Infinite Regress, 2022

 If there be gods.

by Tricky Walsh.

“It is the moment when our artist
Having regressed to the point of
Infinity, himself becomes a part
Of the picture he has painted and
Is both the Observer and the observed…

…I think that time

can only be fully understood...

by an observer with a godlike gift

of infinite regression.”[1]

Science is a parsimonious thing.
Always looking for the least creative and most obvious pathway from A to B.
That’s fine. That is not the role of Art however, which is to take us from A to Pi to the speed of light, to the distance to Jupiter’s 80 or so moons, to the colour of the fading blush of sunset as it shifts from warm to cool, to a hundred other disparate things, to B.
Or not at all.
As far as Art’s inner logic goes, the journey is even more tangential and rhizomic. Not every train of thought reaches the station to which it had planned to arrive.

 Infinite regresses are interesting. They’re basically arguments whose reasons are full of holes and require justifying themselves [but generally aren’t.] Building houses with cards or straw. Or trying to explain to a five-year-old the inequities of the art world.
Why? Because. But why? Because why.

Every time I think of the art world, I think of the thought experiment about the Grand Hotel, conceived of by David Hilbert in 1924. An infinitely scaled structure which can house an infinite amount of people. No vacancies, but always able to accommodate more guests. Every time a new person arrives, the lodgers are all shuffled into the next room along to make space for the new occupant, room two goes to room three, room three goes to room four, and so on. The first room gets the most consideration, because it always houses the new. Such is the attention span of this universe. In the art world there are fingernail scratches on the door of the first room. No one wants to move. No one wants to disappear further along the infinite hallway because most of the curators stop after door five.

 There is a nice idea about mutual accountability however, which the poet Lawrence Lesser refers to in his poem Infinity Hotel:

“Last thing I remember at the end of my stay –

It was time to pay the bill but I had no means to pay.

The man in 19 smiled, “Your bill is on me.

20 pays mine, and so on, so you get yours for free!”[2]

This is the burden and the refuge of lineage.
Accountability. Connection. Inheritance. Responsibility. Art school teaches us to ignore or deny it. It is both a shame and a waste and perpetuates the isolated nature of art making, the romanticised myth of the lone creative genius. None of us were brought forth fully grown, ignorant of the world. We have picked up and adopted the tiny patches which have eventuated in the construction of our selves. Sadly, instead of acknowledging our origins, we fall into snide competitions of Who wore it better. As if these things had not been worn by a hundred other people before us. Perhaps differently. But we are not a species that embraces difference very often.
 
Infinity is a game played with child logic.
You can +1 it as much as you like, but the giant bulk of infinity will never increase. It can’t, it lacks an end point for expansion. You can’t add a drop to the river and consider it enlarged when your drop is now 45 kilometres along the stream bed and travelling further from you every second. When your drop probably evaporated and is currently condensing in a cloud overhead, ready to fall again on some other surface. Your drop was probably swallowed by a bird and now lines a shit-caked nest twenty feet above the river. Your drop, if ever you could own such a thing, always belonged to the river anyway. Our demarcations are finite and measured. Time. Space. But the thing itself, away from our interference, is limitless.

 Infinity is interesting in that it is generally communicated by numbers. Hilbert, who was horribly fluent in the language of mathematics noted that “infinity is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought…The role that remains for the infinite is solely that of an idea – if one means by an idea, in Kant’s terminology, a concept of reason which transcends all experience and which completes the concrete as a totality – that of an idea which we may unhesitatingly trust within the framework erected by our [mathematical] theory.”[3] But the infinite is an idea which interests most of us. We who inhabit the physical world and cannot possibly comprehend its magnitude, considering our short lives and finite resources. We relate to it through contrast or limitation. Think of it as a life like this, but exactly not. Like trying to imagine a billionaire’s hoard. We just can’t compute things over a certain scale. Our inability to comprehend that has led us to this moment – a world determined by a handful of people who assuredly are not looking after our better interests. It’s like at some point we stopped believing in gods and then to fill the void, we raised these puppet people. Gave them unlimited power over all dominion, let them peer into all the hidden spaces. Forgot to read the fine print.

Robert O’Connor has created an infinite regress.
Like all information systems, there are things which are prioritised and things which are allowed to stop existing. He does this with a kind of verticalization of the information strata. Working in layers which recede past the painted surface and into the historical. It’s almost archaeological, inferring to the demarcations of time by situating disparate referents in composition. Hand in hand, as they say. When context is everything, what happens when you divorce it from the content? I have always enjoyed the abstracted sense of the correlative in O’Connor’s works. There are obvious relationships between the subjects and objects within his paintings which allude to subtle and unspoken narratives. I prefer this. I don’t always need to be lectured to. Granted, they are usually overwritten with some childish tantrum or intricate renderings of piles of shit or a scribble of a bong, but that’s just the pixifoto operator waving a shiny toy to catch our attention and make us smile, distract us from the real work underneath. As is his right, O’Connor denies the right to dissemble. “The individual paintings in this series don’t mean anything in particular and they are indifferent to whatever meaning-making you want to put them through.”[4] I can appreciate this sentiment though I also understand a little of what it is hiding, because I too, baffle with information so as not to be comprehended. In Art, the narrow margin between wanting to be perceived and lying exposed on the floor can often be smeared onto either side of the same membrane.

