aeriology: catelogue essay by Ann Finegan

aerial: of air, gaseous, existing in air wire(s) or rod(s) transmitting or receiving radio waves.

ariel: spirit, or sprite, agent of the Magus,magician- world-transformer, Prospero, in Shakespeare's The Tempest.

We are all antennas, or so someone said or should have said. Receptors which interface between the energies transmitted in the airways and the electronic signals filtered down our neurones. We are machines. Machines have merely extended (prosthetics) the machine which we already were. On a macro-level Deleuze and Guattari have already shown us in our machinic couplings -- desiring machines hooked into the capital machine1; on the mircolevel of biopolitics Donna Haraway has shown us at the level of the genome, the thread or line which reads, replicates and codes the body's micro semiotic codes2. The smallest unit of the body is a communications machine.

Aeriology: when I enter into the space of the gallery I am confronted by a machine. At first I may fail to read it; I may not even see it as a machine. Thin wire wraps itself around the four pillars which support the gallery structure. I see fine, fine wire wrapped around a form. Accustomed to various wrappings I see a form defined; I see a sculpture; perhaps a writing or a graphic; I don't at first see the machine. My eye has not been trained to view this coil of wire as a machine, much less as an energy gatherer.

Literally the 'line' of the wire is gathering and reconfiguring energies, turning refuse static to potential by a process of realignment of the subtle bodies of particles. I begin to perceive that a vast machine, of multifold coilings, is incommensurably coupled to a small device evidencing invisible activity. I look for the switch, for the lead to the plug, and then I slowly realise that this coil, by its mere folding, is transforming ambient energies (talk-back radio; electric trash) to become its own electronic source. Hinterding has unmade my conception of the electrical machine, capturing it in the miracle of a coil; if you like, she has taken a line and invested it with a rhetorical form. Literally the line has been figured, drawn out, contoured, transformed into electronic potential.

In Heideggerean language, this work of art has given over the invisible of energy to manifest. Hinterding has revealed the knowledge of the machine by techne, 'knowing'3 in artistic form.

Hinterding's technology is simple. Which is why I return to Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology", and the banal question of the dangers within, and immediately subsume it to the question he asked of "The Origin of the Work of Art". In the latter essay, Heidegger inquired into the making of the work of art, and meditated on the Greek word techne which was used to describe both the domains of art and craft. There was no division into our two orders, one higher, one lower. A common word techne described all productions, from the crafts in use in the everyday to what was at work in the sublimer form of the Greek temple. Heidegger focused his attention on the humble tool (the shoe as an apparatus for walking; literally the transporter or carrier of 'being'/beings) as much as on the nobler temple, for it was a question of letting manifest; or, in Heidegger's language, of deconcealing. For techne, above all, as a mode of knowing, or revealing, was to let manifest. Technology (Heidegger's shoes, hammers, jugs, temples) are stripped back to techne, a mode of knowing, of deconcealing. From the undifferentiated matter of the earth's concealing (of materials as diverse as leather, or stone, or clay), the artist's techne deconceals, reveals the knowing in the work.

In this work of Hinterding's, the spectator (termed by Heidegger as the 'preserver') can only preserve the work, see it, or "get it" through a mode of knowing, of coming to know what Heidegger termed 'the workliness of the work'; the knowing that is therein deconcealed. First of all, in approaching Hinterding's work I had to come to see it in terms of a machine, at its simplest level, of the Heideggerian tool. (The jug is a tool for carrying, replacing the 'cup' in the hand; the temple is a tool for worship, receptacle to receive the manifesting of the gods). I had to think through the machine, as machine.

Hinterding draws the line of the wire into the secret of the coil, into the form of the fullness of potential. We, too, are the miracle of a folding of the line, of the folds in the gene or genome (Donna Haraway); of what is written or folded in the lines of the reproductive code. And we, too, at the levels of molecular chemistry are electrical machines.

