THIS (TOO) SHALL (NOT) PASS
by Alix Desaubliaux
Acrid Spectre
Manufactured from scratch, designed down to its molecular assemblages, plastic does not decompose. It absorbs, fuses, and jealously preserves within itself the very elements that forged it. At 125 degrees Celsius, it melts and loses its shape. That is the power of its malleability. The naked flame of a lighter burns plastic, releasing a thick, nauseating black smoke. Expelled from the alchemical mixture, it leaves a bitter, inky residue on the skin of whoever wields it. The stinging scent rises to the nostrils—acrid. Everything about it signals toxicity. Inhaled in quantity, it makes the head spin, and then…
Darkness. The low hum of a motor. A computer fan. Light bursts through the screen. Colourful tendrils pierce the void as the screensaver emerges on the black, matte surface of the monitor—summoned from the abyss of the 2000s. This is how Inner Feels: Everything Flows, Carin Klonowski’s latest video, begins.
The Balrog at the Mine
Carin Klonowski’s works embody Schrödinger-like paradoxes, as evidenced by the exhibition title, which borrows the Persian adage this too shall pass. The parentheses (too) and (not) transform the statement into a negative potentiality. Usually, when part of a sentence is set aside in parentheses, it serves to clarify its meaning. Here, it unsettles it. This artificial paradox enlists the complicity of the reader. Here, things are not what they are. Not only what they are. Not what they appear to be. Or perhaps they are far too much so, or all at once. The pieces are as material as they are virtual, as solid as they are fluid—akin to the liquid crystals of now-obsolete screens, which recur throughout Carin Klonowski’s work.
The elements of the virtual world in Inner Feels: Everything Flows have transgressed the boundary between their digital world and ours. But is the game on the outside, or are we on the inside?
Light and electrical energy animate the plastic and steel skeletons of computer screens. They are not so distant from the continuous flows of a global capitalist economy—an economy that shapes a truth, one that exceeds the material state of things. The tangible world is eroded by post-truth, an era in which reality and meaning have turned gaseous. The artefacts of our society—the traces of our passage on Earth, our “saves”—are ultimately little more than particles in the wind.
A laser has indelibly inscribed text into screens that normally only display it. There is no turning back. The surface, now marred in our eyes, is newly adorned with the intimate concerns of computers and their screens, condemned to exist in this form forever. Immortality becomes a trap.
Turm-oil
Our bodies possess the ultimate superpower: the ability to decompose. In contrast, artificial matter—oozing through landfill valleys, trickling into trash-dump crevices, settling in radioactive landscapes sculpted by our refuse—stands as a bleak testament to what has failed to keep pace with the frantic fever of human consumption, both organic and technological.
"Drill, baby, drill," declares one of the artist’s works, echoing the infamous phrase wielded by Donald Trump to champion his pro-oil policies. In both the film and the gallery, these wastelands of technological debris are not just no man’s lands of discarded junk—they are the very cradle of the world's necropolitics, the irrefutable proof that humanity is capable of treating human beings just as it does its waste.
"Once mourned, now mined," another screen reads—everything will be exploited, extracted, and plundered by the relentless drills of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Even death is not spared.
What will pass (or not) is also what will be mined, discarded, or assimilated. Yet the very materials we deem wholly separate from ourselves seep into us—we absorb them, despite ourselves. Thanks to its indestructibility, plastic invades our fragile, soft, biodegradable bodies, microplastic by microplastic. The natural order of biodegradation is reversed.
Plastic adapts, while the compostable bodies of the living are cast aside by neoliberalism. Those who cannot be assimilated by the system—whether human or non-human—are the ones who decay, returning to the earth. They are the expendables of capitalism, waiting their turn to be reduced to carbon matter, to crude oil, and ultimately, to new plastic materials, in a last-ditch attempt to resist complete obliteration. Even as these bodies struggle against the grip of carbo-politics, seeking to escape or defy it, they inevitably end up fueling the great oil machine.
