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Iain Ball / Emily Jones

In conversation with http://energypangea.org/

Rare Earth Sculptures : Neodymium 2011 E N E R G Y⋮P A N G E A

Your current focus is on your Energy Pangea project. What appeals to me about this is the breadth of content and material of which the project consists, marrying aural, visual, tactile and conceptual elements (‘gesamtkunstwerk’ 2k11?). To what extent is this totalising and intersensory concern an ambition of yours? We just got back from Mark Leckey’s show at the Serpentine Gallery: See, We Assemble. The thing that struck us about this show was that it was inextricably ‘Post-Internet’. Leckey had himself expressed his dislike of the term ‘multi-disciplinary’ - the thing that made the show so post-Internet to us was its ability to transcend its own materiality within a cross-section of information; with the show’s sponsor Samsung as a medium, Henry Moore or the ‘idea’ of modernist sculpture as a medium and the Serpentine itself even addressed as a medium. With Energy Pangea we want to present a myriad of material that uses media convergence as its primary weapon, in the sense that it feels impossible to just make things that are self-contained and at the same time there is a struggle to do that very thing : to make the perfect self powered artworks when all that is solid continues to melt around us. This is why the central focus is sculpture, because it’s a perfect idea of an artwork that has so much authority but at the same time is surrounded by a quantum fog and the way we process things now is never in any one place, but always with multiple connections and contexts. When we use the Internet we are exposed to a spectrum of material sourced from many different places that collides together and we really want to make sense of this, so it’s very much about about processing the idea of an artwork within this landscape.

There is also a strong emphasis on music here, echoed across your practice. Does this further reflect the themes of the previous question, or are you trying to achieve something more with it? I pick up on this particular element of the work because music seems to have a certain potential for autonomy - it’s a format that can recontextualise itself with simply the creation of a playlist or cd. The music for the post.consumer.cult project appears as a playlist at the bottom of the page, would this be something we might see happen in Energy Pangea? Inherent in playlisting is, for me, a potential for work to reassess and reimagine itself, a potential I see as not without parallel in your practice.

There are strong influences from films like Baraka; film is a medium that can tie in a lot of material so soundtracks are quite necessary. All of the Rare Earth Sculptures will eventually have events that also work as documentary films with soundtracks. I think that the experience and place of sound is especially important in a sense where it has to be tied into some kind of event or experience for me to get excited when producing or directing it. Since 2004 I’ve been involved in a sound and visual project with Clifford Sage called Communicvoid which is always chaotic and process based and often executed as site-specific. Between 2005-2007 I worked almost entirely in sound and then began working with it again recently because I realised that convergence meant that it was somewhat unavoidable. Clifford Sage made the soundtrack for post.consumer.cult which was really the final ingredient in what I came to see as a content cloud that pulled in anything that was relevant to its argument and then went through a refining process.

I think your reference to a content cloud makes perfect sense in relation to the 'all that is solid' quote in your first response- it perhaps points not to a realisation of the impermanence of matter, but the manipulability of matter. Heterogeneity becomes a powerful concept in this context. All that is solid might melt into air, but then it finds a new form in the iCloud, where it might easily be realised as a solid (sculpture) once more or take on a different form entirely. I take this all to mean that the Energy Pangea project might never have a finished or terminable state, but will always exist mutably and in flux. Is this true? Further, I like the idea of the sculptures becoming events and then films, it gives the project a rhizomatic appeal. Would you ever consider incorporating an interactive aspect to your work?

Yes, totally, most of the work exists as malleable ideas, where content can be added or changed because its never set. Dates usually just give authority to a piece, by having a date next to the work it looks nice, but it’s useless attributing the date to a time when the idea was conceived because ideas and titles and content can always change whether you are having to adapt the work to suit changes in html and browser formats, show in a gallery or develop new understandings of the work and how it should take shape though new research.

All the work is interactive because people take the content and use it in their own work and vice versa but I don't try to make it interactive. Interactivity is too functional and utilitarian a concern for me to set out to make a piece of work engaging on an interactive level. Is there an ecological aspect within the work? I know Emily is involved with the Year of the Hare project, to which questions of ecology might seem more relevant, but to what extent is Energy Pangea likewise influenced by these themes? What I find interesting about ecology, or what has been termed ecological information, is the way it has been theorised into Fluxus experiments of the 1960s, called upon as being a radically new, experiential model of knowledge for western epistemology. Within this is the idea that ‘information superhighways’ can transmit any type of conceivable information apart from the ecological - thereby privileging this aspect above others. Might we find a similar, albeit updated, investigation within this project? I’m thinking of your emphasis upon ambience and environment.

