built before any specific crisis, precisely so that no specific crisis could contain it.

The conceptual apparatus for this kind of statecraft exists, and it is not Western. Kautilya’s Arthashastra — composed somewhere between the fourth century BCE and the third century CE, attributed to the minister who helped found the Maurya Empire — describes what it calls the mandala: a geometry of interstate relations in which the neighbor is always a potential adversary, the neighbor’s neighbor a potential ally, and no relationship is permanent because permanence is not the goal. The goal is the maintenance of maneuverability. Western international relations theory has a concept of balance of power, but the balance of power assumes that states are trying to achieve stability. The mandala does not assume stability as a goal. It assumes that the system is always in motion and that wisdom consists in moving with it rather than against it.

On March 11, India joined the 140 co-sponsors of UN Security Council Resolution 2817, condemning Iranian attacks on shipping in the Gulf — a vote that placed New Delhi alongside Washington and against Tehran. On the same week, Indian refineries continued processing Iranian crude, delivered through channels established under the Rial-Rupee-Dirham bilateral trade agreement that explicitly circumvents dollar-denominated settlement. To Western eyes, this is hypocrisy or confusion. Through the lens of the mandala, it is precision. India is not choosing between two blocs. It is maintaining simultaneous relationships with both — not because it cannot decide, but because decision, in the Kautilyan framework, is the trap. The neighbor is always a potential adversary. The adversary’s adversary is always a potential ally. The geometry keeps moving.

There is a naval precedent for this that Pawar also documented, less celebrated than Shivaji but perhaps more directly relevant to the current moment: Kanhoji Angre, the Maratha admiral who controlled the Konkan coast in the early eighteenth century. Angre did not dominate the sea lanes through superior force — the Portuguese, the British, and the Mughal-aligned traders all had larger fleets. He controlled them through indispensability. Every major maritime power operating along the western coast of India needed Angre’s cooperation to move safely. He extracted tribute from the Portuguese, negotiated with the British East India Company, raided those who refused terms, and made himself the necessary intermediary for any commerce that wanted to arrive and depart intact. He was not neutral. He was structurally central — the node through which all flows had to pass, precisely because he had made himself the most efficient route and the most dangerous obstacle simultaneously. When the British finally defeated him in 1729, they did not replace his function. They inherited it. The coast still needed someone to manage its passage. Power had moved; the structure remained.

On March 8, 2026, the tanker Shenlong entered the Strait of Hormuz and switched off its AIS transponder — the Automatic Identification System that makes vessels visible to maritime surveillance networks, insurance systems, and port authorities. It disappeared from the screens of Lloyd’s adjusters, from the satellite tracking feeds, from the legal apparatus of international maritime commerce. On March 9, it reappeared on the other side of the strait. On March 11, it docked in Mumbai. The cargo was Iranian crude. The passage was invisible. The arrival was not.

Pawar would have recognized this immediately. Not the technology — the operation. The basket that the guards had stopped inspecting. The route that the surveillance apparatus had not been calibrated to see. The Harkara, working in the gap between what the empire’s perceptual system expected and what was actually moving through its territory. The AIS transponder is the contemporary equivalent of the Mughal gate inspection: a system designed to make movement legible, to capture it within a framework of visibility and control. Switching it off is not evasion in the simple sense. It is the activation of an institutional capacity built for exactly this purpose — the capacity to exist at a different speed, in a different register, than the system designed to contain you.

This is where the Pawar framework diverges most sharply from the standard geopolitical account. The standard account says: India is exploiting a window of opportunity created by the Hormuz crisis to advance its strategic interests. The Pawar account says: India is executing a procedure that was designed long before this crisis, through institutions that do not require crisis to function, because the crisis is not the point. The International North-South Transport Corridor — running from Mumbai through Iran to Russia and onward to Central Asia — was not built as a response to Hormuz. It was built as an alternative to the system that Hormuz anchors. The Rial-Rupee-Dirham settlement mechanism was not invented in March 2026. It has been operational for years, quietly, in the administrative blind spot of the dollar system. The basket was ready. The guards had already grown accustomed to it.

But Pawar’s framework also demands honesty about the gap between the system as designed and the system as it actually functions under stress. And here the picture becomes more complicated. When the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena was sunk by a US submarine on March 4, in waters 35 kilometers from Sri Lanka — returning from joint naval exercises with the Indian fleet — India’s response was delayed, cautious, and ultimately diplomatic rather than military. This was an act of kinetic force conducted inside India’s own declared sphere of maritime interest. The system that was supposed to provide strategic immunity did not provide it in this instance. The Harkara did not reach the ship in time. The basket was not ready for this particular gate.

The tension between the architecture and its stress-testing is not a failure of the Pawar framework. It is exactly what the framework predicts. Pawar was insistent that Shivaji’s genius was not invincibility — it was the construction of systems that could absorb loss and continue functioning. The Maratha state lost battles, lost territory, lost leaders. What it did not lose was the administrative capacity to reconfigure around the loss and continue. What is being tested in March 2026 is not whether India’s alternative topology can prevent all bad outcomes. It is whether it can absorb bad outcomes without the topology collapsing. The IRIS Dena is a data point, not a verdict.

What Pawar understood, and what the current geopolitical moment is making visible, is that sovereignty in the twenty-first century is not primarily territorial. It is not the capacity to hold ground or project force. It is the capacity to maintain a different relationship to the systems of visibility that determine what can be traded, what can be insured, what can be recognized as a legitimate actor in global space. Shivaji’s forts on the Sahyadri peaks were not primarily defensive positions. They were nodes in a topology that could not be controlled from Delhi because Delhi could not see it whole. The INSTC is not primarily a trade route. It is a topology that cannot be sanctioned from Washington because Washington cannot see it whole.

The question that remains open — and Pawar would have insisted that it remain open — is whether a topology can sustain itself as an alternative regime of circulation long enough to achieve the critical mass required for stability. Kanhoji Angre’s system worked for decades and then failed when the British brought sufficient force to bear. Shivaji’s state survived his death and then fragmented a century later under pressures that the administrative genius of its founding could not have fully anticipated. The current Indian architecture faces pressures that Pawar’s historical framework can describe but cannot resolve: the speed at which drone swarms can disrupt nodes is faster than the speed at which any administrative system can recalibrate; the fragility of transit partners along the INSTC route introduces variables that the mandala cannot fully contain; the scarcity of high-end interceptors creates prioritization choices that no doctrine of topological agility can indefinitely defer.

Liza Kin
Berlin, March 26, 2026

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David Lynch: The Posthumous Image

In 1966 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, David Lynch painted a garden scene: green plants positioned at the center of an almost all-black canvas. That night, looking at the painting, he perceived sound and motion coming from within. ‘From the painting came a wind,’ he recalled. ‘And the green garden plants began to move.’ What Lynch discovered that night?

David Lynch died on January 16, 2025. A year later, in January 2026, Pace Gallery Berlin opened an exhibition of his paintings, watercolors, lamp sculptures, and factory photographs. The show serves as prelude to a larger retrospective scheduled for fall 2026 at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery: a posthumous reckoning in his hometown.

Throughout his film career, cinema absorbed explanation. Lynch’s visual art existed in cinema’s shadow, protected by productive obscurity. Attention stayed on films, leaving paintings to function privately. The paintings were mentioned, acknowledged, but rarely examined with the rigor applied to his films. Death shifted this focus. The filmmaker who dominated public attention can no longer direct interpretation. What emerges is recognition of a structure that was always there: Lynch’s paintings operate through a logic of posthumous vision, looking at life from death’s side.

At twenty, Lynch visited Philadelphia’s city morgue at midnight. The night watchman let him walk freely through the building. «I sat in the cold room for an hour with the bodies,» he recalled. «Consciousness animates a person, and here it was just gone.» This was 1966, during his years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. His paintings emerged from this encounter: structural principle: the gap death creates, the charged intensity of what remains visible across that gap.

Lynch describes his childhood as idyllic: ‘elegant homes, tree-lined streets, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it’s supposed to be.’ Then the turn: ‘But on the cherry tree there’s this pitch oozing out — some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.’ This is the posthumous view: beauty perceived through awareness of decay, color intensified by proximity to dissolution. The ants don’t destroy the beauty. They reveal its condition.

