The Asset of Burnout: Transmedial as Agential Strategy

Paula Albuquerque The Asset of Burnout: Transmediality as Agential Strategy

1. Surveillance, Exhaustion and Ghosts from the Future

Before making a case for transmediality in artistic research, I propose a short insight into how my working methods reflect a conscious political positioning towards embedding the problematic technology of surveillance and its materials in the making of artworks. My present project takes as its main premise that surveillance is a mode of production of the attention economy, which creates assets that capitalise on exhaustion. In this situation, any body, or subject, becomes a self-extractive medium that supports a capitalist ecology of self-replication, a cinematic mode of existence that is based on maximised visibility, in which both humans and non-humans wither. This capital-oriented logic threatens the environment and its multi-species, and is biased against non-white, non-male, and non-hetero bodies, whose voices are silenced during decision-making processes.

To think about the future of the current scenario, I engage with a posthumanist perspective that is anchored in a decolonial and anarchival view of the Chthulucene (as in, Donna Haraway’s speculative futurist fabulations), which harbours the hauntological promise of the arrival of ghosts from the future, ‘arrivants’, who emerge after an environmental cataclysm as a post-racial collective with an anticapitalist stance.1 These grassroots, gendered and racialised bodies introduce an affective dimension that has never matched the ‘agrologistic correlationist’ perspective described by Timothy Morton.2

In addition to this discursive framework, to think through the aforementioned contemporary lived experience it is crucial to engage in an

intersectional and transmedial practice of artistic research, making artwork with surveillance technology that unveils and subverts negative stereotypeinducing mechanisms. In this case, employing practice-based methods that challenge Western academic disciplinary constraints provides resources for reclaiming collective agency and fairness in representation.

2. Artistic Research, Aesthetics and an Ecology of Practices

As an artist and a scholar working within the field of surveillance, my hybrid approach to making and thinking has, for years now, been associated with the field of artistic research, which apparently constitutes a polemical, forever-emerging discipline, despite efforts at its academicisation (or perhaps due to these efforts). Several issues arise when we analyse the potentials and flaws of artistic research, specifically when we address its methodologies, which are still considered unorthodox. As Silvia Henke, Dieter Mersch, Nicolaj van der Meulen, Thomas Strässle, and Jörg Wiesel point out, there is a conflict emerging in the discussion about methods in the arts. These do not follow a traditional academic trajectory, but instead manifest as “leaps, digressions, and detours which continually generate new and unexpected counter-expressions, and do not set a goal for their nonlinear “experiments,” but instead trigger irritations and thus daring revelations.”3 To tackle this problem, the authors make a distinction between artistic practice and artistic research, anchored in the latter’s affinity with aesthetics. It means that, even when artistic research is not part of a process of making art, it may manifest as a form of aesthetic research by intervening and transforming scientific discourse.4 This challenges 62

a traditional quantification of research methods, which consequently hinders the academic disciplining of the arts and aesthetic research.5 The philosophers further explain that aesthetic research, which manifests in parallel to artistic practice, belongs to the field of phenomenology, where its “practices map out non-scientific epistemologies.”6 As an artist, I locate experimental activity in the material and social relations my work establishes as it develops. In that sense, I agree that aesthetic thought precludes and preempts discourse, while extensively researched theory is already embedded in it. I experience the presence of theory, of aesthetic thought, on a pre-linguistic level.

It is useful at this point to refer to curator Lucy Cotter’s proposition that both the process of making a work of art and its manifestation are part of a “self-initiated, rigorous and unique” research trajectory.7 Art as form of thought is thus fully anchored on the material research and format of choice.8 Cotter draws our attention to how artists create epistemological objects and therefore continually provoke reassessments of Western canonical epistemes in the arts. In line with the previously mentioned authors, Cotter also highlights the specific logics of artistic research and contrasts them to its “academic knowledge production” counterpart. Artists take the freedom to relate to different fields by association, which is a characteristic of artistic research that is not practiced in other disciplines. Their areas of thought escape categorisation, while incorporating immaterial forms of knowledge in an “artistic material enquiry.”9

However, this is not without constant resistance from academia and its methods of research, according to which incommensurable and associative

forms of thought are dismissible. The opening of a space for new methodologies of research and knowledge production is required, rather than continuing the effort to fit artistic research into a disciplinary format with well-defined limits and strict production formulas. In this way, Cotter suggests that new words are necessary to indicate how form and content are connected, as well as an idea and its realisation, so that artistic research is anchored on material experience rather than external observation.10 Cotter’s standpoint resonates with the need, identified by artists, to open up previously nonexistent areas where thought can manifest. When researching surveillance, I acknowledge that a scholarly tradition is in place, but it is reduced to an art-historical, social or cultural analysis of pre-existing objects. This means that, as a practitioner, I need to experiment with surveillance technology and create artworks in order to research its impact on contemporary languages of audiovisual production and processes of subjectification. My ‘making process’ is thus transmedial rather than transdisciplinary, as my work develops across and in between media within the cinematic realm. It may therefore be productive to compare both methodological approaches at this point, to situate my preference for forms of material and discursive thought that are (trans)medium-determined and not discipline-bound.

