A Field Without Boundaries — Shimmer, Rotterdam (2021)
Solo exhibition, Chapter 2 of World as Lover, World as Self*, Shimmer, Waalhaven Oostzijde 1, Rotterdam, 5 February – 12 June 2021. Curated by Shimmer (Eloise Sweetman and Jason Hendrik Hansma). Handout and exhibition reports: sources/ingested/shimmer-a-field-without-boundaries-2021.md. Installation photographs by Sol Archer and Shimmer; credits and captions from Art Viewer (4 June 2021) and Shimmer's archived exhibition page.*
A Field Without Boundaries was a solo show assembled from older works and changed while it ran. The artist's announcement on harm.work reads: "I will present a back-catalogue of works made over the past few years. Starting in February 2021, Shimmer will regularly 'refresh' the exhibition." Shimmer documented three refreshes. One new work was made for it: a sticker of mirror foil, also titled A Field Without Boundaries, made to be stuck on surfaces around the space. The artist's new website went online during the show, with Shimmer's support, announced on harm.work as Brand New Website.
Shimmer and the programme
Shimmer was an exhibition space on the second floor of a building at the Waalhaven, Rotterdam's port, co-initiated by Eloise Sweetman and Jason Hendrik Hansma in February 2018 (Art Viewer). In 2021 it was open by appointment. World as Lover, World as Self ran from October 2020 to December 2021 in chapters, each a solo show by one artist; the title is that of a book by the environmental activist and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy, which the handout quotes in its 2007 edition. Chapter 1 was City Pollen by Magali Reus, Chapter 3 In Need of a Memory Bank by Geo Wyeth.
The handout describes the format. The chapters "fade in and out of each other", so that for a while "the solo exhibition becomes a fleeting duo exhibition"; the curators compare the overlap to "the crossfade in film or in music". The programme's method is defamiliarization, which the text attributes to the Russian Formalists, "a means to 'turn the familiar strange'". The exhibition text calls the chapter "Not entirely a solo show" and says the works "were chosen in close dialogue between the artist and Shimmer's curators". The "refresh" was meant "to reformat the value systems of artistic and curatorial exhibition-making by creating shifting sets and generations".
"Generations" is a word from his own vocabulary. Death Imitates Language, the series the first phase showed, was bred over generations by a genetic algorithm (→ Death Imitates Language). Shimmer applied the same idea to the hang.
The title
The phrase comes from Candia Morgan's plenary paper "Language and Mathematics: A Field Without Boundaries" (CERME 8, 2013), which the handout quotes. He had filed it on 4 December 2020 in his are.na channel of candidate show titles, with the note "Bounds are the entire area that belongs to something, while a boundary is the outside edge that defines it." (Show titles). The handout gives its own reason for the choice: programming languages are "free to use", and the internet once offered "a venue of infinite exhibition possibilities, without gatekeepers or real estate costs (or so it seemed)."
The phrase returned twice. In 2023 it closes his text on Field, the 2008 grid of loading spinners released on-chain: "We find ourselves in a large open field: a field without boundaries" (→ Field (2008/2023)). In 2026 his statement on the Entfaltung drawings uses it for drawing and programming themselves. The Grid reads the phrase against the grid that stops at the edge of the screen.
Refresh one: Death Imitates Language, the bags, and City Pollen
Juancar Zolim Juancar, from Death Imitates Language, hangs on the wall between two windows, with the cranes of the port behind the glass. It is a square of clear acrylic. Under it lie a pale green disc with its top cut away, a small circle at its centre and dark blurred spots, all seen through a field of tiny drilled holes. The handout describes the series as images from a genetic algorithm "rendered onto acrylic glass through finely milled perforations that seduce the eye into seeing liquid forms". The Squircle and Death Imitates Language read the work's shapes and its making.
Close up the surface is frosted, the holes run in a diagonal grid, and the green and grey of the print lie behind them. Shimmer's first exhibition report, dated 6 February 2021 and written as a list, records the effect: "Perforated, dare I say porous, but I daren't, as it's not / Punctuated, small fine holes, revealing more, and more, and more".
During the overlap his works stood in Reus's installation. Her wallpaper, a photograph of a pale rose blown up across the back wall, stayed up; on two grey cabinets in front of it stood his hand-cut brown paper bags. Shimmer and Art Viewer caption every bag photograph Pseudocount Arp Bootleg, 2019, "Hand cut paper bags, 31 x 20 x 10 cm"; harm.work has no work of that title. One of the bags, a ghost shape with two eye holes, is Spectre (2019) on harm.work, with the note "Photo taken at Shimmer Rotterdam" (→ Sculpture and the Object).
The second bag has a round hole near the top, a smaller one beside it, a curved blob in the middle and a long slot at the bottom, cut through several bags nested inside each other, so that each hole shows the edge of the next layer. harm.work's Bags series calls them "interpretations of lithographies by Hans Arp", and the handout names "the chance-based practice of late dadaist artist Hans Arp" and "logics within logics, and layerings of intentional serendipity". The report: "Two works made of brown paper, bags within bags within a bag / Make me think of decoupage that I made as a child with my mother".
Refresh two: Calor Scripturam and a screensaver
The second phase added Calor Scripturam (2015), receipt paper marked with heat and water, its marks by then turned from black to a dark red-violet (→ IOU (2015), where the ageing is recorded in his words). It hung on its own wall by a window.
