Reader,
Irena Haiduk currently lives and works in the year 2136. She is available through a dimensional transmitter that locates her Biotic Tag, a form of embodied ID marker that allows her to separate her physical body from any level of her consciousness. Two years ago, Nicola Lees and Haiduk met in Aspen, Colorado, and began a conversation about finding forms to hold art, the exhibition as a medium and exhibition design. They took a long green walk with Lees’s dog Lutz and spoke about the rehabilitation of the camera, traditionally used as an image-capturing ap- paratus. This optical intelligence, incepted as a weapon, “shoots” things to possess them, and uploads the evidence: a culmination of centuries of technological development focused on the eye. Haiduk reported that following the 21st century Climate Cataclysm, the camera gets restored to its original use, meaning a chamber or a room, a place where images can accumulate over time in an embodied, intentional way, and where this process can be witnessed in public. The camera could host again. It formed a studio, a place artists offer to the world, a place for study where one can give up control of oneself to learn something about oneself. This loss of control, letting the unknown in, is akin to being possessed by a demon. This kind of host- ing turns possession on its head and challenges the idea of safe, inert display and collection. Instead of embalming, preservation and eternity, in- stead of inanimate assets inside exhibitions— a demonstration, demon, demos, monstera, a living public studio, where to host allows letting other(s) work through you, to become another self. Haiduk’s own work is invested in relationships between aesthetics and economy, image ecology and the way that economic infrastructure leaves clear aesthetic marks. She believes that to work in an aesthetic field rooted in making desires, to make art today, is to share the responsibility for what aesthetic economies maintain. Desires, many of them powered by art, brought us here. As our planet becomes impossible to physically inhabit, it is urgent to ask again, from many directions and on every level: what is art for? Can it find forms that do not make us want to dispose of ourselves? At this time, Haiduk offers an orientation, the same that Lees underwent in 2022, to prepare ground for different conversations to come. Note that this procedure auto-generates your individual Biotic Tag, one that you may use in future encounters.
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