14 May 2025
The siege
Essayby Fernando José Pereira
“If historical colonialism annexed territories, their resources, and the bodies that laboured in them, the concentration of power by data colonialism is both simpler and deeper: the capture and control of human life itself through the appropriation of data that can be extracted for profit. If that is true, then, just as historical colonialism provided the fuel for the future ascent of industrial capitalism, data colonialism is also paving the way for a capitalism rooted in the exploitation of data.” 1
Nothing is more typical of our era than the idea that we have no time. This notion is not exactly new. It has gradually got ever closer, and we now live besieged by a machine-driven sense of time that seeks its apogee in the quest for instantaneity. We live subject to a time that is not human and crafted by algorithms, leaving us drained and unanesthesia2. Yet a paradox becomes clear, though it is a singular one. We, as a society, in general, have never been more enthralled by the very technology that causes this shift. None of this is surprising, of course, given the daily avalanche of novelty spread across multiple channels by the so-called communication capitalism. Newness emerges on a daily basis and engulfs us from every direction, whether online, on television, or on the countless illuminated panels that have invaded our cities. There is no way to avoid it. Complicity arises bit by bit in day-to-day practices that link us more intensively with digital devices.
To start with, we endlessly scroll in any place where this is feasible. No specific or perceptual restrictions apply, such as, for instance, the simple act of watching a film in a movie theatre, and there’s a sudden bluish glow invading the darkness.
The recourse en masse to mobile phones to take pictures of artworks in our museums, or the selfie clicked before an artwork so often out of focus there somewhere in the background, exemplifies what Anselm Jappe3 calls the heightened narcissism of a self-consuming society.
Such images are seldom (if ever) looked at again. Or, at best, they are viewed in ways that misrepresent the experience of visiting the exhibition space. A relatively recent example is the show “Ágora” by American artist Mark Bradford at Serralves Museum. The exhibition featured enormous paintings for people to see/contemplate in what is the museum’s “public” space. Agora, in its most fundamental sense, means a square, assembly point, or gathering place4. It is, therefore, a site of community. A community (of visitors) arriving at the museum (would) have its own distinct expectations for what it encounters, and because of the particular characteristics of that specific museum setting, it is an experience incapable of being reproduced elsewhere. In this particular but also paradigmatic context (alongside other examples we shall see further on), the viewer is confronted with a series of large paintings placed around a group of fifteenth-century tapestries called “The Unicorn Hunt.” It would be wrong, however, to see this as atemporal, a merely illustrative, or documental show. It is instead an exhibit of so-called “socially abstract” works that, while appearing akin to abstraction, or that are indeed abstract, are endowed with a social dimension in the kinds of materials being used. A case in point would be the addition of small aluminium patches common in hair colouring, (the artist’s mother’s being a hairdresser). All of this is important, but one factor is decisive in our discussion: scale. These works are on a very large scale, and when the viewer gets up close - a must with such paintings - they become immersed in the artworks thanks to their sheer size.
Returning to the thorny issue of mobile phone usage in the museum, the simple act of photographing one of these paintings to look at later (once time is available, that is to say, never) alters the entire perceptual framework the artist has set out to achieve through the work’s vast scale. The scale inverts entirely: now what we have is a body contemplating a painting on a small three-inch screen. The once monumental painting becomes lilliputian, subsumed by the body’s scale.
All of this is peculiar and yet commonplace these days.
In her latest book, Disordered Attention / How We Look at Art and Performance Today, Claire Bishop addresses the issue of mobile phones within museum spaces. She introduces a concept called “hybrid attention” to explain the mass desire to photograph or film art. She bases this on the duration of performances by, for example, Anne Imhof at the Venice Biennale. From her standpoint, the length of time, and near-static motion of the performers render them “Instagrammable.” In other words, from the spectator’s point of view (which Bishop adopts), the artist arranges these participants in poses ready to be photographed, and the extended timeframe of the performance is conducive to the “hybrid attention” she describes, making it almost second nature to turn away from the work to focus on our phones. From the artist’s perspective (I also saw this performance at the Venice Biennale and did not photograph or film it out of respect for the artist and the piece), this possibility is new and poses definite challenges. Capitalism, with its chameleon-like capacity to absorb all things, has discovered a way into this form of resistance, despite the inherent difficulties in processes that rely on duration, a quality seemingly at odds with instantaneity. This has again been achieved thanks to an unlikely ally: those attending the shows. Bishop acknowledges her own habit of taking photographs or videos to use later in her work. Yet this feels like an unrealistic interpretation of what happens in most cases, given that the vast majority, if not nearly all, of these captured images serve no purpose beyond the narcissistic goal of achieving “likes” once shared5. Even so, it remains a pertinent theoretical viewpoint, well worth following with close attention as it evolves.