Everything announces itself immediately, all at once, from the center. There is no beginning, no end, no prescribed path for the eye to follow. The viewer cannot escape into narrative scanning. The patch confronts directly, refusing to release attention into compositional journey. This centrality eliminates temporal sequence. What repeats across sixty years: mechanical women from the late 1960s (bodies as tubes and compartments, systems under pressure). Shadow of a Twisted Hand Across My House (1988). Who Is in My House (2008-09). Billy (and His Friends) Did Find Sally in the Tree (2018). Tree At Night (2019), Flower (2020), The Evolution of a Bar Fight (2021). The same arrested forms returning. The structure repeats, testing whether it still resists. It does.

The paintings test containment. Thick impasto transforms every mark into tactile mass. Francis Bacon taught Lynch that paint itself can become the site where violence occurs, enacting it through material. Lynch absorbed this lesson completely. He saw Bacon’s 1968 exhibition at Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in New York, where Triptych (1967) presented bodies pressed together so forcefully it became impossible to distinguish embrace from violence, lovemaking from destruction. The patch holds this pressure. Line would release it. Lynch’s mechanical women, painted the same year, already showed this logic: bodies barely holding coherent form, systems on the edge of collapse but suspended in place. Thick impasto, crude surfaces, hand-built frames function as containment rather than expression.

Factory photographs shot between 1980 and 2000 across multiple continents (Berlin, Poland, England, New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles) document abandoned machinery, shattered windows, control panels severed from function. These sites register not as symbols but as literal demonstrations of exhausted use-value. The aesthetic imprinted itself during Lynch’s Philadelphia years at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where industrial ruins and urban decay struck him as beautiful. «I started falling in love with industry and flesh,» he later said. «To me factories are symbols of creation, with the same organic processes as in nature.» The photographs show repeating conditions wherever industry collapsed: arrested decay, systems that have ceased functioning but continue standing.

Lynch describes his paintings as «organic phenomena»: paint combined with ash, resin, soot, industrial residue. Color here operates through material process rather than applied pigment. Rust red from oxidation. Ash black from combustion. The factory photographs show the principle: peeling paint reveals layers of decay, each stage a different color produced through chemical transformation. Lynch doesn’t apply color. He cultivates it through material process. «Reds behave like wounds because they have been scraped and made to bleed.» Color emerges from the action of scraping, from the reveal of underlayers, from physical trauma to paint surface. The red cannot exist without the process that created it. Industrial rust, organic blood, scraped paint: same dependency on material transformation.

This conflation of creation and decay runs through all the work. Heat, secretion, combustion, rot: industrial sites and organic bodies dissolve under identical conditions. The surface remembers time. Factory sites arrested in decay and paintings built through material accumulation document the same operation: systems that have exhausted their function but persist as material fact. What remains standing after use-value has been consumed.

Space behaves like substance with weight. Backgrounds press forward, flatten, smother. Figures mid-transformation, frozen between states. Entities that neither become nor resolve. Nothing stands freely. Everything is implicated. The paintings compress space until it becomes pressure itself, not void to be filled but force to be contained. The stage format (border of lightbulbs, curtains demarcating fictive space) appears throughout Lynch’s work, returning in paintings, lamp sculptures, drawings. The stage presents arrested condition rather than narrative. A space where nothing progresses but everything is held.

Violence in Lynch’s paintings is never dramatic. It has already occurred, or occurs so slowly it no longer announces itself. The condition that makes impact inevitable, suspended in paint. This violence is administrative. Persistent, almost bored. Something is always wrong, but rarely spectacular. The damage is structural. Shadow of a Twisted Hand Across My House (1988) presents menace as architectural fact. Suddenly My House Became a Tree of Sores (1990) transforms domestic space into site of contamination. Who Is in My House (2008-09) asks the question but provides no answer, only the fact that something occupies space it shouldn’t. There Is Nothing Here, Please Go Away (2012) denies presence while insisting on expulsion. The titles perform what the images contain: situations that cannot resolve.

Words thicken the image. Language traps. Titles suspend mid-clause: It Was Linda Who… (grammatically incomplete, promising disclosure while withholding content). Good Bye World collapses spacing. Oh Oh Oh I Got Good News for You repeats its opening exclamation compulsively. These are not captions. They are interrupted speech. Billy Did Find Sally in the Tree asserts completed action while the image refuses temporal closure. Reading becomes another way of being stuck. The viewer oscillates between text and image, unable to settle in either. Meaning stalls. Attention sharpens. The titles share structure: interrupted articulation, failure to complete statement.

The lamp sculptures (Mappa Burl Top Lamp (2022), Matchstick Lamp C (2019), Red Zig-Zag (2022)) retain functional nomenclature while producing what exhibition materials term «uncanny illumination.» Objects designed to enable vision produce excess that disturbs it. Utility inverted into threat, another form of containment within domestic objects. Light that doesn’t clarify but overwhelms.

Humor enters where structure strains. A grotesque exaggeration, a blunt phrase, a childlike figure refusing dignity. The joke doesn’t relieve pressure. It sharpens it. All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth (2012) juxtaposes holiday song innocence with two figures fighting in front of a house. The humor makes the violence more uncomfortable, not less. Laughter becomes another register of unease. Tenderness and cruelty sit too close to be separated cleanly. Drawings feel naïve while remaining violent. Brutality feels casual while remaining heavy. This imbalance denies the viewer a moral position that feels safe. You are either too close or too distant, never correctly placed.

The same motifs return across decades to test whether they still resist. The image is approached again and again, as if it might finally speak differently. It never does. That refusal is not failure. It is the work’s operation. Lynch’s painting asks to be endured: to stay with an image longer than comfortable, without promise of resolution. The logic is operational: does the image still hold? Does it still press? If it does, it stays. If not, it is returned to, worried again, made heavier. This is not obsession in the psychological sense. It is technical: repeated testing of structural capacity.

The posthumous exhibition makes explicit what was implicit. Lynch’s paintings were always structured by posthumous logic, the view from the other side of consciousness, where things appear charged with the intensity of having been lost or being about to disappear. The morgue visit (1966) wasn’t origin story. It was confirmation of method. The garden painting that same year: green plants at the center of black field, perceived as moving, producing sound. What Lynch discovered wasn’t animation. It was that painting operates through a temporal break, arrested motion that still contains pressure, color that returns intensified through proximity to void.

Cinema protected this structure by absorbing attention. The films were analyzed exhaustively. The paintings remained private, functioning as infrastructure for everything else. Death removes that protection. Cinema’s shadow lifts. What persists operates independently now: paint, ash, resin, photographic emulsion. Materials that no longer require Lynch to mediate or explain them. The painter who was always there, no longer competing for visibility against the filmmaker.

The work that remains documents sites where function has ceased but pressure continues. Factory photographs and recent paintings become equivalent: both show exhausted systems still standing, still containing what resists dispersal. This is what the posthumous view reveals, not hidden meaning but structural fact. Lynch’s paintings were always made from the position of looking back at life from the other side. The red ants underneath. The consciousness that was just gone. The gap through which color returns intensified.

What Lynch discovered that night? Painting could contain arrested motion, the pressure of what cannot move yet refuses stillness.

Liza Kin
Berlin, Februar 7, 2026

David Lynch
Pace Gallery Berlin, Die Tankstelle
January 29–March 29, 2026

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The Body for the Body of Writing 

Christoph Büchel’s Monte di Pietà

In 1542, Titian painted a portrait of a woman he had never seen: Caterina Cornaro. She had died thirty-two years earlier. The artist depicted her as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, with the martyr’s wheel, in Turkish silk, with a face he invented or copied from other portraits. The posthumous portrait is a strange genre. It produces a person retroactively. Titian was creating a document: the Venetian version of history, in which the Queen of Cyprus voluntarily abdicated and returned to the mother republic. This version was a lie. In February 1489, Caterina’s brother arrived in Famagusta with an ultimatum from the Senate: abdicate or be declared a rebel. The chronicler recorded: «Her eyes did not cease shedding tears.» She signed.

In the spring of 2024, Christoph Büchel constructed a bankrupt pawnshop across three floors of Ca’ Corner della Regina, a building that had actually functioned as a pawnshop from 1834 to 1969. Visitors entered through a facade bearing the inscription «LIQUIDAZIONE TOTALE — FUORI TUTTO — VENDESI.» In the rooms: objects spanning four millennia. Cuneiform tablets, Venetian beads made for African markets, slave traders’ chains, credit documents, pawn tickets. The portrait of Caterina, brought from the Uffizi, hung in the building where she was born.

