31 Jul 2026
The soul cannot be captured: Natasha Tontey against the regime of total visibility
Interviewby Alexander Burenkov
“ In my works, I have always portrayed technology as lacking any drive connected to the soul. The soul therefore appears, however abstractly, as a force that resists this idea of visibility—insisting that reality is not only grounded in material things that can be captured, but also in something beyond them.”
Over the last decade, Natasha Tontey has emerged as one of the most compelling voices rethinking the relationship between mythology, technology and image production within contemporary art. Rooted in the cosmologies and ritual traditions of Minahasa in North Sulawesi, her practice continuously stages collisions between ancestral belief systems and the operational logic of digital infrastructures. Working across film, installation, CGI, performance and speculative fiction, Tontey approaches technology not as a neutral tool but as a deeply ideological apparatus shaped by militarism, extraction and systems of control.
Her recent project, The Phantom Combatants and the Metabolism of Disobedient Organs, presented in Venice Biennale at Ateneo Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti and commissioned by the LAS Art Foundation, pushes these questions into increasingly complex territory. Combining LiDAR scanning, thermal cameras, photogrammetry and quantum ghost imaging with ritual choreography, speculative mythology and intentionally obsolete visual aesthetics, the installation inhabits a distinctly post-digital condition—though one that resists simplistic narratives of technological progress. Rather than presenting digital culture as seamless, immaterial or frictionless, Tontey foregrounds its glitches, residues and failures. Her computational images never fully stabilise; bodies dissolve into rendering artefacts, landscapes become probabilistic simulations, and vision itself appears haunted by the histories of surveillance and military imaging from which these technologies emerge. Yet Tontey’s work also complicates dominant Western understandings of the post-digital. In her reading, the convergence between ritual systems and technological perception long predates contemporary computation. Cartography, surveillance and myth-making were already intertwined within older forms of territorial conflict and spiritual practice in Minahasa. What contemporary digital infrastructures intensify is not simply visibility, but the operationalisation of vision itself—the transformation of images into instruments of extraction, targeting and governance.
One of the most striking tensions within the installation lies in its deliberate juxtaposition of advanced imaging systems with the aesthetics of low-budget B-movies, decaying chroma key effects and DIY material assemblages. Against the smooth perfectionism of corporate digital culture, Tontey constructs a visual world where obsolete and cutting-edge technologies coexist in unstable proximity. Glitch here is not accidental but theatrical: a deliberately staged imperfection that exposes the ideological fantasy of technological mastery. At the centre of Tontey’s practice remains a persistent question about the limits of computational capture. While contemporary imaging systems increasingly seek to render bodies, territories and behaviours fully legible, her work insists on the persistence of something that exceeds visibility altogether. Myth, ritual and the soul emerge not as nostalgic alternatives to technology, but as parallel epistemologies capable of disrupting the totalising ambitions of machine vision. In Tontey’s universe, the image is never merely representational—it is contested terrain where spirituality, geopolitics and post-digital aesthetics continuously collide.
Alexander Burenkov: Your project The Phantom Combatants and the Metabolism of Disobedient Organs at Ateneo Veneto operates through advanced imaging systems—LiDAR, thermal cameras, photogrammetry and quantum ghost imaging. At what point do these tools stop being technical devices and start functioning as cultural and aesthetic systems within your work?
NT: This is a very good question. I am interested in advanced imaging systems because of their roots in militarism. The extension of human perception—the capacity to see beyond the limits of the body—is often bound up with the operational logic of militarism: the more cyborgian the vision, the better. For me, the tension lies in asking whether these tools can be appropriated as aesthetic forms. To what extent might they even be used to expand the worldview of people in Minahasa, where I often work and which is also part of my own ancestral and cultural lineage? I think it is difficult to say precisely where the break occurs: when these tools stop functioning merely as technical devices and begin to operate as cultural or aesthetic systems. What is clear, however, is that within my practice, what is understood as an “advanced imaging system” has, from the beginning, never been separate from the DIY images I generate: decaying old chroma key effects, costumes made from whatever waste materials are available, and so on. In this sense, what is considered advanced operates alongside what is considered kitsch.