Not by mere coincidence, but because of the work’s significance, Peter Osborne also refers to Anne Imhof’s performance in Venice in his most recent book, from 2024, in order to question contemporary temporality in its close relationship with technology. The English philosopher states: “If the contemporary is fundamentally a new temporal form, bringing together in disjunctive conjunction a multiplicity of temporalities that are forced into relations with one another as a result of the increased social dependencies of a globalizing capital, then it will be in the museum’s specific forms of mediation of these temporal economic relations that its contemporary character will lie.” In other words, in the mediations between artists and publics, now compulsively6 assailed by the technological “tinyfication” provided by mobile phones and the digital possibilities that spread through what are called social networks.
In a well-known essay titled “What is the Contemporary,” the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben addresses this condition of ours. He says that in order to be truly contemporary, one must be aware of being simultaneously inside and outside this epochal concept, which means not abandoning the multiple layers of time that human life requires: past, present and future. Yet the siege perpetrated by algorithmic language tries to block any possible exit from within its perpetual present, attempting to generate a form of social schizophrenia, as Fredric Jameson already warned in the early 1990s.
In an increasingly visible way.
The use of the verb “to see” here is not accidental. Digital technology and the society it is moulding rely profoundly on an (ocularcentric) image bank. Screens are everywhere, from the mobile phone in our pocket or purse to shop windows displays, advertising panels that have now become digital screens, and other urban visual devices. In today’s cities, we are confronted daily with the glaring brightness of these devices, always presented as the latest in futuristic ideas seeping into the present. The excessive glare of our age seems to be its calling card. Consider, to give just one example, the harm done to nature by all these infotainment systems in our public parks7, where trees and nocturnal animals have to suffer under overpowering artificial light. The street lighting that now uses small LEDs brings with it an unwelcome new development: shadows cast by natural elements (for instance, leaves of our trees) appear strangely unnatural, as if algorithmically pixelated.
Let us return to Agamben and his essay. The Italian author says8 that “the contemporary is someone who fixes their gaze on their time, perceiving not its lights, but its darkness. All eras are obscure for whoever lives their contemporaneity. The contemporary is precisely the one who knows how to see that obscurity, who can write by dipping the nib into the gloom of the present.” In other words, if we wed the darkness of the contemporary with a conscious obsolescence that makes a connection to the past through its very lack of nowness, we end up with a less starstruck interpretation of the contemporary idea of the present. We could say, with Agamben, that being out of time is to be genuinely contemporary. The out-of-time entity lives the present in an active manner, making their presence known alongside it. It is thus a (pres)entity, as the Spanish philosopher Garcia Bacca said, from his Mexican exile.
Another unavoidable reality is the glut of images churned out by digital devices, or the flow9 as described by Peter Osborne in his latest book. In a previous text, I called them para-images. Statistics show a daily average of 100 million images uploaded to the internet on Instagram alone. Over time, all these pictures break down into code that never even stands a chance of being perceived as real, in an act of utter cannibalisation. By becoming a banal sight, they also render banal the reality they fight to survive in. We look on, for instance, unalarmed, at the genocide occurring in Gaza. In communication capitalism, it is just another in an endless sequence of images, alongside cat reels or the multi-million transfer of some footballer or pop star entangled in a scandal of questionable political correctness. In this state of affairs, images have reached a saturation level that complicates how artists engage with their own image production. How can such output endure in a world oversaturated with imagery? How can we use the technology available to us in a way that is critical and not purely dazzled by what we have at our fingertips? From within the realm of art, how can we look upon the latest major innovation, Artificial Intelligence?