Caterina’s body functioned as a site for the production of legal facts. At fourteen: a marriage contract by proxy with the King of Cyprus; the document recorded a transaction in which the Cornaro family’s trading rights and sugar plantations were exchanged for a dynastic connection. At thirty-five: an act of abdication; the document created the transfer of a kingdom to Venice. After death: the posthumous portrait; the document legitimized an annexation that was by then half a century old. Each time, the body served as a surface upon which inscription produced a new reality. Silvia Federici demonstrated that the primitive accumulation of capital operated through two parallel processes: control over women’s bodies in Europe and the enslavement of bodies in the colonies. The witch hunts and the transatlantic slave trade are not separate histories but two sides of a single mechanism. Büchel’s exhibition materializes this connection: Caterina’s portrait hangs a few meters from a credit document from 1852 in the American South, in which enslaved people are pledged as collateral for a loan. Four centuries separate them. The logic is the same: the document precedes the body it purports to describe.

Near the portraits: carved wooden busk stays, dated 1905–1912. The exhibition label states: gifts from grooms to brides, «debito d’amore,» a debt of love. An intimate object worn by the bride on her body, beneath her clothing. But the busk stay is not a gift in the modern sense; it is a document of betrothal, recording an obligation between families. Love here is a form of credit. Marriage is repayment. Maurizio Lazzarato wrote of the female body as the «absolute commodity»: not simply an object of exchange but the site where the very possibility of exchange is produced. Caterina’s body produced dynastic legitimacy. The bodies of brides produced family alliances: first the inscription (contract, busk stay, portrait), then the reality that this inscription supposedly reflects. The female body was the testing ground. Here the logic of «to inscribe is to create» was perfected before it spread to racialized bodies, to territories, to genetic resources.

Venice was the place where technologies of inscription were systematized and made exportable. In 1494, Luca Pacioli published here the Summa de Arithmetica, the treatise that codified double-entry bookkeeping for dissemination via the printing press. Pages from this edition are on display. Pacioli codified and systematized existing practices, making them widely teachable and reproducible across Europe. Debit and credit, assets and liabilities: a language in which anything can become a line in a ledger. Including the body. Édouard Glissant called this the violence of transparency: the coercion into total legibility, the denial of the right to opacity. Double-entry bookkeeping demands that everything be translated into number. The enslaved person entered into the ledger is stripped of what Glissant considered a fundamental right: the right to be misunderstood, to be irreducible to a unit of account.

Monte di Pietà: the Catholic pawnshops that arose in fifteenth-century Italy as an alternative to Jewish moneylending. Ca’ Corner della Regina was a pawnshop for 135 years, from 1834 to 1969. The pawn ticket is a performative document; it does not describe the pledge relationship, it creates it. The object becomes collateral at the moment of inscription; without the ticket, there is no pledge. The exhibition accumulates unredeemed tickets, papers that promised a return that never occurred. The bankrupt pawnshop presents a paradox: an institution founded on the promise of redemption itself ceases to exist. Documents that were supposed to guarantee return now record its impossibility.

In one vitrine: three documents side by side. Yves Klein’s Carnet de reçus pour les zones de sensibilité picturale immatérielle, 1962: a receipt book for the sale of immaterial zones. Klein sold emptiness for gold; the buyer received a receipt, and if they wished to «fully possess» the zone, they had to burn it while Klein threw half the gold into the Seine. Beside it: a receipt of slave emancipation from Suriname, 1868. Beside that: a credit document from the American South, 1852, in which enslaved people are listed as collateral for a loan.

Three receipts. Three acts in which the document produces what it purports to describe. The 1852 document creates people as collateral: before signing, they were property; after, they were loan security that could be seized upon default. The paper transforms the legal status of the body. Klein’s receipt creates ownership of an immaterial zone, that is, of nothing; the zone did not exist before the receipt, the document generates the object that can now be owned. The emancipation receipt creates freedom, but freedom here is not a condition but a legal fact produced by inscription. Saidiya Hartman demonstrated that emancipation did not abolish violence; it reconfigured it. The one who grants freedom thereby confirms that they had the right not to grant it. The receipt liberates and subjugates in a single gesture. Klein is a canonical conceptualist; his receipts are in museums of contemporary art, dissertations have been written about them. The receipt from Suriname is a historical artifact. But the performative logic is identical. Conceptual art did not invent the document that produces reality. It inherited it from systems of property, including property in persons.

On display: a photograph of Marta Minujín’s performance Payment of the Argentine Foreign Debt to Andy Warhol with Corn, the Latin American Gold, 1985. Minujín «pays» Argentina’s foreign debt to Warhol in corn. Beside it: Warhol’s own Time Capsule 1, 1955–1971, a cardboard box filled with letters, newspaper clippings, refuse. An archive of accumulation. Minujín gives; Warhol collects. She produces a performance of payment; he produces an archive of storage. Corn, a plant stolen from the Americas by Europeans, is now «returned» as payment for a debt that Latin America supposedly owes. The transaction is absurd, and precisely for that reason it exposes the logic. Denise Ferreira da Silva has shown that colonial debt is unpayable not because it is too large but because the system of accounting itself is colonial. It is impossible to pay a debt in a currency created by the system that produces that debt. Minujín pays in corn; she exits the system of accounting. But exit is impossible: the performance is documented, the photograph circulates, the gesture becomes «art» in an «exhibition.»

In 1888, the Congo Free State, the private property of Leopold II, received a loan of 150 million francs. Between 1885 and 1908, by various estimates, between one and fifteen million people died while resources were extracted to service this debt. The exhibition includes documentation of the loan. The Congo’s debt remains unpaid to this day; the country continues to service obligations whose structure was established in the nineteenth century. Beside it: Theaster Gates’s Stony Island Arts Bank Bond, 2013, a bond addressing the ongoing extraction from Black communities in Chicago through redlining, disinvestment, predatory lending. The same bodies that were collateral in 1852 remain sites of value extraction in 2013. The 1852 document and Gates’s bond are two ends of one line; Büchel juxtaposes them without comment.

In a vitrine on the piano nobile: an open suitcase containing laboratory-grown diamonds. Diamond Maker, 2020, an ongoing project that will be completed by the artist’s death. The process: Büchel incinerates all his works, including childhood drawings, through pyrolysis. From the ash, the Swiss company ALGORDANZA, which specializes in memorial diamonds, extracts carbon. Büchel also contributes his own feces as an additional source. The certificate specifies: the carbon and graphite for the HPHT diamonds derive from Christoph Büchel’s excrement. Through a process of high pressure and high temperature, this material becomes diamonds, chemically indistinguishable from mined ones.

Beside it: six cans of Piero Manzoni’s Merde d’artiste, 1961. Manzoni canned his feces and sold them at the price of gold per gram, forcing the art market to accept excrement as value. Büchel completes the transformation: shit literally becomes diamonds. But something else matters more. Diamond Maker is a document deferred until death. The ALGORDANZA certificate records an obligation that will be fulfilled when the artist dies. Büchel has pledged his own death as the final act of value production. He owes the system his body, and the document certifies this.

Büchel created a hyperrealistic fake auction catalogue, styled after the Bollettino delle Aste Giudiziarie, the official bulletin of judicial auctions from the Venice Tribunal. The document announces Ca’ Corner della Regina for sale: the building and all exhibition objects as numbered lots, bidding on November 25, 2024, the day after the exhibition closes. Ethiopian wheat seeds confiscated during the colonial period and stored in jars labeled «Italo» become «Lot 096.» The Plutei of Trajan: «Lot 002.» The suitcase of diamonds: «Lot 021.» The catalogue performs what all the documents in the exhibition perform: it fragments the connected into numbered units. Walter Benjamin wrote that the religion of debt means «no longer the reformation of being but its fragmentation.» The auction catalogue executes fragmentation literally.

Among the objects on display: items from the collection of Giovanni Pietro Campana (majolica, glass, antique seals) arrived from the Louvre. Campana was director of the Roman Monte di Pietà from 1839 to 1857; he financed his collection with the institution’s funds, was convicted of embezzlement, and the collection was confiscated and sold to France. These objects have already passed through an actual foreclosure: confiscation, auction, museification. Now they are included in Büchel’s fictive foreclosure, assigned new lot numbers in the fake catalogue. The 2024 document catalogues objects that were produced as «assets» by the 1861 document. The recursion is infinite; foreclosure does not end, it reproduces.