Hello? I Exist
The flows that animate these electronic machines are also the ones that exhaust them. These are the flows of electricity, but also of meaning, capital, economy, and overconsumption. What passes through a screen wears it down, gnaws at it, consumes it, until we are forced to discard it, dissatisfied with its now obsolete performance.
Carin Klonowski gamifies our frenzied consumption of electronic objects, plastic companions, and metals. Though nearly indestructible, their functional lifespan is shorter than ours, and they end up discarded before we reach the end of our own, albeit brief, lives as living beings. The obsolescence of technological objects—and the awareness of it (which society allows us to keep at bay by feeding us a continuous stream of images, distracting our attention)—is both a space for reflection and a mirror. We see our reflection in the black mirror of the monitor. We navigate through the vast dumping grounds of electronic waste in Inner Feels: Everything Flows.
The entity-artworks encountered in the exhibition twitch with phatic spasms: they mimic the empty words of humans, like the screensaver that calls out to us with its "hey!", or the endless "hello?" marking each of our phone conversations, ensuring that our interlocutor is indeed there, listening. The screens shake and tremble, desperately trying to prove that their existence is not in vain—just in case we feel the urge to discard them. Their vibrations, their words, their tenuous existence scream out to us, asserting that they do, indeed, exist—though in a mode of being different from our own.
We see these discarded electronics as waste, as burnt, transformed, aesthetically sacrificed fragments of matter. They plead for the attention we no longer know how to give in sufficient quantity. Their ontological frailty mirrors the erosion of our critical faculties.
Brainrot is the New Cottagecore
"Lasagna or Doom-Level?" Memetic images persist on the violet-hued mountains of the Inner Feels: Everything Flows universe, much like the withered, invasive plants that sprout from the barren ground of landfills and wastelands—soils stripped of all substance by combustion and exploitation. These are the only artefacts that survive and manage to resist the speed at which we have reshaped our memory and our way of seeing images. The nostalgic meme acts as a form of rebellion. It is forced to invoke our relationship to the past and destroy the meaning of the present in order to exist. It can only function if it liquifies what we have buried, bringing it back into circulation.
Brainrot is the new cottagecore, a fleeting aesthetic trend that barely lasted two years on social media. The quaint imagery of rustic cottages and The Lord of the Rings’ Shire, meant to soothe us, has been replaced by ever more cropped, fragmented, and deconstructed images—bound together only by the fact that no one truly holds the key to their meaning.
Another Future is Not Possible
"What-if?" The engraving on the Laserdisc hints that an alternative was once possible. Perhaps humanity could have taken a different path at some point. But there is no save file—we cannot access this memory archive that may exist in another reality.
Humanity is trapped on its own irreversible trolley track, the most complex variation of the trolley problem: the era of post-truth.
Manufactured from scratch, designed down to its molecular assemblages, plastic does not decompose. It absorbs, fuses, and jealously preserves within itself the very elements that forged it. At 125 degrees Celsius, it melts and loses its shape. That is the power of its malleability. The naked flame of a lighter burns plastic, releasing a thick, nauseating black smoke. Expelled from the alchemical mixture, it leaves a bitter, inky residue on the skin of whoever wields it. The stinging scent rises to the nostrils—acrid. Everything about it signals toxicity. Inhaled in quantity, it makes the head spin, and then…
Darkness. The low hum of a motor. A computer fan. Light bursts through the screen. Colourful tendrils pierce the void as the screensaver emerges on the black, matte surface of the monitor—summoned from the abyss of the 2000s. This is how Inner Feels: Everything Flows, Carin Klonowski’s latest video, begins.
The Balrog at the Mine
Carin Klonowski’s works embody Schrödinger-like paradoxes, as evidenced by the exhibition title, which borrows the Persian adage this too shall pass. The parentheses (too) and (not) transform the statement into a negative potentiality. Usually, when part of a sentence is set aside in parentheses, it serves to clarify its meaning. Here, it unsettles it. This artificial paradox enlists the complicity of the reader. Here, things are not what they are. Not only what they are. Not what they appear to be. Or perhaps they are far too much so, or all at once. The pieces are as material as they are virtual, as solid as they are fluid—akin to the liquid crystals of now-obsolete screens, which recur throughout Carin Klonowski’s work.