These questions carry doubts that artists will naturally struggle to answer10. Nor do they necessarily need to. The works they produce will remain open to interpretation from these angles.
Let us therefore look not for a single definitive reply to these questions, but instead at the open possibilities for creating work under entirely adverse conditions, by discussing a few recent works and experiments by artists that prompt us to reflect on this subject. After all, no conclusive responses exist, at least not in the open field of contemporary artistic practice. There are only resonances.
It is well known that, for quite some time, the so-called disciplinary practices have been in crisis, replaced by a more wide-ranging and open way of working. Some years ago, following a noted essay by Rosalind Krauss11, this approach was identified as post-medium12. The main novelty of this concept lay in recognising the failure of any supposed intrinsic link between medium and support. The argument put forward by the American scholar, taking the work of Marcel Broodthaers as an example, was the opposite. For the Belgian artist, no support (such as the canvas in a painter’s case) can be identified as the consistent element across his output. Quite the contrary. Yet one medium became indispensable in all his pieces: fiction. It was therefore a radical transformation. Here, the medium is not tied to any particular support; it is conceptual, what Krauss describes as differential specificity.
This important finding, reached in the case of the aforementioned text based on an artist’s work, simply confirms what has always been normal in artistic practice: artists now have access to every possible field of intervention, from the body to the most complex of technologies.
In that spirit, I would like to discuss the work of two artist-composers, thus primarily working in sound, whose output provides important insights for the points raised here. I refer to the American composer, based in Sweden, Kali Malone, and the Canadian composer Sarah Davachi. Both have academic backgrounds in electro-acoustic music, an interest in various tuning systems, and experience with generative and technological composition methods. Despite this background, each has explored instruments not generally perceived as modern: the pipe organ and, in Malone’s case, the specificity of vocal polyphony.
If we listen to records13 released by each composer, we notice that, alongside these instruments, there are modular synthesiser compositions, and that the relationship between the two approaches is entirely unproblematic. What emerges quite clearly, as in most artistic practices, is that it is never the technology alone that creates the results, but rather the artists who impose their vision on technology. Let us take a closer look at these two examples. Both Kali Malone and Sarah Davachi use the pipe organ for its distinctive sonic qualities. Above all, it extends sound over prolonged periods. Their approaches to composition, which rely on just intonation, are entirely contemporary. Although musicians outside the Western tradition adopted this method long ago, it was thoroughly explored in the minimalist movement and, with the arrival of electronic and later digital technology, such processes expanded even further. The apparent obsolescence of using such a dated instrument as the pipe organ thus becomes absolutely contemporary. Let us recall Agamben’s concept of the contemporary. In these instances, the point is illustrated very explicitly.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that Kali Malone’s most recent album14 opens with a polyphonic vocal piece using Agamben’s own words15. The Italian author’s text comes from another book called Profanations. In it, he argues that it is easy to profane the sacred, bringing something that had been claimed by the sacred into the secular realm (these are the words sung on the record). Yet it concludes with a decisive sentence: it is impossible to profane what cannot be profaned, referring to capitalism’s chameleon-like capacity to perversely convert everything for profit. This is a statement of utmost relevance to the theme of this text. Technology and the digital domain are perhaps the most severely affected by such hegemonic appropriation. We should remember that the internet’s initial appearance was presented, somewhat naively, as a space for freedom. The etymology of the word cyber, used at that time to describe the virtual realm, makes it easy to see what was really at stake: cyber has its origins in a Greek term meaning control. Moreover, the earliest browsers were all named, presumably not by chance, in allusions to European colonial expansion (Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator...).
In the two examples outlined here, the chief point to emphasise is the link that music establishes with the idea of duration, which may well be, as we have seen, the last form of artistic resistance against machine-driven instantaneity. Duration stands in complete opposition to instantaneity.
Claire Bishop, despite what was previously been said at the start of this text, has other significant thoughts to add to this notion. She suggests that a work’s extended duration in performance is one possible method of resistance in art that must also come to terms with Artificial Intelligence. Performance, as a bodily practice free from technological closure, exemplifies this16.
In the midst of the pandemic, the Northern Irish artist Willie Doherty17 produced a video intended for online viewing only. Given that particular historical moment, no other form of exhibition was possible. Aside from his deliberately anachronistic use of black and white, (at a time with potentially millions of colours at our disposal, which distances him from a coloured pseudo-realness), what stands out most is the piece’s length, in a medium that is averse to the overlong.