The exhibition closed a year ago. Caterina’s portrait returned to the Uffizi, a document that completed its work thirty-two years after the death of the one it created. The pawn tickets remain unredeemed; the 1852 document continues to list people as collateral; the emancipation receipt continues to produce a freedom that does not abolish violence. All of these are closed documents: they have done their work, their time has passed.

The Diamond Maker certificate remains open. It awaits Büchel’s death in order to close. The diamonds in the suitcase already exist, but the document that certifies them has not yet fulfilled its function to the end. Between the portrait that produced a dead woman and the certificate that awaits a death: five hundred years. The entire exhibition is situated in this interval: documents that have already created their reality, and one document that is not yet closed.

The German word Schuld means both «debt» and «guilt.» But as long as the document remains open, something opaque persists within it: time that has not yet become inscription. The time that remains is the time that cannot be owed.

Liza Kin
Berlin, December 31, 2025

Christoph Büchel exhibition: Monte di Pietà Fondazione Prada
Ca’ Corner della Regina Venice 
April 20 – November 24, 2024

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The Production of Emptiness

On Harun Farocki, Ho Tzu Nyen, and the Migratory Image

In 1947, as Europe emerged from the ruins of war and Hiroshima’s shadow stretched across the globe, the French architect Claude Parent spoke of a necessity that went beyond physical reconstruction. «We had to start from zero,» he recalled decades later, «create a new metaphysics, a new architecture. We all were convinced that atomic energy would allow us to start with the void.» Parent’s formulation was about clearing space: emptying memory of its comforting narratives in order to build forms of thinking adequate to catastrophe.

More than seventy years later, the imperative to «create the void» has migrated from the ruins of architecture to the digital screens of the twenty-first century. Yet, the ethical problem remains unchanged: How does one show violence without aestheticizing it? How does one engage viewers affectively while maintaining the distance necessary for critical thought? These questions, which have animated political filmmaking since the 1960s, now face a new institutional reality. It has become a displaced image—evicted from the linear flow of cinema and television, it now inhabits the exhibition space, demanding a different kind of attention.

It is within this condition of exile that the convergence between the German filmmaker Harun Farocki (1944–2014) and the Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen (b. 1976) becomes most legible. In a 2022 conversation, Ho explicitly acknowledged Farocki’s significance for his practice, particularly «his approach to montage and the relationship between images.» Yet this affinity runs deeper than stylistic influence. Despite the technological gulf between Farocki’s analog editing tables and Ho’s virtual reality environments, both artists have developed a shared methodology of resistance. Their works construct a specific form of knowledge production based on negative dialectics. By migrating into the gallery, they transform the passive act of viewing into a form of spatialized thinking, constructing the «void» not as a metaphor, but as a structural necessity for the survival of the critical image.

To understand the affinity between Farocki and Ho, one must look past the surface differences of their media and observe the shared operational logic of their practice. Both artists reject the immersive documentary that promises transparent access to «what really happened,» just as they reject the purely analytical essay that maintains absolute distance. Instead, they employ a constellation of techniques designed to expose the gap, or the non-identical, between the image and its meaning.

Central to this shared morphology is the principle of distance montage. Inherited from the Soviet-Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian, this technique defies the logic of continuity editing. Rather than connecting adjacent shots to create a seamless flow, Farocki and Ho connect images separated by vast temporal or spatial distances. In Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988), aerial photographs of Auschwitz are juxtaposed with Renaissance perspective drawings and 1980s robot vision. The meaning resides not in the images themselves, but in the tension produced by their collision—a spark that illuminates the shared logic of «enlightenment» and «reconnaissance» governing both the painter and the bomber.

Ho Tzu Nyen translates this principle into the vertical architecture of Virtual Reality. In his installation Voice of Void (2021), the tea room of the Kyoto School philosophers, the sky of the Kamikaze pilots, and the prison of the dissenters are spatially separated layers. They never appear simultaneously. The viewer must perform the labor of connecting these distant spaces, discovering the structural pattern that links high theory to brutal practice.

This spatial separation is reinforced by a rigorous exposure of construction. Farocki, famously, always showed his hand—literally and metaphorically. In his seminal installation Interface (1995), he placed two monitors side-by-side: one showing his films, the other showing his own hands at the editing table. By foregrounding the manual labor of selection and assembly, he transformed the gallery into an operating theater of the image, insisting that meaning is made, not found.

Ho Tzu Nyen adopts a similar ethic of transparency, yet perhaps the most arresting encounter with the void arises from what appears to be an accident. Inside the VR environment, a «colored sphere»—likely a default artifact of the software—floats visibly in the darkness. To the observer, this object reads less as a technical leftover and more as the system’s raw, unconscious state. Here, the «Absolute Nothingness» of the Kyoto School philosophers is stripped of its mysticism, appearing simply as a geometric primitive—the default setting for «nothing.» This rupture extends to the physical act of transition. As the viewer stands up or lies down, moving between the Tea Room and the Sky, they pass through a glitchy, undefined tunnel of geometry. In this vertigo, the void ceases to be a metaphor. It becomes a visceral passage—a haptic sensation of falling into the blind spots of history.

A particularly striking manifestation of transparency appeared in the 2025 exhibition at neugerriemschneider in Berlin. In a departure from previous presentations, the Berlin installation revealed its technical infrastructure. For the first time, in the VR room, the hardware—computers and control systems powering the experience—was displayed openly, breaking with the convention of the ‘black box’ typical of VR installations. This curatorial decision, specific to the neugerriemschneider presentation, resonates with Farocki’s transparent editing table. By placing the hardware in the room, the installation configuration transforms the ‘black box’ of VR into a ‘glass table.’ The viewer sees not just the hallucination, but the machine generating it.

The operational power of this method becomes most visible in Voice of Void, a work that explicitly addresses the problem of intellectual complicity in historical violence. The installation centers on the roundtable discussions of the Kyoto School philosophers during WWII—Masaaki Kosaka, Keiji Nishitani, Iwao Koyama, and Shigetaka Suzuki—who utilized the concept of «Absolute Nothingness» to justify Japanese imperialism.

The work announces its digital origin from the outset through stylized CG representations of the four philosophers—uncanny, smoothed-out shells that appear throughout the installation. Upon entering the main gallery space, the viewer confronts a multi-screen configuration that spatializes the narrative before the headset is even worn. The tea room discussion occupies the central projection, flanked by lateral screens showing the ‘Sky’ populated by hovering mecha robots, while the ‘Prison’ space is implied in the architecture. This installation setup lays out the work’s topography horizontally, prefiguring the vertical experience that follows. When the viewer transitions into the VR room, this external view is internalized: the screens vanish, and the body itself becomes the interface connecting these layers.

But the core of the work is the VR experience, which functions as a rigorous cybernetic loop. Seated on a tatami mat with a notepad before them, the viewer is not merely a spectator but a variable in a permutational logic. The experience is strictly determined by body position. If the viewer sits upright and performs the gesture of writing, they occupy the position of Masuzo Ohya, the stenographer. Through the headphones, they hear the philosophers discussing «The Standpoint of World History and Japan» in November 1941. To write is to enable this discourse, to transform spoken words into the permanent text of history.

If the viewer ceases the writing gesture while remaining seated, the audio shifts violently in time. The year becomes 1971, and the voice becomes that of the aged Ohya reciting poems from his collection Asian Sands. These tanka poems confess his guilt for witnessing atrocities in China and remaining silent. The «void» here opens up within the viewer’s own body: the gap between the act of recording (1941) and the act of confessing (1971) is held in the same physical space.

To access the consequences of the philosophy, the viewer must physically stand up. This gesture transports them through the ceiling into the sky, into the cockpit of a Kamikaze pilot listening to Hajime Tanabe’s lecture on the «necessity of death.» The connection between the abstract theory of the tea room and the suicidal violence of the sky is felt as a vertiginous ascent. By lying down, the viewer sinks through the floor into a prison cell, encountering the texts of left-wing philosophers. Here, the system demands precise bodily orientation: leaning right activates the voice of Kiyoshi Miki, while leaning left activates Jun Tosaka. A fifth position exists: complete stillness while seated transports the viewer to a «bonus» zazen meditation room where Kitaro Nishida’s voice recites The Problem of Japanese Culture.