In her discussion of transdisciplinarity, Sue McGregor adopts a traditional academic approach, defining it as taking place across, between, beyond, and outside the disciplines.11 As the author points out, transdisciplinary research is primarily seen as interdisciplinary, involving both scientific and non-scientific practices, with academic and non-academic partners collaborating to tackle 64

complex social issues. The passages in McGregor’s text, written quite some years ago, that resonate with me the most are those in which she draws attention to the importance of lived experience. Quoting Basarab Nicolescu’s writings, McGregor defends that transdisciplinarity involves a knowledge of the ‘self’ which impacts on what she considers a completely new approach to living and being.12 Even if I do not disagree, as an artist, I could argue that what was proposed here as a new and fresh perspective at the time, was already a reality in non-Western countries, carried out by dissenting impoverished social groups.

As Hito Steyerl perceived in her article ‘Aesthetics of Resistance?’ from 2010, highlighting Peter Weiss’s novel of the same name from 1975, forms of artistic research (transdisciplinary, transmedial research, and bricolage) have mostly been linked to the context of social struggle and revolutionary movements throughout the whole of the twentieth century.13 It’s a phenomenon that is also transcontinental, as evidenced by Third Cinema, which shows that film doesn’t have to be a capitalist, oppressive means of representation, but can be an active tool in the revolutionary movements taking place in Latin America and on the African continent. Steyerl’s stance also displays a resistance towards terms from the sphere of the ‘disciplinary’, as they undesirably suggest that art should, or even ever could, be disciplined.

Moving beyond the apparently straightjacketed premise of the discipline, I find better footing in Isabelle Stenger’s text ‘Introductory Notes to An Ecology of Practices’, in which the philosopher points out the flaws of scientific factuality. In her own words, an ecology of practices is a (political)

tool for thinking, which manifests differently for each person who engages with it.14 It is “a nonneutral tool”, entailing a certain sense of personal investment and responsibility that go beyond what the tool itself is supposed to represent: a single unified Truth, as in scientific methods. As such, Stengers gives attention to context of production and specific conditions of engagement with an ecology of practices as tool of thought. However, the author also defends that the practice and its outcomes do not depend on the context of emergence only. There is thus a degree of responsibility involved in the choice and in the employment of this thinking tool, or “technology of belonging”, that does not abide by one single Truth. This process comprises responsibility for future engagement with this same tool, such that the choice for any particular method is dependent on a variety of factors relating to past, present and future, a kind of ‘haunting’ of conditions and consequences that one should be aware of, including the limitations of this same knowledge.15 Art is not separated from the media it manifests in. The technology employed is already (part of) the work and, therefore, an awareness of technological implications should be embedded in this work. The choice for the tool is a responsible, informed one, and thus a political standpoint. As confronting as it may be for me that the aesthetics of war technology are the basis for the visual impact of a particular artwork, it must be acknowledged that the racist finance-based necropolitics of AI-determined drone vision is entangled with the consumption of the same imagery within a museum context.

It specifically resonates with me that the intersectional transmedial practices I engage with may be considered of minor importance in relation 66

to the authority of certain Eurocentric discourses. However, staying with the desire for kinship means at moments experiencing the weight of those discourses; for example, at the meeting of a transnational network built by diaspora curators and during events for BIPOC artists.16 This common ground, this mutual recognition of practices and thought tools outside of Western canons, is what I believe Stengers is hinting at when she describes a (social) technology of belonging as “the kind of active, fostering ‘milieu’ that practices need in order to be able to answer challenges and experiment changes, that is, to unfold their own force.”17 In agreement with Stengers, I look for methods that move beyond the academic realm and can be engaged with on several levels through material enquiry. This involves identifying discursive elements as very specific media in themselves: as tools with a politicallydetermined technology.