Duration, along with the choice to step out of time in the piece’s relationship to images and time, brings into focus possible ways to break free from the hegemony of technological immediacy.
Susana Soares Pinto, an artist based in London, uses medieval painting techniques in her most recent works, rejecting any industrialised means of production of materials. Even so, these artworks strongly address some of today’s most pressing issues, such as the threat looming over nature because of rampant extractivism. Once again, hers is a practice that demonstrates a lucid critique beyond any rhetorical flourishes. Her chosen materials and methods are what guide her to the results she seeks: an ongoing examination of how different forms of extractivism, from coal to data and technology, reinforce domination. In each case, the outcomes remain the same: ever more pollution, ever more exploitation, ever more profit. Self-consumption, excess, self-destruction.
Agamben’s idea of profanation is also the most helpful term to define the group of works by the Spanish artist Xoán-Xil López. He won a prize in one of the most recent Ars Electronica festivals in Linz, Austria, with objects reminiscent of archaic sculptures that produce birdsong. This is an important development, as Ars Electronica is the highest-profile event for so-called technological art, and so it is even more noteworthy that the award should go to something seemingly alien among all the cutting-edge machines on show. It brings, perhaps, a degree of insight.
We have covered just two possible ways that art and technology relate to each other: duration and obsolescence. These are the methods most directly associated with today’s complicated notion of the contemporary, a term now almost indistinguishable from the digital. Many other possibilities exist. One way or another, art has always had to adapt critically to new technological achievements. To recall only the most recent examples, there was photography, then cinema, then video, and finally, the digital realm.
What sets this new state of affairs apart is the pan-system that has formed around it. The siege is absolute, and colonisation total. Photography, cinema, video, sound, all have been besieged, so that at present these technologies are to a large extent only made in digital form. This situation places the more technology-based artistic processes in a new and unprecedented light. Art now uses the same technical means (algorithmic programming) as industry, the war machine, as we can see nowadays with the IA integration on the genocide in Gaza, the financial system, and so on. For art, this leads to a circumscription profoundly opposed to its experimental potential. Hence the challenge it faces: how to inhabit this territory from within while remaining somewhat outside it, a form of inexteriority18. Artists’ strategies already hint at an art capable of engaging with these new technological conditions as a conceptual challenge.
One final example. The Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr has said that what drove creativity in analogue cinema, with its large filming equipment, was the potential to make tracking shots and panoramas or to follow characters with the camera on one’s shoulder. Today, with the miniaturisation and digitisation of live viewing, the real challenge is to resist that impulse and stick to a fixed-shot plan. What better metaphor for the situation we face, and what clearer way to describe the possibility of using technology critically?
Perhaps one of the most essential tasks in this time-starved modern day is the courage to de-modernise, as the Mexican scholar Irmgard Hemmelainz19 argues, which means returning to a human experience of time that detaches us from the unreality of machine (mainly digital) temporalities, entranced by paralysing instantaneity. To go back to a time that can manifest itself.
I wrote many years ago that art’s utopia contrasts with the aporia of the digital20. I do not regret those words and find them truer today than ever, more than at the time, which was in the late 1990s.
I have no fondness for starry-eyed optimism, but I do believe I am tenacious. Perhaps that makes me an optimist.
Fernando José Pereira
1 Couldry, Nick; Mejías, Ulises: The costs of connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism, Stanford University, 2019
2 This text is set out in a kind of heterotopia beyond anesthesia. At the beginning of this century, I developed an idea that still seems important to me today: de-anesthesia. Duchamp spoke of his works as anesthetised by taste. Times, however, have changed. Today we need another formulation: de-anesthesia comes from the etymology of the word anesthesia, originally in ancient Greek referring to the negation of beauty. In the 19th century, it gained another meaning that has remained to this day: the negation of pain. De-anesthesia is established through the unconcealment of beauty as a possibility for the unconcealment of pain.