This structure enacts the central tragedy of the subject: the illusion of freedom within a predetermined structure. The viewer is «free» to move, but every movement triggers a pre-written outcome. The work spatializes the negative dialectic; the tea room exists only by suspending itself between the violence above and the repression below.

If Ho spatializes this dialectic in VR, Harun Farocki performed a similar operation decades earlier through the medium of the essay film. Images of the World and the Inscription of War is structured not by narrative causality but by the logic of the migratory image, weaving together the microchip factory, the history of measurement, and the aerial reconnaissance of Auschwitz.

Farocki’s film functions as a machine for reading what is invisible. He reveals that the American military analysts who studied the photographs of Auschwitz failed to see the gas chambers—not because the image was unclear, but because their operational framework was calibrated to identify industrial targets. The camera saw everything; the institution saw only what it looked for. The voice-over explains that later, CIA analysts—knowing what to look for—easily identified the crematoria. The evidence was always there, sleeping in the archive, waiting for a gaze capable of recognizing it.

Farocki extends this logic of «blindness through visibility» across disparate historical moments. The film opens in a microchip factory in California, where a female worker sits passively while a robot circles her head, measuring her facial features to create an «ideal template.» The voice-over observes the reduction of the human face—the site of identity—to numerical data. This scene is not violent, yet it produces a profound unease. It reveals the genealogy of the operational gaze: the same logic that turns a landscape into a bombing target turns a worker into an ergonomic variable.

Farocki’s critique extends to the logic of colonial violence, echoing his analysis of Marc Garanger’s ID photographs of Algerian women (1960). Though distinct from the aerial views of Auschwitz, these images share the same operational genealogy. Forced to unveil for the colonial camera, the women stare back with expressions ranging from defiance to humiliation. By juxtaposing the logic of the camp, the factory worker, and the colonial subject, Farocki employs negative dialectics to reveal the remainder: the persistence of an instrumental reason that transforms the human subject into an object of calculation. Farocki practices a form of «descriptive criticism,» creating a «void of explanation» by separating the image track from the voice-over. The viewer is forced to inhabit this gap, performing the inductive labor necessary to construct the meaning that the analysts missed.

The juxtaposition of Images of the World and Voice of Void reveals a thirty-three-year span during which the technologies available for artistic production transformed fundamentally. Farocki worked with film, video, and found footage—materials that must be physically handled. Ho Tzu Nyen works with CG animation, algorithmic processes, and real-time interactivity—materials that exist as code. Yet, understanding what persists across this transition is crucial for grasping the portability of the method.

The most obvious transformation concerns materiality. Farocki’s editing table was a site of physical labor; the cut was a physical act. Ho’s digital processes eliminate this substrate. As Ho explained in a recent conversation, working with AI and algorithmic generation involves embracing the glitches, artifacts, and overly literal interpretations that these systems produce—as a starting point for transformation. The artist no longer cuts and splices but codes parameters, adjusting the rules of a generative system.

This shift enables new forms of interaction, but also new forms of control. Farocki’s installations allowed viewers to compare simultaneous screens, but the temporal sequence was fixed. Voice of Void introduces parametric interactivity: the viewer’s body functions as an input device. And this is crucial—Ho’s interactivity is not the open-ended «user-generated content» promised by Silicon Valley. It is constrained interactivity. There are exactly five configurations, predetermined and fixed. The system responds, but only within the limits of its programming.

The inherent material constraints of the medium converge with the work’s conceptual logic. Whether dictated by the technical limits of production or deliberate choice, this restriction is meaningful. Instead of sustaining the illusion of infinite freedom often marketed by VR, the work reveals the rigid boundaries of the system. Farocki anticipated this theoretically, noting that installations allow montage to become «spatial.» Ho extends this logic: not only can the viewer look again, but the system can respond differently based on how they position themselves. The principle—creating structures that generate multiplicity rather than fixing singular meaning—remains constant; digital technology simply realizes it more fully. However, the digital medium introduces the risk of false immediacy. Commercial VR pursues «realism» to eliminate the awareness of mediation. Ho navigates this by consistently undermining immersion. The hollow bodies, the visible polygons, the exposed servers in the Berlin exhibition—these are strategies for maintaining critical distance within immersive experience.

As these works migrate into the museum, their fundamental logic shifts. The linear argument typical of cinema dissolves into a landscape that the viewer must physically navigate. This spatial friction revitalizes the practice of critical dissonance, moving it from abstract theory to concrete experience. Adorno saw dialectics less as a system for sorting concepts and more as a practice of resistance—a persistent focus on the ‘non-identical,’ those stubborn remnants of reality that refuse to be categorized or smoothed away.

This migration transforms the ontology of the work. In the museum, the viewer is mobile, allowing for what Kodwo Eshun calls Argumentation in Motion. The argument of the work is no longer a linear thesis to be received, but a spatial environment to be navigated. It is here that the relevance of Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics becomes acute. Adorno argued that dialectics should not be a «method» or a «system»—forms which lead to intellectual automation—but a concrete practice. Unlike the synthesis of the Hegelian dialectic, negative dialectics insists on the non-identical, the remainder that cannot be resolved. «What is, is always more than what is,» Adorno wrote. There is always a surplus, a remainder that escapes the concept.

Farocki and Ho operate as practitioners of this negative dialectic. Their use of distance montage, layering, and permutational logic are techniques for producing this remainder. When Farocki compares the still life painting to the advertisement, he asks not how they are similar, but what the advertisement has stripped away. When Ho forces the viewer to lie down and lean into the floor to hear the prisoner, he ensures that this position cannot be synthesized with the position of the philosopher. The body of the viewer becomes the site where the non-identical is felt. The museum, functioning as a shelter for the migratory image, allows this friction to occur in a way that cinema never could.

The convergence between Farocki and Ho should be read as parallel strategies emerging from different contexts of historical trauma. Where Farocki excavates the Western Enlightenment’s complicity with genocide, Ho reveals how Asian philosophy’s encounter with Western modernity produced its own forms of violence.

In a contemporary landscape defined by the seamless flow of algorithmic content and the false immediacy of AI-generated images, the creation of this void is an act of resistance. The urgency of this practice extends beyond technological critique. We inhabit a moment when historical memory itself has become migratory—fragmented across incompatible platforms, rendered homeless by the collapse of shared institutional frameworks for remembering. The void that Farocki and Ho create operates as a counter-structure to this condition, maintaining the irreducibility of historical experience against its algorithmic reduction.

The convergence of Farocki and Ho reveals how the critical image persists across technological ruptures through operational strategies that transform viewing into a form of embodied critique. This practice redefines art as a «supra-aesthetic» form of knowledge production. It creates a knowledge that is situational, negative, and deeply aware of its own construction. Farocki and Ho do not solve the puzzle of traumatic history; they construct frameworks that allow us to inhabit its contradictions. They teach us that the «essay» is a method for navigating the cracks in the system. They offer a space where, finally, the migratory image can speak.

Liza Kin
Berlin, November 23, 2025

Ho Tzu Nyen exhibition: 2 stories: voids & times at neugerriemschneider
Christinenstraße 18–19, Haus 9
10119 Berlin, Mitte
September 12, 2025 – March 21, 2026

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The (Post)Colonial Alphabet

Anna Kin’s «ღ» and the Semiotics of Imperial Continuity

In January 2025, Kazakhstan planned to implement a transition to the Latin alphabet—the fourth alphabet change in a hundred years. The Arabic script was first introduced to the territory of Kazakhstan in the eleventh century following the spread of Islam and was traditionally used to write Kazakh until the introduction of a Latin alphabet in 1929. It’s crucial to note that this adoption of Arabic script did not mark the beginning of writing among Turkic peoples—the Old Turkic script (also known as Orkhon-Yenisei script) was already in use by the 8th century, with inscriptions discovered in Mongolia’s Orkhon Valley. This ancient runic script predates many writing systems of sedentary peoples, directly challenging colonial narratives about nomadic illiteracy.

The Arabic script that came to dominate the region for nearly a thousand years thus represented not an introduction of writing to «preliterate» nomads, but rather one layer in a complex palimpsest of scripts—from ancient Turkic runes to Sogdian-derived systems to Arabic, and later to Latin (1929) and Cyrillic (1940). Since 2017, the country has once again been moving toward Latin, though deadlines are constantly postponed, and society remains divided between those who see this as a path to modernization and those who fear losing connection with their written heritage.

