Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data

What connects a bisected 22-meter planet radiating a warm red glow in Greek summertime with a mirrored techno-temple nestled within the artificial vegetation of an Athens park?

And the dreamlike delusions of an artificial intelligence projected before the statue of a king who led us on a military expedition into the depths of the East one hundred years ago – what might they have to tell us?

Why do sunsets in video games never end?

Where does skin end and clothing begin?

How would you like your digital body to be, once your physical body is dead and gone?

Would you ever heed a prophecy spouted by a disembodied artificial intelligence?

Digital technology is both entering into the human body and extending it beyond its bounds. This network of bodies, an offshoot of both surveillance and entertainment technologies, is calling upon us to seek out the very limits of the “plásmata” [“beings”, “creations”, or “imaginary things” in the Greek] that we ourselves create and actually are:

How do we understand gender within a digital setting? How do we see our own selves in the reflections we ourselves create? What does disability mean, or the extension of our abilities? How do pharmaceutical and medical technologies help mold our intentions? What sorts of bodies does a machine imagine, and how can it make them? What kind of a body is created by platforms that engender job insecurity? What is signified by the non-human body and how does it express its own subjectivity? What does the ever-expanding digital economy entail for the planetary body that is Earth?

We decided on Pedion tou Areos Park as a setting once more – a space that started out as an army training ground before becoming a recreation ground for the city’s inhabitants – in order to speak about the body not just as the locus of subjectivity, but also as the field of identitive, political, and social conflict, as the core of both pleasure and pain, and ultimately of our very existence.

“Plásmata” – which runs from May 23 to July 10, 2022 – opens at the statue of King Constantine I and reaches all the way to the Alsos Theater and the pine forest that lies beyond.

This year, the exhibition will follow pathways that ask us to discover parts of the park that are not, in the main, known to the general public. We’re inviting exhibition visitors to explore those Pedion tou Areos areas that run alongside Alexandras Avenue – the side where the statue of the goddess Athena stands – and to wander around the digital pavilions and events sited in the clearings and flowerbeds hidden away inside the park. This is a conscious curatorial approach that allows visitors to engage with the exhibition in Pedion tou Areos’ most popular areas before being invited to lose themselves within the park in order to discover startling exhibits, collective activities, and events. Just like last year, the rationale is one of curated serendipity, with three suggested routes through an exhibition that’s nevertheless accessible every which way: engaging with one exhibit means at least one other is in sight, and so visitors can lose themselves within Pedion tou Areos.

With 25 international pieces, new commissions, more than 250 square meters of LED works, 40 solar batteries collecting the energy of the Attic sun by day to create an artificial moon 70 meters above the ground using laser beams by night, a humanoid handing out medicine in an abandoned pharmacy at the edge of the park, and a huge red planet that reminds us of our overheating Earth and of our inability to formulate a collective political subjectivity, “Plásmata” promises to entertain us but also to give us pause for thought in the Athenian summertime.

During your visit at the exhibition in Pedion tou Areos, you can read or listen to more information about the works by scanning with your smartphone’s camera the QR codes next to each work.

You can download the “Clio Muse Tours” app, and save the “Plásmata” tour before your visit. The app is available for Apple and Android devices. An active data connection is required, but no additional data will be consumed if you have saved the tour for offline use before visiting.

Morehshin Allahyari / The Alternative Limb Project / Refik Anadol / Frederik Heyman / Ekene Ijeoma / Keiken x Clifford Sage / Kimchi and Chips / LaTurbo Avedon / Marshmallow Laser Feast / Eva & Franco Mattes / Christian Mio Locklair / Matthew Niederhauser, Elie Zananiri, John Fitzgerald / NOWNESS / Tony Oursler / Maria Papadimitriou / Eva Papamargariti / Annie Saunders, Andrew Schneider, Emma O'Halloran, OpenEndedGroup / SHOWStudio / SpY / SUPERFLEX / Dries Verhoeven / Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm / Saya Woolfalk / Liam Young

We experience, perceive, move, think, feel and explore the world with and through our bodies. Every cell, organ, tissue and all components that make up our body and complex human organism allow us to exist and survive; to live, breathe, eat, love, create, act, express ourselves, protest. Through our bodies we navigate life, we desire, grow and change, we make an impression on the world. But we can also be judged, culturally identified, stereotyped or categorized as we are exposed to the world with our bodies.

In a post-technological age, and at a time when technology is not only commonplace in society, but it also imbues our bodies, it is impossible to imagine our worlds without interventions or systems that have been fulfilling desires of human improvement, enhancement, advancement and innovation. Technology has been changing the way we behave, work, live, interact, and love. It has changed the way we regard ourselves and how we are being perceived by others. And in an age of ubiquitous connectivity, with physical and virtual worlds merging at a fast rate - with the average person now spending more than one-third of their life online - it is clear we are already creating a society where our lives are completely enwrapped by technology.