AB: The installation combines ritual, myth and CGI with technologies often used for surveillance and military mapping. Do you understand this collision as a specifically post-digital condition, where “vision” is always already militarised?
NT: I am not entirely convinced that this is a post-digital condition per se. For me, the entanglement of ritual and myth with technologies of surveillance and military mapping seems to have existed for a long time. In the context of Minahasa, I feel that this was already present in inter-tribal warfare, where cartographic principles were mediated through ritual in order to map the positions of enemies. Technologically speaking, this may not be “advanced” if we measure it against what we assume to be contemporary or present-day technology. But the logic is similar. Ritual and technology have always moved together. However, I do agree that vision has often been understood as a militaristic form of perception. In a post-digital context, we can see how image-making today is always connected to the production of operational images. It is never simply the production of neutral images.
AB: In this project commissioned by LAS foundation, bodies are not simply represented but constantly re-coded, mutated and rendered through computational processes. How does post-digital imaging reshape the idea of the body as something stable or historically legible?
NT: I have always been interested in the idea of the computer bug, and of the glitch within the digital. I am interested in imagining what happens when these concepts are applied to the context of the organic body: how the body might be understood not as a final form, but as something that continues to mutate. The post-digital condition may be one of the things that shapes this idea of the body as never static. For me, this returns to the notion of the glitch, and to the excesses of the digital world leaking into reality.
AB: A lot of post-digital discourse assumes that we have moved “beyond” the digital. Yet your work makes the digital hyper-visible through its apparatuses. Are you interested in resisting this idea of transparency or invisibility of technology?
NT: I think I am someone who has lived between two eras: one shaped by what we understand as the digital and the influx of information, and another in which almost all media were still analogue, operating through material mediation. Growing up across these two eras means that I am not particularly interested in thinking about technology in terms of either transparency or invisibility. I feel that I have always lived alongside technology. So if it is both a black box and transparent at the same time, I think that is already part of its basic condition. I am interested in the black box, but I am also interested in ritual—and ritual, in itself, is almost never transparent.
AB: The project uses B-movie aesthetics alongside highly sophisticated imaging technologies. Do you see this tension as a critique of technological smoothness, or as a way of revealing the constructedness of all visual regimes?
NT: Yes, there is a critique of perfection. The evolution of technology always produces obsolescence. I am precisely interested in that obsolescence: looking at outdated technologies and placing them alongside newer ones. The DIY spirit is also something I often apply in my work, and I owe much of this to the work ethic of B-movies from different eras, where marginal technologies were frequently used because access to the most advanced tools was limited. This has become a key foundation for me: to think about two kinds of technology—the peripheral and obsolete, and the new and seemingly perfect—colliding with one another.
AB: Military imaging systems are designed to produce certainty—identification, targeting, classification. Your work seems to transform them into myth-making machines. Is this a form of “misuse” of computational vision?
NT: Yes, and also to blur the indexicality of military imaging systems, which are otherwise highly operational. By indexicality, I mean that military imaging systems are always connected to sensing and to the residue of reality: what is captured by the apparatus becomes, in a scientific sense, an index of the real. In this work, however, I am interested in making this indexical function more ambiguous and fictional. The military imaging system is detached from its operational role, and begins to function instead through its aesthetic capacity.
AB: LAS Art Foundation often frames its programme around future-oriented technological research. In this context, how do you position your work in relation to institutional post-digital aesthetics—especially the immersive format?
NT: I am interested in the vision and mission of LAS Art Foundation, and I feel that a discursive programme is needed—one that challenges our perception of what the future is. What kind of future? Whose future? Who has the right to this future? Perhaps this is where I position myself politically. This immersive work is therefore important because these questions—of whose future we are speaking about—can be experienced sensorially.
AB: The installation stages sovereignty as something distributed across body, land and perception. Can post-digital technologies still be understood as neutral infrastructures, or are they inseparable from geopolitical power? What's the specificity of the digital culture in Indonesia?