I started Energy Pangea because I wanted to stop thinking that the world was going to end and start trying to imagine something else. The geodesic sphere that is the Energy Pangea logo represents this beautiful idea of nature as a self regulating system and the dream of counter-culture. Neither of these things are realistic anymore, so the geodesic sphere is there as a reminder of those utopias in the light of today’s turbo-information cloud, amongst confusions about information and politics. I also realised that I couldn’t really address things as synthetic or non-place in the way that I had been able to in earlier work; I felt strongly that there had to be something else, so I turned my attention to other things. This focused on the collective human action as a wide-spread and emergent system based on the idea of ‘new energy source’ in a kind of meta-ambiguity; and with this I became interested in using materials like wood and wearing more earthy colours. None of this has much to do with ecology as a science, but there are many aspects of art-making which are oriented around ecological philosophies. We both had an education that was based on a Beuysian/Social-Sculpture model for art production which has given us an urge to push many aspects of ecologically motivated art that seem old fashioned into estranged and slightly uncomfortable territory whilst still maintaining absolute seriousness about what we are doing.

How do you then see the other, very diagrammatic, rational and scientific aspect as working within (or against) this?

Everything today is characterised by uncertainty, none so much as advances in quantum physics; wave-particle duality, non-locality, the uncertainty principle, super-string theory and entanglement are all suggestive of the inner universe of though as a catalyst for potential, but on a whole despite these advances the mainstream scientific community still deny a spiritual metaphysical dimension to human understanding. The terms 'pseudo-scientific' and 'new age mumbo-jumbo' get used more than ever to describe all kinds of responses to these discoveries. It's high time to diminish irrational/rational binaries. We are focused on lost and ancient knowledge that has been eclipsed by the enlightenment and are channeling it through the language of an outreach project into the collective-information polymath, which has rational and irrational qualities

Neodymium is the only finalised sculpture at this stage of the project. Yet it is interesting as a sculpture because it perhaps verges upon the condition of an installation; a situation in which you have brought two different found objects with unique identities and repositioned them to create an intended new meaning- a process that seems relevant to the way a lot of information is created and processed these days. Would you say you're interested in the process of creation as much as the final product, the formal sculpture itself? Also, you link through to the Shambhala site on the Neodymium page, giving the sculpture a social dynamic, or at least creating links with the real world. Might we therefore begin to see features such as the user comments below the sculpture on the Shambhala page as part of the sculpture?

I definitely don't consider the piece as installation. To me installation is concerned with addressing the site-specific and spacial dynamics which effect the work. Post.Consumer.Cult, although made up of sculpture, collage, video and sound, is perhaps more focused on installation in its final outcome on a web page. I consider found material, objects and images as sculptures. For me, sculpture is really a choice in how the work is understood. When I was making Old Earth Objects, it took around eight months from the first objects being lined up, and I looked at them every day and slowly some of the objects were replaced with newer ones that I'd discovered which were more relevant to the refined idea of the piece, their positions were changed and the concept evolved. Effectively I sculpted the idea of the title. Taking some raw material and turning it into something new is a very sculptural process. As cheesy as it sounds, when we look at things we are sculpting because as observers we effect the material that is around us, to suddenly see something in a new way is a sculptural process.

With RES Neodymium the sculptural element is not so much in the healing tool as it's only one of the elements within the piece, which is intended to work symbiotically with the Lizard and the Neodymium Lamp. What makes it a sculpture for me is the mixing together of materials and ideas to create its argument. I think also, the back-story of how the healing tool was obtained is not relevant to its social engagement as an artwork because it only effects how the work was made and the link to the Shambhala site is really just to emphasise its position as a commodity. I feel that if it was considered to be concerned with social-engagement it is because it has an argument which is based on the dynamic forces of energy production, which it doesn't present in relative terms but, rather, has an agenda of sorts. But I think that its agenda was also conceived in a sculptural way and it's not necessarily important that the agenda is actually carried out by anyone - it isn’t really sure that it wants people to start worshiping the sun and revolt against sources of power obtained from within the earth, rather it wanted to play with these ideas and forms to create the aesthetic of an objective argument.

The complexity of the project begins to reveals itself when you think in levels of abstraction and reification, between the material, technological and economic (levels of distinction perhaps best summarised by the juxtaposition of iconography on the Europium page). What is the project’s relationship to economy; in short, to what extent, if at all, is the project politicised?

I think that a common misinterpretation about the project which we have begun to encounter is that we are somehow addressing issues such as global recourses and contemporary ecology in ways that are scientific or journalistic or we are taking rare earth elements as a subject which we are addressing in a literal and straightforward context. In reality these things are only taken as fragments of material in the abstract sense. In western society our approach to a visual anthropological survey of our culture is totally fragmented and misaligned because no one knows what to believe in any more. Adam Curtis said, ‘I'm completley modern, I don’t have politics’. I like to think that the project works from this standpoint.

My Nike LunarSwift+’s sit by the door at the other end of the my room, they carry the weight of all that we associate with the Nike brand, but the trainers themselves are totally abstract, if they didn’t have Nike printed on them and for whatever reason we assumed they weren't for wearing on our feet they would be a vessel encased in bright red mesh, florescent yellow rubber and shrouded in a kind of mysticism which we associate with the materials and factory processes from the late consumer age. The Rare Earth Sculptures work in the same way, they are given the stamp of the ‘idea’ of Rare Earths and they are cloaked in this term ‘Energy Pangea’ but this is tactile material too and connections form in the same way as do neural pathways and without necessarily connecting to any preexisting idea we have about rare earths or energy politics. I think there has to be an element of altered or processed thoughts out into the world based on what knowledge we have and in some ways it contains a certain naivety or distancing from those subjects which is necessary for the critique.