At the same time, we are seeing the problematics of technological systems and their impact on the body and human condition; from how we measure our bodies against societal expectations presented through digital worlds, advertising and social platforms to how social media influence and affect our body image. Our bodies are policed and surveilled through technologies invading our spaces, while we also see the impact of dependency, body commodification, and narcissism. And of course through technologies we have been reproducing bias and injustice, as well as enabling harassment, hate and disinformation. Our bodies are objectified, measured, monitored, analyzed, categorized, quantified, manipulated, disrespected; they can be places of abuse, violence and assault.

We are creating technologies and construct worlds, where certain bodies are valued more than others and where bodies are absent, such as black, trans, female, queer, disabled, where workers’ bodies are hidden, or bodies are defined through binaries. We have been constructing technological processes through which gender, race, body, disability, or class stereotypes are intensified and amplified. Our worlds, physical and virtual, are being built about and for consumption, commercial interest and social control. Being immersed in and surrounded by algorithms that are encoded with binary and heteronormative bias, we create narrow, tyrannic worlds, leaving many of us outside. We have been creating technologies, while technologies have been creating us.

At a time when companies like FB and Microsoft are rushing to sell us wild ideas about what a metaverse can be, we have already embraced a merging of physical worlds with mixed reality, augmented reality, and virtual reality - including online games platforms and blockchain powered virtual worlds. These are worlds that could seem without boundaries for what one wants to be or do, but are mainly driven by commercial interests and markets. Are these hybrid worlds here to change or replace physical reality as we know it, or are these instances of short-lived pleasure and gratification, whilst creating new dystopian worlds? Either way, it’s clear that these spaces translate to digital economies - one can buy, sell and create products but also personas and lifestyles including apparel, cars, houses etc.

Ironically, in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), where the Metaverse first appears as a virtual world, it is a dystopian space where people can escape from an equally dystopian but unbearable real world run by big corporations; what we are ending up with today is a metaverse funded and run by these very companies. The metaverse, pretty much as fast transportation underground tunnels, ocean pods, space travel or inhabiting Mars, is serving the fulfilment of fantasies and escape worlds for the powerful and rich. It is also a way for creating new models of financialization and more opportunities for exploitation and extraction from people and the planet.

If we are already experiencing worlds beyond the borders of the physical space, can we possibly reimagine, shape and inhabit hybrid, synthetic spaces in ways that go beyond consumerism, exploitation and financialization, but instead focus on co-existence and compassion? Worlds that create possibilities and open up a multitude of perspectives, interconnectedness, and new ways of expression. Can augmented and virtual spaces take us “back to earth” rather than becoming fantasy spaces to avoid or escape it?

Donna Haraway in her seminal 1990 work, A Cyborg Manifesto, explores her idea of a “cyborg world” about “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship between animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.” And she continues, “Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling.”

These posthuman imaginaries, hybrid forms of human, animal, plant, bacteria and other species, fluid and flexible identities help us think beyond hierarchies and dichotomies, as in humans being better or different from animals, men being superior to women or humans opposed to machines. They help us envision post-anthropocentric perspectives that enable kinship, equity and relationships across all forms of life, a collective and interconnected body.

“A world parallel to our own though overlapping. We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.” Denise Levertov’s beautiful poem Sojourns in the Parallel World reminds us of what happens if we leave behind our resistance to think of ourselves as part of nature.

Plásmata (Greek for creatures), derived from πλάσσω (plasso), which means to form, mould (plastikos), are created, invented, they are animate beings, fantastical or real. In Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds, (2017) the editors identify Mary Shelley’s Victor’s creation as “the creature”, allowing readers to decide whether the denominations daemon and monster, which are used frequently in the text, are appropriate. In the same preface, they remind us that “the way we now use the word creature ignores a richer etymology. Today, we refer to birds and bees as creatures. Living things are creatures by virtue of their living-ness. When we call something a creature today, we rarely think in terms of something that has been created, and thus we erase the idea of a creator behind the creature. We have likewise lost the social connotation of the term creature, for creatures are made not just biologically (or magically) but also socially.”

The Plásmata one encounters in the artworks in Pedion tou Areos reveal to us a view of the human experience as a blending of material and immaterial, organic and machinic, a merge of human and nonhuman, social and physical.

— Irini Mirena Papadimitriou, Creative Director, FutureEverything

"Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data" exhibition participates in "This is Athens City Festival", organized by City of Athens