The elements of the virtual world in Inner Feels: Everything Flows have transgressed the boundary between their digital world and ours. But is the game on the outside, or are we on the inside?
Light and electrical energy animate the plastic and steel skeletons of computer screens. They are not so distant from the continuous flows of a global capitalist economy—an economy that shapes a truth, one that exceeds the material state of things. The tangible world is eroded by post-truth, an era in which reality and meaning have turned gaseous. The artefacts of our society—the traces of our passage on Earth, our “saves”—are ultimately little more than particles in the wind.
A laser has indelibly inscribed text into screens that normally only display it. There is no turning back. The surface, now marred in our eyes, is newly adorned with the intimate concerns of computers and their screens, condemned to exist in this form forever. Immortality becomes a trap.
Turm-oil
Our bodies possess the ultimate superpower: the ability to decompose. In contrast, artificial matter—oozing through landfill valleys, trickling into trash-dump crevices, settling in radioactive landscapes sculpted by our refuse—stands as a bleak testament to what has failed to keep pace with the frantic fever of human consumption, both organic and technological.
"Drill, baby, drill," declares one of the artist’s works, echoing the infamous phrase wielded by Donald Trump to champion his pro-oil policies. In both the film and the gallery, these wastelands of technological debris are not just no man’s lands of discarded junk—they are the very cradle of the world's necropolitics, the irrefutable proof that humanity is capable of treating human beings just as it does its waste.
"Once mourned, now mined," another screen reads—everything will be exploited, extracted, and plundered by the relentless drills of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Even death is not spared.
What will pass (or not) is also what will be mined, discarded, or assimilated. Yet the very materials we deem wholly separate from ourselves seep into us—we absorb them, despite ourselves. Thanks to its indestructibility, plastic invades our fragile, soft, biodegradable bodies, microplastic by microplastic. The natural order of biodegradation is reversed.
Plastic adapts, while the compostable bodies of the living are cast aside by neoliberalism. Those who cannot be assimilated by the system—whether human or non-human—are the ones who decay, returning to the earth. They are the expendables of capitalism, waiting their turn to be reduced to carbon matter, to crude oil, and ultimately, to new plastic materials, in a last-ditch attempt to resist complete obliteration. Even as these bodies struggle against the grip of carbo-politics, seeking to escape or defy it, they inevitably end up fueling the great oil machine.
Hello? I Exist
The flows that animate these electronic machines are also the ones that exhaust them. These are the flows of electricity, but also of meaning, capital, economy, and overconsumption. What passes through a screen wears it down, gnaws at it, consumes it, until we are forced to discard it, dissatisfied with its now obsolete performance.
Carin Klonowski gamifies our frenzied consumption of electronic objects, plastic companions, and metals. Though nearly indestructible, their functional lifespan is shorter than ours, and they end up discarded before we reach the end of our own, albeit brief, lives as living beings. The obsolescence of technological objects—and the awareness of it (which society allows us to keep at bay by feeding us a continuous stream of images, distracting our attention)—is both a space for reflection and a mirror. We see our reflection in the black mirror of the monitor. We navigate through the vast dumping grounds of electronic waste in Inner Feels: Everything Flows.
The entity-artworks encountered in the exhibition twitch with phatic spasms: they mimic the empty words of humans, like the screensaver that calls out to us with its "hey!", or the endless "hello?" marking each of our phone conversations, ensuring that our interlocutor is indeed there, listening. The screens shake and tremble, desperately trying to prove that their existence is not in vain—just in case we feel the urge to discard them. Their vibrations, their words, their tenuous existence scream out to us, asserting that they do, indeed, exist—though in a mode of being different from our own.
We see these discarded electronics as waste, as burnt, transformed, aesthetically sacrificed fragments of matter. They plead for the attention we no longer know how to give in sufficient quantity. Their ontological frailty mirrors the erosion of our critical faculties.