Yet perhaps you still enter into some sort of discourse on globalism? Foreign policy is becoming more and more dictated by the availability of certain minerals crucial to information technology - for example conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been massively exacerbated by the country’s rich supply of coltan. It is a war that is at its heart an ideological conflict. What's more it has been suggested that up to 97% of the world’s rare earth elements are mined in China, a country politically at odds with the rest of the world. What therefore can we make of your interest in branding, NGOs and corporate globalism? Are there links here to the Phillips 2013 project?

When I was working on Philips2013 I became interested in how I could distort the brand image by making new connections and associations that were either a hyper-extension of pre-existing intentional or unintentional aspects that make up the Philips corporate image or completely new material that was brought in. Most potent was the play between Philips as bringer of dreams and bringer of death and I took the CT Scan images as a starting point, as representative of a contemporary dance of death through the way that they have presented us with our own mortality from a clean and technologically advanced medical standing. Then the central idea became focused on a way of presenting Philips as a global phenomena involved in a mutated business practice which was absorbing divergent groups into into the common relationship of Philips products.

Many of these themes developed into Energy Pangea but the focus became more about resources, energy and primitivism rather than consumer electronics. This was centred on two things. The first is to find ways to present a version of the global energy debate as a central component of the limbic system, using the reptilian brain in revolt against the neocortex as a way to develop an alternative energy supply; this is a long term goal. The other is a rejection of the modern world- likewise a long term goal, and the reason why Energy Pangea is something we aim to be working with as a major practice and research project for the foreseeable future. These rejections of modernity concern themselves with an inquiry into non-western belief systems, Eastern metaphysical doctrines and the creation of new primitivist think-tanks that embrace advances in technology. In general, we see a concern with resemblance of primordial debris to assist in providing an alternative to the implosion of the west by embracing tribalisms, ritual and initiation coupled by modern technology and scientific discoveries. Using the 17 Rare Earth Elements effectively provides us with a platform that ties together a diverse range of ideas into a sub-section of the periodic table.

In rejecting the modern world, do you envisage a viable alternative, or are you more interested in the truth procedure by which such an alternative might be revealed? (Might we argue that a goal of modernism was equally to transcend its contemporary age?)

Much of the fascination I previously had for western culture was centered around ideas Walter Benjamin articulated in his Arcades Project: that mass culture is a dream world, but it is also a hell in a state of permanent decay. I've tried to present the dichotomy between dreams and death and its symptomatic by-products: alienation, synthetics, de-realization : all of these also work as euphoric experiences of the world so there was a play between the two in how conference centres and service stations feel. Now I have a stronger distaste for western culture, I don’t feel like I’m in a dreamworld when I’m in shopping centres and after reading the continuum concept I have no faith in the medical establishment, the education system and the monetary system, or many of the ideas that seek to replace these. I’m dissatisfied with Marxist-Left critiques of postmodernism so recently have become interested in the radical Traditionalist movement. I think what excites me about these ideas is that they are dangerous and yet totally different from the ideas of the left. I’ve started looking into the work of Julius Evola, who was affiliated with Dada and later tried to influence the Fascist Party. And also René Guénon who converted to Sufi Islam- the whole phenomena of western converts to Islam is fascinating to me. I'm not sure if the goal of modernism was to transcend its contemporary age but rather to develop it along western concepts of technological and social progress, whether from the economic left or through free market capitalism.

It could be argued that what we are doing is apposed to postmodern relativism and cultural-implosion, but I’m less interested in distinctions between modernism, postmodernism and new terms such as super-modernity - it’s really all just the modern world when looking at things from a zoomed out perspective. A simplification of this in manifest could be boiled down to 'It looks modern, but on closer inspection, it isn't'. With the Neodymium Rare Earth Sculpture there were elements which suggested a rejection of reason and modern scientific rationalism, and it was also focused an unsustainable and un-progressive technology. At the same time a meditation on the sun as the source of life is presented as more technologically advanced, sacred and perennial.

Is there room for mysticism in the internet age?

Not since Adam Curtis, Facebook and Lil B. All the notions of technoshamanism have disappeared, and I don't say that with a sense of nostalgia. I’m anti-immediate-retro; it’s all about 7000 years ago in Sumeria.

Could this project exist without the internet?

Like many people, I suffer from the slightly melancholy notion that nothing exists unless its on the Internet. I don't know how to transcend this feeling, when a technology becomes part of our lives it’s always hard to imagine what it was like before, before the like button, before the internet. I’m always amazed when I meet artists who don’t use the Internet, I get slightly envious and wonder how they function.