A laptop on the desk ran a screensaver, there from the first days: a dark, blurred image with a small circle in the middle. The artwork list does not name it. Report 1, written the day after the opening, describes it: "1 work on the computer / screen saver / Images change but a tiny bit slower than expected / Frosted, blurring, like sandblasted glass, but not, you know? [...] A small circle in the centre, / The constant". Which work it was is an open question.
Manique Hendriks's report, written on 5 March 2021, describes a "big print from the Death Imitates Language (2016) series, placed between two windows overlooking the harbour", "laser polished transparent plexiglass with matte packaging foil sandwiched in between", and "one framed print from the Mutant Garden software (2019 - ongoing) [...] leaning against the wooden packing crate." She ties the hang to the setting: "The ever changing environment of the port, with large ships constantly docking and undocking, perfectly fits the continuous changing nature in the works of Harm."
Refresh three: the artwork list
The handout's artwork list, uploaded in April 2021, matches the third phase: Vuwtvvyft Zcuviey Dayssuck (2016), Trebles (2019), Cussos Unfence Thermographers (2018), Juancar Zolim Juancar, the video Strategies (2011) and the sticker.
Vuwtvvyft Zcuviey Dayssuck is the second Death Imitates Language panel in the show: a clear square held by screws at its edge, a green band and a grey smear behind the acrylic, and short black horizontal bars stacked in its lower left. The window light reflects in it.
Two square prints hung one above the other on the back wall. Trebles is yellow, with a tall grey pill shape on the left and violet and magenta blocks on the right; harm.work files it in Proto Seeders, early outputs of the Mutant Garden algorithm. Cussos Unfence Thermographers is from Nested Exchange: a grid of violet rounded squares in the upper half and pale outlined circles over ruled lines below (→ The Grid).
Strategies played on a screen by the door. In the photograph the line on screen is "Distrust all claims for one true way", over a grey photograph of flowers and a sprig of yellow gorse. The line is Eric S. Raymond's Rule of Diversity, one of the unattributed borrowings the video is made of (→ Strategies (2010/2011)).
The sticker
A Field Without Boundaries (2021) is a mirror sticker, 5 × 5 cm: a near-circle of reflective foil on a black square, the title set in an arc along its upper edge. The photograph shows one on the door of a grey cabinet, reflecting the room.
The exhibition text gives it a job. The squircle, "an intermediate shape fusing a square and a circle" that interface designers use for an "organic" and "user friendly" look, "also appears in a series of squircle-shaped stickers that can be applied to surfaces within the exhibition both to 'distribute' the work, querying its 'location' in space, as well as to resist the notion of a 'final form' of the exhibition itself." A hung work has a place on a wall; a sticker can be put anywhere and does not come off. The refreshes changed the show in steps, by decision of artist and curators. The stickers were meant to spread it over surfaces where no plan put it.
Report 1 ends on the sticker: "1 work many times over / Highly reflective / I can't get out of the image / Unless I look from an angle [...] Could use to reapply lipstick / I saw someone do that once, and the curator was shocked / I usually check to see if my glasses are crooked, will Harm mind? / A squircle / Sounds tasty / Summery / Not square / Not circle / Both". On the squircle as interface ideology see The Squircle and the Spike interview of 2021 (Spike #70).
The exhibition reports
Shimmer published written responses to each refresh. A note in the handout gives the method, after the art writer Prue Gibson: writing as "an attempt to create an entity that equals the impetus; that is, the writing meets the artwork, which meets the viewer, which meets the gallery space, which meets the air conditioning". Report 1 (6 February 2021, "Weather: blue skies, sunny as hell.") is a list of sensations, one per line, grouped by work: the acrylic panel "bigger than the wall itself", the bags, the screensaver, the stickers. Report 2 is the visit by Manique Hendriks quoted above, which opens with the taxi driver asking whether she really needs to go to the Waalhaven. Both are transcribed in full in the ingested handout.
The new harm.work
On 19 February 2021, two weeks into the show, the artist announced his new online archive under the title Brand New Website: "As it's currently impossible to organise a vernissage and celebrate, I thought it would be nice to commission my long time favourite DJ Carten Jost (Dial) to compose a bespoke mix as background music while browsing this website." The DJ is Carsten Jost of the label Dial. The mix, 75 minutes long, is on SoundCloud under the exhibition's title, A Field Without Boundaries. The post ends: "This website is released in conjunction with my exhibition "A Field Without Boundaries", at Shimmer Rotterdam, who generously supported this initiative."
The site is the archive this wiki links to on every page. It launched with a show built from the same back-catalogue, at a time when, as the post says, an opening could not be held. Art Viewer's credits thank the Gemeente Rotterdam, Creative Industries NL, the Mondriaan Fonds, The Approach (London) and Upstream Gallery (Amsterdam).
In the practice
The show set work from ten years side by side: a video of borrowed advice (Strategies), receipt paper marked by heat (Calor Scripturam), images bred by a genetic algorithm and printed into acrylic (Death Imitates Language), prints from the Cartesian genetic programming of Mutant Garden and from the nesting of Nested Exchange, and Arp's shapes cut into shopping bags (Bags). Several of them were made by systems that keep changing their output, and Shimmer's format treated the exhibition the same way: shown in versions, with "generations" and no "final form". Hendriks drew the same line between "the continuous changing nature in the works" and the port outside. The one new work, the sticker, carried that into the room.
See also
- Death Imitates Language — the series of the two acrylic panels
- Sculpture and the Object — the Bags after Arp, Spectre
- The Squircle — the shape of the sticker
- Field (2008/2023) and The Grid — the phrase "a field without boundaries"
- Strategies (2010/2011) and IOU (2015) — the video and the receipt paper
- Shimmer handout and reports — the source