Arebyte Residency

In-grid has moved out of the gallery and into your homes. We have ceased to be a weekend destination, and demand attention through pings and pushes.

We have been dispersed into cells, embedded in I-frames. We are distanced social animals, mingling through digital platforms and apparatus not fit for purpose. A flow of images pouring in through windows and under doors. Digging our heels in, bracing as it rushed through, what connections can anchor us in this virtual currency, and where can we safely situate them. How can we still stay linked if not hyperlinked, not to be flown into the cosmic winds of the virtual landscape? What does it mean to hang on with no anticipation of touch?

Storytelling is how we remember and how we predict. Narratives are used to caution, to ensnare and to enrich. In-grid is pulling at the threads of these narratives, dissolving them before reworking their disparate bits into new configurations. Our world has been thrown up into the air and we watch as the dust settles, new combinations arise, systems interweave with other systems, forming tangible connections where there were previously none. How can dystopia become a fertile playing ground for new imaginaries?

We are at a fissure between objectivity and fantasy. It is into this chasm we shall jump, free-falling between the absolute and the absolutely not, a place where new possibilities lie and new connections can be built. In-grid will regale you with stories of Alter Worlds, petri-dishes for other ways of being. They will use these visions to reassure you that alternatives exist, but also as a call to arms – PAY ATTENTION, see what happens when you sleepwalk into a world before you dream it into being.

Technology and it’s algorithms are mystified as impartial oracles, rarified magical fetishes, where in reality they are the labor of multitude of individuals. There are the fingerprints of 1000 partial creatures on its surfaces. There are the developers, with access to the gods, down through to the data janitors cleaning sets of training data as offerings. There are people maintaining the buildings in which the data is cleaned. There are software manufacturers and hardware manufacturers. There are people shipping parts, people manufacturing parts, people mining the precious metals which make up circuitry of the parts. There are people repurposing what remains when the hardware has served its purpose and burying the rest. There are clickers and tappers and typers. This isn’t magic, it’s someone’s job.

How does the landscape look through one eye? Why not open another? Or another? What does this vista look like from below or above, in infrared, in odor or in taste?

When we try to include non-human actors in our narratives, we can’t help but anthropomorphize, settling into a position where humans are at the center of everything, and all that is seen is from that positionality and perspective. This does not acknowledge we are multitudinous in nature, the cells of your body constantly die and regrow, die and are replaced (or not) infused with our habitat. We leave little pieces in our wake like dander, on surfaces, in tea, in other people’s bodies and minds, in the words we write and the thoughts we omit. We not only leave little traces of our consciousness scattered, littered around, but we also soak up more than we realize. We are porous and greedy. We are generous and messy. Our Liminal Touch aims to progress these relations of an isolated internal to a new entwined relation of systems where we are intra-acting among others. It is looking to identify how we can be touched, and how we touch (non-human) others.

By succeeding from a system, you are not preventing it from existing or disrupting its trajectory. The ability to remove yourself from the grid is a privilege few possess. Instead, by remaining with the trouble, it is possible to acknowledge the web of relations in which you are embroiled, and if necessary subvert from within. In-grid compiled themselves from technologies that have become increasingly ubiquitous during the spring-summer of 2020 – video conferencing apps, project management tools. Such technologies have been described as invasive, surveilling malware but in many ways are essential to the maintenance of our physical and social wellbeing. In-grid attempts to provoke urgent critical discussion of such technologies without being didactic or judgemental. In-grid encourages us to reimagine these platforms – could they tolerate silence, encourage intimacy, used to critique?

The narratives of this residency have been dictated by many simultaneous voices. Our styles are incompatible, unparsable and interwoven throughout this project, like a rat king. How can we start to not unweave this tangled mess but see it anew, not a knot but a course, a web, a set of motions that left us here. We hope you will find our voices harmonious in places, and discordant in others. Feel free to add your own. We have written this in snippets and fragments and tiny bursts of energy and of inspiration. We’ve gone to work mid-thought, our wifi has cut out mid discussion. We write in code, we write code.

Literal Morphology aims to encounter the world as raw, before the forming of narratives, how can we learn to move through these untamed fields? How do we restrain them? And how can we let them take new forms that are comprehensible but still fluid. Join us as we decipher, synthesize and extrude how we compile, compact and restack the world. In-grid is a wordsmith, a magpie for beautiful expression. Watch as In-grid constructs their own identity, and consider how your language has constructed yours.