O’Connor steals from the canon of art as readily as he does from the doomscroll of popular culture, to similar although perhaps more democratic effect. The works were, after all, think-tanked by a group of students he was working with. A trojan horse designed by committee.
He explains that the paintings “are the result of a quasi-democratic and sort-of violent process where images are taken-from, given-to, copied, cut up, stuck back together, edited, revised, etc, and so on. In this way they are closer to meme-making or data processing than art. “[5] It’s an interesting thing to hand over the steering wheel, particularly to a different generation. Particularly to one which has formed while embedded within this often-overwhelming information age. One which lacks the emptiness and boredom to contextualise it, but which is a far superior processor of that much stuff. We inhabit vastly different worlds, and “we can no longer come to agreement on what we’re seeing, because we’re looking at different pictures of the world. It’s not just that we have different perspectives on the same events and stories; we’re being shown fundamentally different realities, by algorithms looking to trigger our engagement by any means necessary.”[6] Our world now is curated by machines whom we have collectively taught, but which speak at a pace that increasingly we cannot keep up with.

Is there an innate and intended deception in producing a text or image whose contents actively seek to unravel the accepted logic? Is it deception if it’s none of your fkn business anyway? We assume a certain level of ownership over what we feel we have a right to access. Surveillance technology and social networking has stretched the good nature of this owner/relationship and allowed us to poke deep into each other’s psyches and regurgitate our every thought. The idea of importance has been thrown out the window, thanks to the mirage of democratisation. Everyone has a right to contribute, everyone has a right to know. Every social network is a mine and a cloning machine. Find the gold. Copy the gold. Line the walls with it until we mistake its endless sparkle for the sun.

 One wall in the exhibition is composed entirely of painted images. A collage of collages. It fills the wall like one of those walls of screens you see in sci-fi films and overwhelms as much as the aversion therapy scene in Clockwork Orange. It also brings to mind every lacklustre security guard falling asleep in front of a hundred surveillance monitors. You can almost smell the crushed red bull cans, hear their amelodic lullaby as they scatter to the floor.

 We are all well aware of how surveilled and collected we are now.
We do a lot of it voluntarily, adding our faces and thoughts and actions into the great melting pot of the cloud. I say voluntarily, but I guess I mean ignorantly. We give a vast proportion of ourselves to the infinite stream of information, to the companies who collect and sell it, completely incapable of comprehending the vastness and breadth of the network. Like the grand hotel, no vacancies, always room for more.

Well, not all of us.
In 2011 the Spanish Data Protection Agency decided to take on Google to support ninety of its citizens’ “right to the future tense.”[7] This, is an incredible action for so many reasons, the first of which has to be in the acknowledgement of the infinite capacity of the system, and of our right to not participate within that. We should be allowed to. Particularly when we lose our context. Particularly when we are no longer trained to dig deeper, to uncover the layers of meaning behind the memes. “Google’s mission to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’”[8] on the surface sounds like a benign librarian fighting for an access ramp, and if it were limited to a physical structure then that might be the case. The nature of the internet however, with its constantly perpetuating present-tense has made the right to be forgotten impossible.

“In Europe, the intellectual roots of the right to be forgotten can be found in French law, which recognises le droit a l’oubli – or the “right of oblivion” – a right that allows a convicted criminal who has served his time and been rehabilitated to object to the publication of the facts of his conviction and incarceration.”[9] In the internet, we never serve enough time and can never be rehabilitated, and “for individuals it has meant that information that would normally age and be forgotten remains forever young”[10]  This vampiric eternalism is at odds with the human memory, including the way we process information.

 “Memory consolidation – the process of storing and discarding information” [11] happens in both REM and NREM (deep) sleep, its connection to dreaming is perhaps something we shouldn’t ignore. The unexpected pathways, the tangents and the subliminal narratives which follow unexpected logics. We don’t naturally think like machines, particularly when in an unconscious state. Then we think and process information like artists. With the senses and by connecting disparate things and creating worlds. And while we sleep, our brains determine what is important.

 Perhaps artists are like the internet, never letting go of anything, keeping everything present. Maybe that’s what this is, this room of images and too-much-stuff – the should-be discarded leavings of a brain that just won’t let go. Maybe, if there are actually deities or even just the omnipotent eye of the surveillance gods watching us make our infinite regresses, then Robert O’Connor is Prometheus hiding the bones of the beast under a layer of shiny delicious fat to fool them.
Make sense of it, I dare you.

Tricky Walsh

October 2022.

[1] Dehn, Paul. Escape from the Planet of the Apes. [script] 1971 pp 14-16.
https://www.scripts.com/script/escape_from_the_planet_of_the_apes_7745

[2] “Hotel Infinity,” poem in six verses by Lawrence Mark Lesser, first published in American Mathematical Monthly 113 (2006): 704. See also Glaz 2011, p. 177. 

[3] Hilbert, David 1925. “Über das Unendliche.” Mathematische Annalen 95: p 190

[4] ROC Notes/artist statement.

[5] ROC Notes/artist statement.

[6] Rushkoff, Douglas. “We've Spent the Decade Letting Our Tech Define Us. It's out of control.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 29 Dec. 2019, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/29/decade-technology-privacy-tech-backlash

[7] Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, 2019, p58.

[8] Ibid p59.

[9] http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox-the-right-to-be-forgotten/

[10] Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power.   Profile Books, 2019, p59.

[11] http://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/memory-and-sleep