Brainrot is the New Cottagecore
"Lasagna or Doom-Level?" Memetic images persist on the violet-hued mountains of the Inner Feels: Everything Flows universe, much like the withered, invasive plants that sprout from the barren ground of landfills and wastelands—soils stripped of all substance by combustion and exploitation. These are the only artefacts that survive and manage to resist the speed at which we have reshaped our memory and our way of seeing images. The nostalgic meme acts as a form of rebellion. It is forced to invoke our relationship to the past and destroy the meaning of the present in order to exist. It can only function if it liquifies what we have buried, bringing it back into circulation.
Brainrot is the new cottagecore, a fleeting aesthetic trend that barely lasted two years on social media. The quaint imagery of rustic cottages and The Lord of the Rings’ Shire, meant to soothe us, has been replaced by ever more cropped, fragmented, and deconstructed images—bound together only by the fact that no one truly holds the key to their meaning.
Another Future is Not Possible
"What-if?" The engraving on the Laserdisc hints that an alternative was once possible. Perhaps humanity could have taken a different path at some point. But there is no save file—we cannot access this memory archive that may exist in another reality.
Humanity is trapped on its own irreversible trolley track, the most complex variation of the trolley problem: the era of post-truth.
A song accompanies this exercise in ethical thought without a solution, performed by a Vocaloid controlled by artificial intelligence. The voice thus generated finally embodies the spectres of the works. Faced with digital voices, humans naturally imagine alter-egos that are familiar to them. These entities, adorned with humanity, have powerful voices, speaking louder than the whispers of disembodied objects. If we're to perform the moods of the artifacts of our technology, we might as well let them express their emotions directly and ask one of them to testify.
What if we never let you fade,
Kept you spinning, bright and brave?
This musical otherness points directly at the great absent one in this post-mortem congress of machines, who has been there all along, hiding in the shadows of the off-screen: the human being, the social creature, the one in love with their miserly, cruel, and consumerist emotions, who spends their identity cheerfully across networks, convinced of its elusiveness, untouchability, legitimacy, and strength.
Humanity conceived of the Internet but has never truly understood it. It made us hypermnesic, forcing us into the constant archiving and mass-posting of the tiniest details of our lives. We will never be able to decompose online now that we’ve surrendered all our intimacy to the networks. "Lost between the tape and wave," we desperately search for the quantum state of matter, stuck in our binary thinking, trapped in our axioms of opposition between solidity and fluidity, digital and analog, permanence and impermanence. We are convinced that we are materially and sensibly different from the objects we create, when in fact they profoundly transform us—in our bodies, in our customs, and in our identities.
Even if the water flows under the bridge, the impact of our emotions—the things that initially seem the most tenuous—are of long duration.
Kept you spinning, bright and brave?
This musical otherness points directly at the great absent one in this post-mortem congress of machines, who has been there all along, hiding in the shadows of the off-screen: the human being, the social creature, the one in love with their miserly, cruel, and consumerist emotions, who spends their identity cheerfully across networks, convinced of its elusiveness, untouchability, legitimacy, and strength.
Humanity conceived of the Internet but has never truly understood it. It made us hypermnesic, forcing us into the constant archiving and mass-posting of the tiniest details of our lives. We will never be able to decompose online now that we’ve surrendered all our intimacy to the networks. "Lost between the tape and wave," we desperately search for the quantum state of matter, stuck in our binary thinking, trapped in our axioms of opposition between solidity and fluidity, digital and analog, permanence and impermanence. We are convinced that we are materially and sensibly different from the objects we create, when in fact they profoundly transform us—in our bodies, in our customs, and in our identities.
Even if the water flows under the bridge, the impact of our emotions—the things that initially seem the most tenuous—are of long duration.
(Original text available here)
The artist dedicates this show to Guillaume Le Baube, a dear friend who will be deeply missed. This, too, shall not pass—our memory of you will remain.
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