 I found myself rethinking Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"4, and I begin to blur the distinction between production and reproduction. I think of Hinterding's 'line'. Her line of wire is a 'line' which traces a form in space. A reproductive form. In one sense she merely copies what she knows. She reproduces a techne, a mode of knowing, about the (electrically) conductive line. Certain configurations of form generate productive effects; the coil resonates and reconfigures static as productive electrical potential. And it is also an art work in which she is drawing a line. Artistic production. I hesitate to write 'creation'.

Oscillators, a recent earlier work of Hinterding's, played on the re/productive connections of the (electro)conducting line. This work involved the literal drawing of graphite lines on paper -- what more traditional and time-honoured mode of artistic production? What more classical tools? The graphite line traced, configured, a pattern on the page. But graphite is also an electrical conductor. The pages were wired to a solar cell which picked up the ambient light emanating from the bulbs illuminating the gallery. The graphite line effectively reorganised this light, reconfiguring it according to the patterns of conduction and resistance as outlined on the drawings on the page. This 'drawing' was a sound-work: a simple speaker/transistor picked up on the sounds synthesised by the line. As much as the work was a 'machine' it was also about the re/productive potential of the tracing or formation of a line.

 Aeriology picks up and enhances this play on the doublings of the reproductive line; Hinterding's 'miracles' (light becoming sound; evidencing the invisible) are achieved in the contours, and configurations, of the line. Hinterding's artistic practice could not be more 'classical': and yet this classical art-practice, of simply drawing, maps over and reproduces the 'secrets' of the fold5. As Haraway has argued, the electro-maps or patterns in the human body-machine likewise reproduce, produce and replicate across the secret formations of the line.

I think of Freud's bodily topographies, of his attempts to map the storage helveticas of consciousness and the unconscious ("The Topology of the Unconscious"6), and of his imagery of cathexis/decathexis, of libinal energies and flows, and Freud's problem of thinking the blueprints for electro-chemical storage helveticas and the desire implicated in its flows. I think of other prosthetic devices, Deleuze and Guattari's description of the human as a desiring-machine, desiring couplings of various kinds. The car as a prosthetic device extends me in my desire for the pleasure of speed. I think of our pleasures as harnessed to so many machines. And I think of these machines as extensions of us. We have found the means to store molecular configurations capable of maintaining great speed (the car); of extending our ear, first through cables then through waves via satellites when the earth remained opaque (the telephone); in more primitive times we added the material storage loop of the marking of marks upon a page (the letter and the mechanical age of the post). In retrospect, the mechanical age was a material way of storing and releasing energy, of producing effects through certain configurations (Newton's billiard ball theory). The mechanical has evolved into the electrical into a subtler helvetica of effects. Aerial/ogy could be described in terms of a 'science' of the a/ethereal. Machines for a techne of the invisible.

This returns me to Hinterding's alchemy, this secret of a coil through which the invisible is evidenced. A simple 'secret' of obedience in the flows. (The graphite lines of Oscillators had to be periodically smudged out, to slow and disorientate the organised lines of flow which were cutting such lines of pure transmission that the sound was passing out of range, into higher decibels of electronic transmission.) I felt myself witness to a strange act of seeing electricity deconcealed, 'unmade' into its 'aura', and divested of concealing technologies. (Our everyday electricity has to be hidden, wrapped up in black boxes, touched through non-conductive knobs and plastics, in order to protect us from the destructive potential of its productive high volts.) I wasn't in the proximity of only a machine, but of a line that was drawn through the human.

I return to the simple tool of the spade as an extension and reconfiguration of the hand. We reconfigure our bodies to serve us in work through the aid of prosthetic devices. But what is it that we try to do in art's tracings out, if not to acquire a techne or knowing. Or, further, to reproduce this knowing with whatever technical means are at hand. Heidegger, too, conserved this expression, keeping the hand in the work of art, keeping the hand in proximity in classical forms of expression. I felt that Hinterding's (electro) conductive line was putting me in proximity to the human, but also that it was keeping me out.