NT: For me, technology—whether digital, analogue, post-digital, or even writing itself, as one of the oldest technologies for extending memory—is not merely a tool or instrument. It does not emerge ex nihilo. Something drives it into existence. All of these technologies shape the way we see the world; they frame the world for us. This is also why technology cannot be understood as something objective, or even neutral. In Indonesia, digital culture has indeed become embedded in everyday life, although in practical terms, because of the country’s vast scale and its many dispersed islands, it has not spread evenly or massively; it often remains centralised. What is interesting, however, is that regions considered peripheral have created their own forms of digital culture.
AB: There is a strong sense of “rendering” in your work—bodies, landscapes, memories becoming computational outputs. Do you think rendering itself has become a contemporary political operation?
NT: This returns to my point about perfection: all the images I construct here do not appear as final images. They are processes of rendering—glitching, full of bugs, and still in formation. I do not fully understand how rendering is connected to contemporary political operations, or how it becomes part of a political operation. But if what is meant is that rendering can function as a tool of capitalist speculation—for instance, when people sell a vision of the future through rendered images, such as architectural mock-ups or SketchUp models—then yes, perhaps.
AB: Your narrative of Len Karamoy introduces myth as a structural force inside technological representation. Can myth function as an alternative interface to algorithmic or machine vision systems?
NT: I think so, yes. There is also a great deal of research within media studies that has examined the close relationship between myth and technological development. I would even argue that the discourse around AI today cannot be separated from its proximity to spirituality—in the context of singularity, for instance. So it is entirely possible that myth could function as an alternative.
AB: Post-digital aesthetics often revolves around glitch, failure, noise, and instability. Your work, however, feels too constructed and choreographed for the glitch paradigm. Are you moving beyond the aesthetics of error?
NT: I am interested precisely in reproducing glitch and error as a form of aesthetic imperfection, or as a mistake in the process of making. The glitches I use here are deliberately constructed, and the errors they produce are theatrical. But this is also one of my attempts to return to the aesthetics of B-movies and the politics of taste. To what extent can advanced technology produce an aesthetic shaped by its own decay? To what extent can it be challenged to make mistakes?
AB: The work incorporates quantum ghost imaging—a technology that literally reconstructs images from light particles. What's special about this technology and what does it mean for you when the image is no longer indexical but probabilistic?
NT: As I mentioned above in relation to the indexical, I am interested in images that do not originate from the human capacity to “see”—images that do not have to come from reflected light. I am interested in making images directly from light, without passing through other objects or particles. This becomes a speculative—and, to a certain degree, fictional—process of image-making.
AB: How do you think about the relationship between immersive installation culture and post-digital spectatorship, where the viewer is no longer outside the image but computationally embedded within it?
NT: I think both can function at the same time without negating one another: an immersive installation that includes a sensorial, embodied experience can coexist with the way people encounter the post-digital as it enters their world. What interests me about post-digital spectatorship is the idea of the non-representational image. I am interested in this, and in how such a non-representational image might be experienced immersively.
AB: Your work repeatedly engages systems that measure, scan and map bodies. Do you see any possibility of refusing visibility itself within such regimes of total capture?
NT: This is an interesting question, but I imagine that within a regime of total capture— and in its relation to ritual and myth—what the system captures is flesh and machine: materialised objects. I imagine that these objects are capable of transmutation, in which visibility must be continuously updated. However, in the context of ritual and myth, what accompanies the body is the soul. In Minahasa, we also understand this as spirit, although in the West this concept may be understood through various other terms. It is this soul that cannot be captured within a system of total capture, or within the world of visibility. In my works, I have always portrayed technology as lacking any drive connected to the soul. The soul therefore appears, however abstractly, as a force that resists this idea of visibility—insisting that reality is not only grounded in material things that can be captured, but also in something beyond them.
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural strategist and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Metabolizing Time: Propositions of Countering Linearity (MU Hybrid Art House, Eindhoven, 2026); Time That Grows Slowly (Dom Art Projects, Dubai, 2026); Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025); Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024); In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
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