Love and Robots through A Scanner Darkly [excerpt]
New Zealand artist Mark Schroder’s exhilaratingly messy installation Fortune Teller riffs liberally on this idea of covering the planet in one homogenised infrastructure, whether that be the occult ministrations of a Her-styled OS, or the performative optimism of the neoliberal worker, enmeshed in the registers of productivity and wellness.
The installation itself is an office space but perhaps a version of this space denuded of pretence; rather, it is the office space bared in all its carnivorous absurdity, the office space replicated and mutated as a more honest account of the logics underlying administrative labour.
It is the office space as cartoonish vaudeville, which Schroder seems to argue is the real truth lurking between water-cooler sessions, a truth more aligned with the wildly reflexive dreamscapes of Charlie Kaufman than the droll servitude of Steve Carell. Schroder reminds us that the climate we’re currently navigating, with its stress on optimising/exploiting the Self as a potentially profitable vehicle, exists not as the tidy arrival point of Game Theory (which would have us believe humans are rational players making economical choices for themselves at all times—which is just not the case), but as the schizophrenic swan-song of a system consuming itself like Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail.
And just like Ouroboros, especially now amidst eco-collapse and a world remade by pandemic, we’re vibrating in the throes of imploding-and-not quite-reborn, awaiting renewal with coiled spines and chronically withdrawn accounts.
Accordingly Schroder’s installation is a squishy chaos, its colours frequently bleeding out of its own sporadic lines so that the actual gallery office-space seems deliberately fused with the work. Schroder’s corporate partitions are littered with curious tangibilities, ceramics and literal dirt and forgotten coffee mugs and wine glasses, all the very human detritus remaining from bodies moving through a space which would otherwise see them transformed into the stuff of algorithms. It’s a far cry from the sterility normally associated with corporate ontologies. Which is the point.
The walls of Schroder’s labyrinth-like structure are plastered with sunny platitudes about succeeding, about being happy, about optimising the Self for a bigger slice of cheese. (Cheese is a motif throughout, that hackneyed money-metaphor that makes competitive rats of its labourers.)
As you spend time with it you realise this install is also about the physical world and its frequent rebellions, even amidst the brute efficiency of a machine geared for profit, product, and punishment. It’s a broke-down panopticon that proudly bears the stamp of fallibility, a glitch in the fascistic determinations of a society which nowadays exacts labour with an oppressively mathematical, super subtle, almost spiritual precision.
The (pathological?) detail of Fortune Teller weaves a cunning effect, wobbling the demarcation between the hallowed space of Art and its administrative scaffolding in a rigorous profanation of that which is only sacrosanct by the graces of an opaque market. And the manoeuvre, like a palindrome, can be read both ways.
Samuel Te Kani