EVERYTHIGN
Sept 9, 2025
Dark weather, new order. This late summer / fall has an official soundtrack already. It is Blood Orange - Mind Loaded (Visualizer) ft. Caroline Polachek, Lorde, Mustafa. The intonation/ modulation of Elliot Smith's "Everything means nothing to me" is ethereal. It is raining and it is 11:20 and i am here looking back rather than doing the things that need to be done
Paris was a bliss. And so was Bordeaux. And Berlin. Spent a summer wasting and now i am sorting lose ends. Wolfgang Tillmans at Centre Pompidou did not really touch my heart. The place is great and the worn down carpeted floor, the already closed boutique and the entire vibe of this place closing soon for a 5 year renovation perfectly matched the nostalgia journey of looking at photos that had once been so important for you some 30 years ago.
But it was the random and unexpected encounter with Shilpa Gupta, Words Come From Ears (2018), a motion split-flap (airport/rail-style) display that flips through scrambled, poetic phrases, that was included in CAPC’s group show “The Practice of Everyday Life (L’Invention du quotidien)” that got me. The physicality of an object resembling a flight information display system from the near past. A thing that moves, stirs up air, resulting in a sound that once reported on departures to far off places, a living entity, decoupled from its determination, coming to live in an age of AI. Talking to us in strange words, looking for meaning, sensing. That was something. We sat there on a bench. And watched things unfold in silence. Several generations, ready to take orders from this machine.
And then there was Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, Joker’s Headquarters. Gesamtkunstwerk as a Practical Joke (C’est le Premier Vol de L’Aigle) (2025) at the 13th Berlin Biennale. Top Floor of KW. A nice summer day. This and that. And an “arms list” formatted like a restaurant menu—with headings like prix fixe, antipasti, primi, secondi, contorni, dolci. The only thing that got me in the building.
Okay. And now. Participatory Propaganda, Memes, Dataviz and AI. Some TikTok Consulting. A conference. A symposium. A seminar. A journal article. I'll be back.