Each alphabet reform erases not only the recent past but also deeper historical layers—a pattern that reveals how these transitions function as tools of colonial control. The Soviet myth that nomadic peoples lacked sophisticated literary traditions before «modernization» obscures the rich textual heritage of the Turkic world, from the Orkhon inscriptions to the complex manuscript traditions that flourished across the steppes.

With the transition to a new alphabet, the process of knowledge transmission and creation of new knowledge risks becoming more complicated. On the other hand, depending on language, authors, time period, and governing regime, history can sound different. This raises questions: How often has history been reinterpreted before the arrival of «New Kazakhstan»? Does this mean that information in Latin script, written by new academics, will approach truth? And, more importantly, will this transition help in better understanding oneself and others on a humanitarian level?

It is precisely at this moment of historical rupture that the project “ღ” by young Kazakhstani artist Anna Kin emerges. The title is a letter from the Kartvelian alphabet, the only symbol that has remained unchanged through all alphabet reforms of the Georgian language. A metaphor for stability amid transformations. A constant whose immutability makes visible the radical change of the entire semiotic landscape around it.

The project constitutes a total installation—a space filled with the sounds of thirteen alphabets. Macedonian, Lak, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Nogai, Serbian, Albanian, Berber, Ukrainian, Farsi, Lezgin, Mari, Balkar. All languages sound simultaneously, creating a polyphony of voices. The viewer can listen to the general facade of sounds or choose individual stories through headphones: interviews with descendants of the deported, stories about lost languages, memories of forced relocations of the 1930s-40s. Letters suspended in space tremble from air movement created by visitors: language exists only in the circulation of breath between speech apparatuses.

But why these specific languages? And why now, at the moment of new Latinization? The answer lies in the very nature of alphabet reforms, which are never merely technical modernization. The Soviet project of the 1920s-30s for Latinization of Turkic languages was presented as liberation from “Arab feudalism” and a path to international proletarian unity. The real goal was different—to sever ties with the Islamic world, Ottoman heritage, to create “new people” without memory of the pre-Soviet past.

The Cyrillization of the 1940s followed the same logic but with the opposite sign. Latin suddenly became “bourgeois,” Cyrillic—a sign of joining “great Russian culture.” Within a decade, the possibility of reading the recent past was crossed out twice. This is not a side effect but the central goal: to create a generation without roots, completely dependent on the state for interpretation of history.

Contemporary Latinization in Kazakhstan speaks of decolonization, distancing from Soviet heritage, integration into the global world, but simultaneously severs the connection between generations. Once linguistic continuity is broken, the process of knowledge transmission becomes complicated, reading original texts becomes difficult.

But alphabet reforms are only part of the story. Parallel to them came mass deportations of “unreliable” peoples to Kazakhstan and Central Asia. 1937—172 thousand Koreans from the Far East. 1941—444 thousand Volga Germans. 1943-44—Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians. By 1945, more than 1.2 million deported people found themselves in Kazakhstan—a quarter of the republic’s population.

Each deportation was not only physical displacement but also linguistic catastrophe. Torn from their native places, scattered across the steppes, deprived of schools in their native language, the deported lost their languages within two to three generations. In the Kazakhstani steppes, their languages became sounds without referent, signs without signified. Koreans who arrived in 1937 today mostly do not speak Korean. Volga Germans, who had an autonomous republic with German schools and universities, transformed into a Russian-speaking diaspora.

Here it is important to note the complexity of the Kazakhs’ own position. They received the deported while being themselves victims of genocide. In 1930-33, 1.5-2 million Kazakhs died from hunger, 38-42% of the population. This creates a unique constellation: a people who survived their own catastrophe become involuntary witnesses and participants in the catastrophes of other peoples. Not by their own will, not as aggressors, but as fellow victims of empire, forced to share scarce resources with new exiles.

Anna Kin, an artist who grew up in Almaty, works precisely with this complex position. She creates a space where different voices sound simultaneously. The thirteen languages in the installation are a polyphony of equal voices, a model of solidarity based not on ethnic proximity but on shared experience of imperial violence.

Initially, Kin approached the project as an archivist. In an interview with Ani Menua, she admits: “I had quite a fatalistic attitude—some of these languages are disappearing, losing popularity, their sound needs to be preserved.” The artist set out to create an audio archive, to fix pronunciation so descendants could use it for knowledge transmission. But during fieldwork, an important shift occurred. Meeting with descendants of the deported in Kazakhstan and representatives of diasporas in Europe, Anna discovered that simple fixation was insufficient. People told stories not simply about languages but about destroyed families, lost homes, the impossibility of return. Language turned out to be a metonymy for a deeper loss—entire worlds, ways of life, connections to land and history. A more important discovery was finding new initiatives for preserving languages and cultures.

Here the project transformed from documentary to affective. Instead of creating an “objective” archive, Kin began working with emotional resonance. The simultaneous sounding of all alphabets creates not an informational but a sensory space in which individual voices are lost and found, just as the deported were lost and found each other in the Kazakhstani steppes.

Particularly interesting is the choice of languages extending beyond Soviet deportations. Serbian, Albanian, Berber—these are references to other imperial contexts. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, French colonization of North Africa, contemporary conflicts around language rights. Many of the chosen languages continue to be under pressure: Lezgin and Lak are marginalized in contemporary Russia, Berber fights for recognition in North Africa, Nogai is under threat of extinction, activists of Mari language revival face repression. The project does not archive dead languages—it witnesses ongoing violence.

Kin creates a transnational framework, showing that linguistic violence is not a unique Soviet practice but a universal pattern of imperial control. This is an important move against narrow nationalism. All empires use similar technologies of control.

The project’s trajectory from Almaty to Berlin is also significant for understanding its semantic layers. The first showing took place within ARTBAT FEST 11, realized as a result of the educational program Egin by curators: Vladislav Sludsky, journalist and researcher Dmitry Mazorenko, history master Zhanar Bekmurzina, and researcher and curator Artem Sleta. Seminars reading Spivak and Chakrabarty, attempting to create critical discourse under conditions of strengthening control, took place under the umbrella of Eurasian Cultural Alliance. The initiative’s creators understand it as part of grassroots intellectual infrastructure—an attempt to preserve space for critical thought.

The Berlin presentation in September 2025 took place at Hotel Continental, which positions itself as an “Art Space in Exile.” Under the curatorship of Zuleykha Ibad, an Azerbaijani curator working with themes of transnational exchanges and postcolonial critique, and Kazakhstani producer Lev Tarikov, the project acquired a new dimension. Here it reads not as a local statement about the Kazakhstani situation but as part of a global conversation about linguistic violence—from Soviet deportations to contemporary migration crises.

In the Berlin version, a new element appeared—a microphone inviting visitors to pronounce their own alphabet. This gesture radically changes the project’s dynamic: from a space of listening, it becomes a space of utterance. If in Almaty the installation documented lost voices, in Berlin—a city of diasporas and exiles—it becomes a platform for new ones.

This participatory element can also be read as democratization of the archive—the right to voice is granted not only to “historical victims” but to anyone who feels the necessity to declare their language. In the context of European debates about integration, assimilation, and multiculturalism, this is a political gesture: an assertion of the right to linguistic diversity in opposition to demands for linguistic unification.

The very concept of exile becomes key here. What does it mean to be in exile in an era when the very idea of home becomes problematic? For post-Soviet artists, departure often exists in a gray zone between political pressure and economic necessity, being neither fully forced nor fully voluntary.

Kin remains in Almaty, speaking at the opening via video link. This gesture can be read as a refusal of center-periphery logic, according to which real art is produced in metropolises. Remaining in Kazakhstan, under conditions of “political winter,” Kin asserts the possibility of critical utterance from the very point of trauma, without the need to distance oneself from it geographically.

The context of the project’s creation is critically important for its understanding. 2023-25 in Kazakhstan is a paradoxical moment of cultural boom amid strengthening control. A private museum and contemporary art center open, international exhibitions take place, the art scene develops. Simultaneously, the list of political prisoners grows, journalists receive sentences for “spreading false information.” Arman Nurmakov in the essay “The Myth of Transit” describes this as a characteristic feature of Central Asian regimes—“an amazing ability to maintain the status quo for a very long time.” A “gray zone” where critical art is possible, but within certain frameworks.

Project “ღ” navigates these limitations with particular precision. It is historical enough not to be perceived as direct political critique. Artistic enough not to read as activist statement. But also resonant enough with the present that an attentive viewer will see parallels between past and present.