3 JAPPE; Anselm. The Self-Devouring Society: Capitalism, Narcissism, and Self-Destruction, Antígona, Lisbon, 2019
4 At this level, we might recall the approach of the filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul who, in his latest film Memoria, made use of the potential of sound: extremely low frequencies (possibly the film’s main characters), only audible through high-quality sound systems, in order to encourage cinema-going so that we could together experience the film communally. Crucially, the fact that it cannot be properly experienced outside theatres is not some rhetorical barrier to be overcome. It is the consequence of a choice intimately tied to the act of making cinema itself: using sound as a decisive element in its interplay with the visuals. An artistic act, then.
5 For more details on this final point, see my text in Luís Ribeiro’s book Welcome to Paradise.
6 We are, of course, reminded of Yanis Varoufakis’s notion of “techno-feudalism,” describing how global capitalism has shifted into a system that concentrates all power in the hands of a small minority, an elite, through the control of digital technologies.
7 One perplexing example being the annual summer show at Serralves Museum.
8 AGAMBEN, Giorgio: Nudity, 2009, Relógio d’água, Lisbon.
9 “There is a clear disjunction between the temporal forms of the old idea of the photograph and that of digitalized photographic image production. In particular, the seemingly naturalized flow of digitalized data and images, participation in which has become a condition of so many social relations, create a difficulty and mutability of the image that produces an accelerating and self-forgetting temporality…The photograph’s existential proximity to the world – its indexicality – is thus increasingly registered less in the content of the image than in the often rapidly image-obliterating act of exchange”. OSBORNE; Peter, Crisis as Form, Verso Books, London, 2024
10 In a kind of farewell publication, the theorist Benjamin H. D. Buchloh speaks with Hal Foster. At a certain point, he remarks: “To my mind emulating the regime of domination in the most precise way is a necessary strategy for a work of art. It’s only one operation among many, but it’s a significant one. Take Conceptualism. In the guise of anti-aesthetics, its stripping of all forms of administration. We’ve yet to see an analogous movement that would take a similar approach to advanced forms of digital culture today – that would tell us, for example, about the impossibility of grasping anything tactile in that culture.” Buchloh, Benjamin H.D; Foster, Hal. Exit Interview, no place press, Massachusetts, 2024
11A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition,Thames & Hudson, London, 2000
12 This raises significant questions about the return to a specific medial condition in the post-medium era, now introduced under the label of digital art, and further reinforced by another outdated theoretical concept, the new. So-called digital art inevitably appears connected to the term “new media.”
13 By way of example, from Kali Malone, the album Does Spring Hide Its Joy, Ideologic Organ, 2023. From Sarah Davachi, the album Long Gradus, Late Music, 2023. Neither of these is their latest release.
14 Kali Malone, All life long, Ideological Organ, 2024
15This is mentioned on the artist’s Bandcamp page: “Agamben defines profanation as, in part, the act of bringing back to communal, secular use that which has been segregated to the realm of the sacred, a process Malone enacts each time she performs on church organs.”
16 Despite its extreme speed, AI remains trapped within the enclosed universe of the virtual. It is therefore unable to conceive of anything less smooth and cold, unlike people with their unavoidable and highly significant sensitive vulnerabilities.
18 My own notion, derived from Jacques Lacan’s concept of extimacy.
19 Pereira, F. J. (Ed.) (2020). Irmgard Emmelhainz. A arte útil e as indústrias culturais. Lado B - Cadernos DAP, (2). i2ADS/DAP.
20 A sentence that serves as motif for the title of the PhD I completed in 2001. Its original title is “Contemporary Art, the Utopia of an Exiled Existence. Digital Developments as a New Aporetic (Im)Possibility”.
BIOGRAPHY
Fernando José Pereira (Porto) is an artist and researcher at the Institute for Research in Art and Design (University of Porto) and the Aesthetics and Art Theory Group at the Faculty of Philosophy (University of Salamanca). His works are featured in the following public and private collections: Serralves Foundation, Contemporary Art Institute, Calouste Gulbenkian Collection, Galician Center for Contemporary Art (Santiago de Compostela), Museu da Cidade de Lisboa, PLMJ Foundation Collection, Ilídio Pinho Foundation, University of Porto, Porto City Council Collection, the Portuguese State Contemporary Art Collection. Member of the Virose collective. Member of the Haarvöl project.
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