3. Transmedia, Naked Lives and Resistance

Transmedia, a term coined by Henry Jenkins, refers to storytelling and franchise solutions, such as Hollywood narratives that develop over several films, DVDs, etc. Even though I am not very concerned with mainstream narrative plots, I see transmedia as a defining notion for the expanded forms of cinema, digital art and discursive platforms that I practice in my art projects. In my 2020 solo show at the Nieuw Dakota Gallery in Amsterdam, ‘Enter the Ghost - Haunted Media Ecologies’, I opted for a site-specific curated selection of five main installations which worked together to create a cinematic experience. This transmedial exhibition created a space in which the atmosphere of uncertainty and discomfort experienced by the visitor, who was surrounded by the sound of military

drones, surveillance footage, and deepfake misconstrued imagery, was enhanced by the presence of construction materials inside the gallery, such as a building container, vast amounts of sand, dark soil, and a long fence. Transmediality brought the discursive element of the publication accompanying the exhibition together with the visual elements of video-based works, the algorithm, and natural and artificial materials. This assemblage created a realm in which virtual spaces and the destruction and construction of materiality were integrated.

After working with surveillance for several years, with an ongoing interest in researching the fictionalising aspects of so-called documentary evidence, my focus has moved away from medium-specific visual production to concentrate on the ghosts of racial and gender biases they conjure up. Because surveillance is at present still relevant to the production of scenarios of subject formation, I now study the phenomenon of the exhaustion of the body as a capital asset and the forms of resistance that potentially arise from it. I arrive at this from a decolonial and anarchival perspective that is haunted by ‘arrivants’, or potential future bodies who hold us accountable for our current anarchival mining or extraction activity, thereby making us aware of the selection of our methods, including thought tools and media.

The present heightened capitalist mode of production is anchored in burning through bodies as assets and production value. To think of the contemporary, one needs to analyse forms of representation, presentation and simulation that document or evidence a particular phenomenon: in this case, states of exhaustion, burnout and physical depletion. Paul B. Preciado’s views on capitalism and its extraction 68

of human desire are of relevance to the study of the exhausted body as capitalist asset.18 The author considers the isolated body, as experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, to be a stereotype of the subject who is living a “naked life”, a term Giorgio Agamben borrowed from Walter Benjamin, to describe a subject “reduced to existing only physically and stripped of all legal status or citizenship.” Preciado’s take on biopolitics proposes that, even if not fully acknowledged, the current scenario is comparable to that of the Global South’s perennial colonial reality to some degree. Like the author, I consider the possibility that a surveillance apparatus, with its modes of subject production, reinforces the systematic exhaustion of humans to produce value a posteriori. If, as Preciado claims, bodies are serving as test-subjects for the pharmaco-pornographic laboratories to experiment on with their drugs, I have to ask whether there may be a possibility that individuals are subjected to exhausting living and working conditions to create test-subjects for the burnout industry.19 I do not have an answer at this point, but evidence shows that self-regulation has intensified during the pandemic, which caused virtually everyone to work from home, increasing the demand for psychologists online, with apps monitoring everyone’s moves and sending out constant reminders to exercise, take supplements and meditate, to counteract weight gain and overcome anxiety disorders. The isolated, exhausted body was caught up in a limbo of passivity towards governmental strategies, which, if apparently protective, seamlessly evoked those with roots in colonial economic models.

To analyse how the seemingly passive condition of burnout may become an active one, I turn to Christoph Brunner, Halbe Kuipers and Toni Pape,

who have worked on an ethology of exhaustion. Drawing on Mark Fisher’s writings,20 their introduction recalls that the increase of administrative tasks at most jobs stands in the way of “developing creative ways of encountering the various (philosophical, artistic, etc.) problems posed by existence.”21 This extends beyond our jobs, since social media and our public profiles constantly need to be fed with our self-performance. The exhaustion of the body that is subjected to an insurmountable amount of useless administrative tasks, under strict ubiquitous surveillance in order to keep producing digital content, keeps one from addressing those pressing issues related to the collapse of our living conditions and those of the planet as a whole. Brunner, Kuipers and Pape’s definition of exhaustion is Deleuzian, and extends beyond labour-based value extraction and somatic (living) energy. The authors hint at potential resistance movements created from within the exhausted realm that may emerge as productive forces. They further claim that communities living under constant exhausting conditions perceive and produce in other ways that those more privileged.22

Pursuing tools of thought requires a critical analysis of the context of production of the seminal academic discourses that are part of my transmedial practice. The increase of artworks and academic writing focusing on climate change in the past two to three decades reflects the growing awareness about the exhaustion of the environment and multispecies. The sense of a cataclysmic future hanging above Western society provokes scholarly production, including science-fiction and speculative fabulation, such as Donna Haraway’s work and the writings of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. A scary future haunts the present, with bleak visions of deserts, 70

tsunamis and numerous pandemics populating the imaginary, provoking diverse attempts at postulating posthumanist worldviews that can replace the Westernised mentality of species superiority. As Morton points out, when we constantly anticipate a horrifying future, we fail to acknowledge that the cataclysmic scenarios are already here, and that entire communities have lived through them for centuries. Just think about colonialism, and, more recently, the states of exception whose exhausted citizens survive with constant PTSD induced by sonic warfare, provoked by loud hovering armed drones and their 24/7 potential to strike.

