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Mixed Feelings — Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam (2023)

Group exhibition, Upstream Gallery, Kloveniersburgwal 95, Amsterdam, 1 July – 5 August 2023; opening 1 July, 17.00–19.30. Gallery text: sources/ingested/mixed-feelings-upstream-2023.md. Announced on harm.work on 26 June 2023 as Mixed Feelings.

Mixed Feelings was the summer group show of Upstream Gallery, which represents Harm van den Dorpel, in its rooms on the Kloveniersburgwal. Eleven artists took part: Frank Ammerlaan, Marc Bijl, Kévin Bray, van den Dorpel, Mandy Franca, David Haines, Auriea Harvey, Jen Liu, Noor Nuyten, Ronald Ophuis and Tabor Robak. He showed one work, a token from Maschine, on a monitor. Four months later the same gallery opened his solo show Our Inner Child (→ Our Inner Child).

The gallery's text

Upstream's text is short. It presents "new developments in the work of several artists who explore, in various materials and techniques, the ambiguous attitude one can harbor towards technological advancements", and divides them:

In a fast changing world, progression and regression go hand in hand. Where some of the artists in this exhibition explore the endless possibilities that new technologies bring, like AI and NFT, and celebrate those progressions, others are emphasizing the flipside of these developments. Think of the increasing alienation between humans and the natural world and the resulting climate crisis, exploitation in industrial labor, and digital exhaustion.

It names three works as its images: Tabor Robak's Nuke, Kévin Bray's Less they touch the ground and more they decide for it and David Haines's Signal, all of 2023. It does not say which of the artists belongs to which side.

Maschine ₇

A tunnel of fine gold, red and violet streaks spiralling around a black centre
The image of the harm.work announcement of Mixed Feelings, 2023

Upstream's page for the artist captions a photograph "NFT Maschine7 (2023) installed at group exhibition Mixed Feelings". It shows Maschine ₇ on a square monitor hung on a dark teal wall above the wooden skirting, its cable running down to the floor. On the screen a wheel is seen down its axle: gold, red and blue streaks wind around a black centre. The harm.work announcement carries an image of the same kind, a tunnel of fine gold, red and violet strokes around a black hole.

Maschine is a collection of 1,000 generative tokens on Ethereum, released on 7 June 2023, three weeks before the opening. It was made on a commission from Mercedes-Benz with Fingerprints DAO and Mercedes-Benz NXT; harm.work calls it "a collection about velocity and perception". Each token animates a wheel spinning at speed. The artist's text for it begins with the rims in hip hop videos that seem to slow down and turn backwards as the car speeds up, and ends with a small neural network trained on his choices to pick among the outputs (→ Maschine; on the turning disc and the trace it leaves in the eye, Afterimage).

Between the two camps

The gallery's sorting has two places: artists who "celebrate" AI and NFTs, and artists who show their costs. Maschine fits the first by its means. It is an NFT collection, its outputs were chosen by a neural network, and it was commissioned by a car maker. Its subject fits neither. The work is about a failure of perception: a wheel that appears to slow and reverse as the car goes faster. Maschine reads the work as built on that perceptual error and notes that the artist's text grants the company's theme, "the potential for advanced technology to empower, and to liberate", only as "an evocation that speaks to people".

On the monitor in the gallery the token ran as a loop: speed shown in a still room, to a viewer whose eye misreads it.

See also