For, at another level, Heidegger's work of art begins to close up and conceal within itself. By this curious paradox of the thingly notion of works of art, qua thing, they begin to conceal at the point of deconcealing. Only when you begin to get it, to know it, when the work of art is, as formed in and of itself, does it then once again become mysterious, and perhaps more so than ever. Or, 'made strange', as the Russian Formalists discovered. At one level of language the Formalists experienced the pleasure of "getting it" of strange configurations which yielded a meaning, or sense. But, as soon as you try to reason the inherent connections, the work becomes more strange and closes back up into itself. You never get closer to the mystery bound up in the ciphers of the sign; you're always listening on the party line, privy to this 'conversation' whereby strange combinations of words do their work and speak.

Something of this process is at work in Aeriology, as I am literally listening in on the line, equipped to listen through the magnifying device of the headsets which are plugged in in order to listen to the work. Myself, I am always with other observers, on the periphery of the thing; listening here in closest proximity, in an intimate distance which still on the boundary of this work. It is as if I've been invited in on the secret, and then at this very limit, the work expels me, and keeps me 'other' in relation to 'it'.

The work of art as pure form has always kept this abstract limit. Rothko's "black sqrares" repelled me at the point of my most metaphysical intimacy, close to the space of hole at the interior of the work itself. Hinterding's formal square keeps this boundary, this reference to abstract form. However, she could not have wrapped her wire around any configuration. A tangle of wire would have remained silent; an abstract and formal configuration, an ordering, was necessary to generate the potential of electrical effects. Rothko's square likewise organises our relationship to an abstract category of absence and conducted us to the metaphysical (some say to God; Rothko's famous chapel series). Rothko's work, in maintaining itself in a position of manifest absence, conducts us in, in the very gesture of fencing us out. Hinterding's work echoes this same formal quality, and, I repeat, of electrical necessity, drawing her line around a perfect square of absence.

Hinterding's 'machine' leads me back though the line to the hand; hands which have drawn and which beckon to the chemistry inherent in the organisation of lines. The seduction of classical masters has never, likewise, been fathomed. Mimesis produces the pleasure in knowing, and was Aristotle's response to art's affect. He couldn't say why. Heidegger took it one step further in trying to elaborate on the concealing which happens in the very intense moment of deconcealing. Productions of affect between one body and another, in a subtle interchange. I'm back at an encounter which escapes me, which withdraws into sub-sensory experience of particles, and which we describe, in the age of electricity, as so much excitement on the line.

I can't get any closer to what I would call this encounter with the formal aspect of the work of art. In Hinterding's work the pencil and the brush, or the stone and chisel (on which Heidegger preferred to muse), has been technologised, 'electricified' in this age of electronic lines. I'm brought a little closer this juncture of line and space -- and its thing-affect.

Notes.

1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London: The Athlone Press,1983.

2. Donna Haraway, "The Bioploitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune helvetica Discourse", in Differences, Vol.1, no. 1, 1989. Haraway's discourse leads me to conclude I am a cyborg, I am a machine, and I ask the question of what is re/produced in machines is not the machine already in me. The hand was a tool for digging before the invention of the prosthetic tool of the spade. The spade was already in the human. We were always electric machines (in the age of Newtonian physics we were already 'force' machines, pushing and pulling machines). How much of the history of science has been the discovery of, and unpacking, revealing, of the 'machines' inherent in the human?

3. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" in Poetry, Language, Thought. trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

 4. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in Illumination, trans. Harry John. Glasgow: William Collins & Son, rpt, 1979. Hinterding, has in a certain sense, reversed Benjamin's ordering of the lost aura of the unique object of craft, prior to the age of mechanical reproduction. Hinterding traces the pathway backwards, from mechanically produced electrical machines to produce of the aura of a simple, crafted electrical machine.

5. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. (traces the fold through the pleats of matter of the lower floor of elastic forces and springs, to the higher floor of aether, and more subliminal affects).

6. Sigmund Freud, "Various Meanings of 'The Unconscious": the Topographical Point of View", Volume 14, pp.172-176. Hogarth Standard Edition of Freud.