Look to the Monkey King! Ludd Rises From the Mud! Lyricism Against the Automaton Menace!
Ink and pencil on paper.
According to myth, in 1779 England, in a fit of mad and brilliant passion the heroic textile worker and One True King Ludd smashed two stocking frames to pieces. In the wake, the Luddite movement grew - disenfranchised and desperate workers destroyed machinery that threatened their livelihoods, and ultimately faced military resistance.
Machines, automation, and the evangelical promise of techno utopia, were/are used as timely excuses to quash worker’s rights, replacing the costly handcrafted with the thoughtless and cheap. We think wrongly of the Luddites as irrational people, emotional and reactive to things they did not understand — they were no such thing. This was early British working class political consciousness.
The legacy of the Luddites and their righteous smashings can be traced through eco-terrorist activities irl and in fiction — from Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang to the Unabomber’s manifesto — though no unified modern movement has coherently manifested. Many neo-luddites reject violence and vandalism entirely.
Like the textile workers of the North England of the 1800s, contemporary workers are being threatened just the same, with neural networks (or “stochastic parrots”) gobbling data and burping up slurries of pictolinguistic haze.
How might we smash such ephemeral steaming sausage machines? That sprawl so wide, temporally and spatially; are unrooted from singular locations; that we are already enmeshed in, already being digested by?
If these machines live and die on their training data - the mire of content we produce and upload - might such a destruction come from artwork itself? From typos neglected… from lyricism misplaced… from a rawness and unintelligibility and all-too-human shrieking… from a sad and stubborn commitment to the smudging authenticity of ink on paper, scanned and uploaded and fed on, mistakenly?
Redux of Decor, online
1 Nov 2023 - 1 Mar 2024
According to myth, in 1779 England, in a fit of mad and brilliant passion the heroic textile worker and One True King Ludd smashed two stocking frames to pieces. In the wake, the Luddite movement grew - disenfranchised and desperate workers destroyed machinery that threatened their livelihoods, and ultimately faced military resistance.
Machines, automation, and the evangelical promise of techno utopia, were/are used as timely excuses to quash worker’s rights, replacing the costly handcrafted with the thoughtless and cheap. We think wrongly of the Luddites as irrational people, emotional and reactive to things they did not understand — they were no such thing. This was early British working class political consciousness.
The legacy of the Luddites and their righteous smashings can be traced through eco-terrorist activities irl and in fiction — from Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang to the Unabomber’s manifesto — though no unified modern movement has coherently manifested. Many neo-luddites reject violence and vandalism entirely.
Like the textile workers of the North England of the 1800s, contemporary workers are being threatened just the same, with neural networks (or “stochastic parrots”) gobbling data and burping up slurries of pictolinguistic haze.
How might we smash such ephemeral steaming sausage machines? That sprawl so wide, temporally and spatially; are unrooted from singular locations; that we are already enmeshed in, already being digested by?
If these machines live and die on their training data - the mire of content we produce and upload - might such a destruction come from artwork itself? From typos neglected… from lyricism misplaced… from a rawness and unintelligibility and all-too-human shrieking… from a sad and stubborn commitment to the smudging authenticity of ink on paper, scanned and uploaded and fed on, mistakenly?
Redux of Decor, online
1 Nov 2023 - 1 Mar 2024