It must be highlighted that the horrifying future sketched in scholarly production is not considered acceptable to Western thought in a Eurocentric living space. As Alexis Boyd, a Black female artistic researcher, explains very well in her thesis, rather than staying within the confines of Western academic tools for thought production, “we must turn to those whose lived and historical experiences have been and continue to be threatened by and shaped within the actualized and anticipated violence of collective annihilation. To those for whom catastrophe has never signaled either total rupture or smooth continuity but is, instead, defined by its repetitive, accumulative structure.”23

4. Performing Burnout/Performing Resistance

To study visual representations of the exhausted body, I am currently analysing images of people in extreme conditions of tiredness, including surveillance footage, art historical artefacts, documentation of dance marathons, and stock imagery categorised under tags like “tiredness”, “exhaustion”, and “burnout.” I am comparing these materials to form an image of the

exhausted body that is racialised and gendered. My present project concentrates on a specific film archive where I will research formal filmic languages that represent the exhausted body. In the particular example I am looking at right now, that of American dance marathons from the 1930s, the body of the woman is portrayed as becoming exhausted, fainting and falling. That of the man is, on the contrary, represented as remaining upright, continuing to move while dragging the female body, or picking it up when women collapse on the floor. Also, all these bodies are white, voluntarily participating in these events. When looking at imagery from the same period, the exhausted nonwhite body is usually portrayed in association with servitude or slavery. In a transmedial approach, studying the behaviour of the archive itself and how it catalogues these entries is crucial to understanding the datasets training its algorithms. The next step involves working with a performer who interprets the gestures being observed as ‘movement vocables’. This performance will be filmed and reduced to an outline that does not reveal gender nor colour, intending to get closer to the somatic origin of exhaustion and burnout. In tying back to Brunner, Kuipers and Pape, I am seeking to inquire where seeds of resistance may reside in the body existing at the limit.

As of yet, I have not decided on the formal aspects of the research outcomes, as these will be determined by the material enquiry I just began engaging with. It will probably result in a curated presentation of film-based artworks, including sound objects and sculptural dispositifs, to expose media-specific reality-constructing devices haunted by race and gender bias. In any case, whatever form of content I may produce, it will further my study of an 72

intersectional transmediality in which discourse, audiovisual media, and surveillance are entangled to expose systemic present-day colonial structures, and create new audiovisual vocabularies for fair representation and further emancipation.

1 Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2 Morton, T. (2018) Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. In this book, Morton puts forth the notion of agrologistics as an approach to the world’s natural resources that is merely functional. 3 Henke, S., Mersch, D., van der Meulen, N., Strässe, T. & Wiesel, J. (2020) Manifesto of Artistic Research - A Defense Against its Advocates, Zurich: Diaphanes, p. 12. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Cotter, L. (2019) Reclaiming Artistic Research, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, p. 11. Here, Cotter is building on a claim by Susan Sontag. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 16. 11 McGregor, S. (2004) ‘The Nature of Transdisciplinary Research and Practice’. Available at: https://www.academia. edu/26721302/The_Nature_of_Transdisciplinary_Research_ and_Practice (accessed 1 May 2021). 12 Ibid. 13 Steyerl, H. (2010) ‘Aesthetics of Resistance? Artistic Research as Discipline and Conflict’, MaHKUzine: Journal of Artistic Research, 8, pp. 31–37. Available at: http://eipcp.net/ transversal/0311/steyerl/en (accessed 1 May 2021). 14 Stengers, I. (2005) ‘Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices’, Cultural Studies Review, 11(1), pp. 183-196. 15 Ibid., 189. 16 BIPOC stands for: Black, Indigenous, People of Color. 17 Ibid., 195. 18 Preciado, P.B. (2013) Testo-Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, New York: Feminist Press, p. 49. 19 Ibid. Pharmacopornography is in Preciado a capitalist mode of production that extracts sexual energy from human bodies. It is a form of biopolitics/necropolitics that is at the basis of gender creation and division by means of the production of drugs such as testosterone, progesterone, and estrogen.

20 Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative?, Winchester and Washington: Zero Books. 21 Brunner, C., Kuipers, H.H. & Pape, T. (2017) ‘Introduction: For an Ethology of Exhaustion’, Inflexions, 10, pp. i-ix. Available at: http://www.inflexions.org/exhaustion/main. html#n1 (accessed 1 May 2021). 22 Ibid. 23 Boyd, A. (2020) Ecologies of Impossible Belonging: A Black Speculative Engagement with Ecological Catastrophe, University of Amsterdam, Unpublished Masters Thesis.