A comparison with the collective Slavs and Tatars, also working with post-Soviet and Islamic space, is appropriate here. But where Slavs and Tatars use irony and pop aesthetics from the safe diaspora of Berlin and New York, Kin chooses seriousness and immersion, working with her own context from within. This position endows her with moral authority: she is not a tourist in someone else’s trauma, but also takes risks, requiring more subtle navigation of local political limitations.

The project’s strength lies in its refusal of “black-and-white” positions. Kin does not romanticize the past or demonize the present. Deported peoples suffered under the Soviet regime, but some of them participated in colonization of Kazakh lands in the 19th century. Russian language was an instrument of imperial domination, but for many became native and the only means of interethnic communication. The project reflects all these contradictions simultaneously, without attempting to resolve them.

Ultimately, project “ღ” is a practice against erasure. In a country where each change of power promises a new beginning from a clean slate, where inconvenient history is silenced or rewritten, where collective amnesia becomes a condition of survival, Kin insists on the necessity of remembering. But this is not nostalgic memory calling for return to an idealized past. Nor victimized memory frozen in victim position. This is critical memory, the ability to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, to recognize history’s complexity, to learn from mistakes without repeating them.

Frantz Fanon wrote: “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” Kin’s project cannot change political reality directly, but it can preserve and transmit what power tries to erase: memory of violence, experience of loss, hope for justice. In the installation space, thirteen languages continue to sound simultaneously, reminding that polyphony is possible, that the future need not repeat the past.

The Georgian letter ღ, which gave the project its name, survived all reforms of the Georgian alphabet—a small symbol of resilience amid transformations. Perhaps this detail contains the project’s main message: not in loud manifestos of resistance but in quiet persistence of preservation. In remembering names, sounds, stories. In creating spaces where different voices can sound simultaneously without drowning each other out. Kin’s project is an act of faith that memory is stronger than forgetting, that somewhere between lost alphabets and new reforms exists a space for genuine dialogue. A space where history does not begin with the latest decree but continues through all ruptures and transformations, preserving the connection of times.

Liza Kin
Berlin, November 7, 2025

Anna Kin’s Project «ღ» at Art Space in Exile
Elsenstraße 87
12435 Berlin, Kreuzberg
September 9–16, 2025

This article was originally written for vlast.kz

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Matrix-Ost Exhibition Challenges the Western European Integration Narrative for Eastern European Art

All of contemporary culture, therefore, constitutes a kind of psychiatric institution in no way inferior to an actual house of the mentally ill…” — Kazimir Malevich.

The road to the “Matrix-Ost” exhibition leads to a part of Berlin where the city loses confidence in its own urban identity. Eastern Lichtenberg dissolves into fragments: remnants of industrial zones, silent brick buildings from the late nineteenth century echoing imperial ambitions and immediately beyond them, parks, ponds, and dense trees.

The site itself is a historical palimpsest: founded in 1889 as a psychiatric clinic, this territory survived the Weimar Republic, the Nazi «T4» euthanasia program, the GDR, and the post-socialist transition. It is precisely here that Malevich’s thesis on culture as a “psychiatric system” ceases to be a metaphor. Any exhibition is constructed upon invisible mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, where the right to visibility is determined by a complex interplay of institutional interests, sponsors, and political expediency. On a territory where this logic of selection reached its most horrific extreme – a state program for the physical elimination of patients deemed “unworthy of life”, this seemingly specialized question of art history acquires an entirely different ethical dimension. It is in this context that the search for the “field of objectlessness” of which Malevich wrote becomes not merely an aesthetic gesture, but an act of resistance against any utilitarian system that decides who or what has the right to exist.

“Matrix-Ost” becomes a space for articulating collective trauma. Crossing the threshold of the exhibition hall, the viewer is immediately immersed in a field of the tactile chronicles of anxiety. A work by Eleonora Hrybniak is a crocheted blanket where each row corresponds to the days of a year lived in Odessa. A blue row marks a day of quiet; a red row, a day spent entirely under the wail of air-raid sirens. Nearby, a video by Nenad Nedeljkov captures the ephemeral nature of human presence in a silent movement. And the viewer, as if responding to this logic of elusive immateriality, begins to glide through the halls, intuitively feeling for the heart of the exhibition.

Inna Artemova, in her work “Utopia 02,” reflects on the ruins of modernist dreams of the ideal city. Maria Arendt’s embroideries become portable memory maps of home, while Ania Ruszkowski’s masks speak of mimicry and self-preservation in a foreign cultural environment. In Darija Radakovic’s piece, an old military blanket becomes a symbolic territory where individual will collides with the collective will as represented by the state. An inscription, warning against surrendering the right to one’s own life and choice to those who act “for your own good,” is a direct challenge to the paternalistic authority that always justifies its actions with “higher aims.”

The exhibition engages with how global conflicts are reflected in the local cultural space, and how artistic statements redefine who tells the region’s history, and from what position. The projects of Patricia Morosan (Remember Europe) and Oskar Lebeck (Viceversa) literally rewrite the map. Morosan documents multiple “centers of Europe,” shattering the idea of a single geopolitical focus. Lebek, through the mirror reflection of border rivers between Germany and Poland, creates an image of the border as a line of communication, not division. In these works, geography becomes a way of speaking about cultural and political relationships, avoiding direct pronouncements but clearly fixing a state of constant revision of zones of influence.

Kazimir Malevich called “practical realism” a disease that demanded of art a utilitarian purpose or service to a political narrative. He saw “objectlessness” as the antidote. “Matrix-Ost” seeks precisely such a field, where art does not build a linear bridge but rather reveals a border zone where document, memory, and abstraction interpenetrate. These works operate on the plane of what decolonial theory calls “aesthesis”, knowledge through sensation, inseparable from the body and from local history. This is an art that refuses to be completely transparent to the external gaze, and it is in this very opacity that a new way of being visible is born.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, the art scenes of Central and Eastern Europe were drawn into a process of accelerated “integration” into Western institutional formats. It was a time that the curator Viktor Misiano described as a wave of “Westomania,” when new cultural structures scrambled to adapt to the global art market, often at the cost of losing their own languages. Today, three decades later, against the backdrop of the current geopolitical fractures in Eastern Europe, it is becoming clear that this movement toward the West did not cancel out the need to look at one another: within the region, and to develop forms that cannot be reduced to the role of “catching up.”

This path inward, toward a meticulous, almost archeological investigation of its own cultural strata, is central to the exhibition. But if decolonial aesthesis offers liberation from subordination to an external aesthetic, within Eastern Europe it sets off another trajectory—a critical gaze upon its own myths. In Anton Laiko’s “Cain + Abel” and the Pomidor Duo’s “30 Years Later,” irony is turned inward. The artists are in dialogue not with the Western canon, but with figures born of their own cultural field—Malevich and Mladen Stilinović. Laiko returns Suprematism to its Ukrainian context, transforming abstraction into a metaphor for the acute interstate rupture that became a reality. Pomidor Duo, reinterpreting Stilinović’s famous statement, transpose the question of visibility into a sharply local register: how does an artist’s voice sound when their state’s actions place them in a situation of ethical and cultural isolation?

These gestures tear apart the habitual East-West axis and create a field where the East turns toward itself. In this logic, “Matrix-Ost” becomes not a showcase of “regional peculiarities,” but a laboratory where cultural codes are redefined by their own bearers. Here, iconography meets algorithms, as in Yuri Tolstoguzov’s project “AIcons,” where the canon of the Orthodox icon is compared to the machine vision of neural networks, showing how visual systems can serve as instruments of both sacred and digital control.

We are in the third generational wave of Eastern European art: after the late-Soviet artists of the sixties and the post-socialist artists of the nineties, today’s artists are undertaking a revision of what remains of earlier utopias. “Matrix-Ost” shows that this is not a single history of a region, but a node of intersecting globalizations that in recent years have entered into direct contradiction with one another. The exhibition becomes an act of cultural self-naming. It does not ask to be recognized, it is already naming itself, assembling a language from fragments, from the under-archived, from that which is only now becoming memory but is no longer fact. This is not an attempt at “integration,” but the documentation of a profound and productive misalignment, in which genuine art is born.

