Infinite dynamic horizons

About

The notion of a horizon first became a fixture in the Western Art canon with the adoption of linear perspective in painting. This abstract proposal of flatness, where all things lead to one or more fixed points on a distant flat line, required one to be bound to an immovable position and accept this homogenous, calculable reinvention of time and space to be objective laws of representation. In her seminal essay In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Horizon, Hito Steyerl observes that with the ever-pervasive usage of Google Earth, AR/VR, and drone technologies, this horizontality is rapidly losing its place as the dominant perspective, replaced with one of verticality and its politics. Steyerl proposes that though this aerial perspective only grants some the god’s-eye-view of floating, but most the motion of perpetually falling, this free fall does not doom us to a demise of falling apart, and instead opens up possibilities of seeing the instability of the ground we are falling towards as vital for necessary shifting. infinite dynamic horizons asks the viewer to consider the horizon in endless motion, where one is constantly on the precipice of transformation, becoming and unbecoming virtual, into and through materiality, faced at once with itself and beyond itself.

Investigating the realms of planetary-scale computation, cosmotechnics, global industry and labor, Greene’s series of works probe the virtual as material. Fabricated from 3D-scans of hubcaps that the artist found while cycling throughout Philadelphia, the work compresses the circularity of viral, industrial, and temporal material. To Greene, this compression became ever more visible during the pandemic. Limited through the intermittent, stark, and repetitious space of Zoom, Greene witnessed their grandmother in her final stages of dementia, and eventual passing. The site-specific installation for this exhibition which accompanies these works activates interstitial space within the gallery through a recursive livestream video feed. Challenging conventional notions of the virtual as immaterial, the installation presents a link between networked hardware and the dis/orientation of the mind and body within nonlinear space and time. In their work, a horizon appears as not so much a fact of perspective as a proposal for the motion and distance between its own anticipation and memory.

This horizon as not-yet-here potentiality, discussed by José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia, allows for a forward-dawning futurity that extends beyond one’s own limited consciousness, viewable through affective excess. In her work untitled (sit 1-4), Shavers puts her viewers literally amongst the excess, where the chairs have merely suggestions of utilitarian function, and participation requires a negotiation with the horizon from one’s personal vantage point as a refusal of passivity. She creates a space for fugitivity, where implied relationship with a green-screen necessitates a grappling with disembodied signifiers, and opens up the possibility of what a beyondness through an unseeable horizon might be. Shavers’ ongoing performance work Rolling Hills, bridges this concept of thoroughness between the etymologies of performance and perspective, framing performance as an abstraction of living. What appears on the screen is an abstracted fragmentation of light recorded from daily sessions on a step-machine, a residue of performance, exertion, and fugitivity between body and machine.