Liza Kin
Berlin, July 28, 2025

Matrix-Ost Exhibition at Kesselhaus Museum Herzberge (Berlin, Lichtenberg)
Dates: August 3 – September 7, 2025

This article was originally written for artfocusnow.com

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Visible Disappearance: Artificial Intelligence, Climate, and the Exhausted Body of Perception

We live in an era where artificial intelligence no longer merely analyzes or predicts; rather, through its pervasive algorithmic mediation of information flows and interactions, it has begun to actively reshape and filter human perception itself. Visual flows, textual responses, and acoustic environments are now increasingly generated, refined, and adjusted by systems underpinned by predictive models. Consequently, we find ourselves existing within the very logic of digital interfaces, where reality is not so much represented as it is filtered, calibrated, and subtly tailored to the user’s presumed needs or desires

This new, pervasive sensitivity, however, did not emerge suddenly. Its fundamental architecture was laid down as early as the late 19th century, when Herman Hollerith famously invented the tabulating machine, a device originally conceived for sorting vast volumes of data. Throughout the 20th century, this concept evolved, notably into IBM punch cards and computational systems built upon a clear logic of exclusion: either data matched predefined criteria, or it was unceremoniously discarded. Today’s artificial intelligence operates with far greater subtlety; it no longer strictly rejects, but rather anticipates, no longer excludes, but skillfully adapts. Yet, at its core, the principle remains constant: perception is processed. This represents a shift from explicit, disciplinary control to a more pervasive, adaptive form of algorithmic governance, subtly guiding attention and shaping understanding.

It is precisely within this context that Olafur Eliasson’s work acquires a particular sharpness. In his new exhibition, slated to open at neugerriemschneider as part of Berlin Gallery Weekend 2025, he offers not just an immersion into space, light, and color, but a profound structural demonstration of perception as a living, embodied, and fundamentally non-algorithmic process. His installations, in this light, can be understood as reimagined computing machines, not built on exclusion, but on oscillation, on flux. If IBM once relied on punch cards, Eliasson now employs polarized filters. If the machine was historically driven by an inflexible code, his work is now centered entirely on the moving, experiencing body of the viewer.

Everything the viewer encounters within these spaces is indeed governed by the precise laws of physics: interference, depolarization, reflection, wave modulation. But this inherent precision does not, crucially, serve explanation; it serves experience. Eliasson does not seek to offer a definitive decoding of the world. Rather, he constructs situations in which perception itself becomes the primary operation. Projections that vanish with a mere shift in perspective, for instance, are not simply metaphors; they are compelling physical demonstrations of how fundamentally perception changes depending on context, on angle, on the specific conditions of engagement.

In one of the central installations, a gelatinous substance begins to tremble, subtly excited by sound waves. A carefully directed beam of light passes through it, creating an image that constantly, almost organically, transforms. This, perhaps, serves as a model of a new sensitivity: an embodiment of the invisible that nonetheless remains powerfully present. Physics here transcends its conventional role, creating an experience that verges on the quasi-mystical or alchemical; the entire scene vividly recalls an alchemical laboratory, with the artist appearing less as a scientist and more as a magician, transmuting nature into profound meaning.

In an era of automated attention and algorithmically managed images, Eliasson’s works demand not passive contemplation, but rather physical engagement – an involvement where perception itself becomes a tangible form of labor. His installations meticulously craft the conditions under which thinking and seeing are actively re-activated – not by guessing or fulfilling desires, but by gently returning the viewer to a slow, embodied, and distinctly non-automated gaze.

The Olafur Eliasson exhibition, then, functions as a spatial anti-system. It neither substitutes reality, nor rigidly structures behavior, nor optimizes emotions. Instead, it opens a dynamic field wherein perception evolves into a form of computation, but critically, one that requires the participation of a body: vulnerable, unstable, and undeniably alive. In an age where so many decisions are made without visible human involvement, these installations serve as a vital reminder: everything depends on your point of view – and crucially, on your own experience.

Everything that becomes transparent, disappears.

In an age where algorithms meticulously adjust visual flows to fit preconceived expectations, disappearance has paradoxically become a primary mode of display. The climate crisis, rather than remaining an anomaly, has been aesthetically adapted; it has been seamlessly integrated into interfaces, into perception, and ultimately, into a collective fatigue. Anxiety is systematically dampened. The body, with all its messy unpredictability, is effectively removed from the frame. Everything seems to remain in its proper place, yet nothing truly touches us anymore.

Artificial intelligence, in this context, is not merely a metaphor. It has become an integral part of the very architecture of the real – not because it possesses an intrinsic reality, but because it profoundly shapes the surface of reality: what is visible, what is audible, what is deemed desirable. Anything that cannot be predicted is systematically excluded. Anything that fails to reinforce the prevailing model drifts into a vast, unperceived blind zone. In this crucial sense, AI and the climate crisis are not merely thematically connected; I argue they exhibit a profound structural homology in their impact on human perception and agency. Their underlying logic is shared: prediction instead of understanding, adaptation instead of resistance, optimization instead of difference. While acknowledging the potential of AI to offer new insights or tools for climate science, my focus here is on its parallel role in shaping a perceptual framework that subtly erodes our capacity for deep engagement with environmental crises. AI does not, in fact, generate vision – it meticulously formats it. And the climate, similarly, vanishes in precisely the same way – not as a dramatic event, but as a gradual smoothing, a slow, almost imperceptible erosion of our collective sensibility.

Training large-scale models requires an astronomical amount of energy. The full training process of a single system like GPT-3 can emit hundreds of thousands of kilograms of CO2, a figure comparable to the lifetime emissions of over a hundred gasoline-powered cars. A single text is already computation, cooling, infrastructure. Behind every image lies a data center; behind every word, an industrial circuit. Dust, lithium, servers, freon, water: AI is far from a cloud-based abstraction; it is, unequivocally, a material industry. It cannot be separated from the very destructive processes it ostensibly attempts to model – indeed, it actively participates in the degradation it describes.

But the problem extends beyond the purely physical; it is fundamentally perceptual. Contemporary algorithms are meticulously trained on fleeting attention, on what is easily clickable, on what is visually «light.» Visuality, consequently, no longer represents; it filters. The climate, framed through relentlessly upbeat infographics and superficial «green» branding, ceases to register as genuinely destructive. It has transformed into a mere product, a transient mood: too well-lit, too polished to truly disturb. And it is precisely in this lies the most dangerous shift: a disappearance that elicits no response, an erasure that is not even perceived as a profound loss.

Data centers may not outwardly resemble the world’s factories, yet they are actively manufacturing the very boundaries of visibility. Their architecture is deliberately neutral; their light, an artificial daylight. Their function remains largely hidden. Yet, these unseen structures determine precisely what is shown and what is excluded. AI does not censor; it optimizes what can be seen. It functions much like a climate system itself: cooling perceived heat, stabilizing variation, flattening peaks of difference.

The deliberate refusal of unpredictability constitutes a political silence. The elimination of difference is framed as a form of energetic efficiency. Anything that resists easy recognition is immediately marked as an fault. The human body (often deemed too slow, too reactive, too inherently unpredictable by optimizing systems) is thereby displaced from the sphere of automated perception. What remains might tremble, much like a vibrating surface in an installation; only by slowing down can one momentarily sense its lingering response. But even this sensation is temporary. Even this, in the logic of optimization, is deemed inefficient. Yet, it is precisely this raw, unmediated capacity of the human body – when re-engaged and de-synchronized from algorithmic flows – that holds the potential to perceive the underlying difference: that something is profoundly wrong.

Modern perception has, regrettably, become complicit in an ecological problem – not because it lies, but because it predicts too well. And embedded within that very prediction lies a profound disappearance: you simply cannot see what you are not prepared to see. You cannot feel what has already been meticulously smoothed out. AI and climate catastrophe, therefore, operate as a single, intertwined protocol: one produces reality, the other collapses it. Neither, crucially, registers as a tangible presence. This ongoing process, if left unexamined, risks diminishing our collective ability to respond to critical systemic failures. Only the body – untrained, unadapted, unsynchronized – can, for a fleeting moment, perceive the underlying difference: that something is profoundly wrong. Everything is visible, yet nothing truly resonates.

And perhaps this is all that truly remains: the right to unpredictability within perception. The right to error. To trembling. To a light too sharp, too insistent to be smoothed away.

Liza Kin
Berlin, May 3, 2025

Olafur Eliasson Exhibition at neugerriemschneider
Christinenstraße 18–19, Haus 9
10119 Berlin, Mitte
May 3 – August 9, 2025

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