Conversation between Sidsel Nelund and Honey Biba Beckerlee about Diplopia

THE CATALOG
SN: One of the pervading sources of inspiration for the exhibition Diplopia is a Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) from 1970. Why did you embark on working with that catalogue?

HBB: It is a catalogue I found among my father’s old stuff. My attention was first caught by the title, which I thought hopelessly Modernist, but it piqued my curiosity nevertheless. I brought it home with me and thought that one day I would do something with it.
Later, when I became interested in future reproduction techniques within stem cell research, I suddenly saw that if those techniques were juxtaposed with the WEC catalogue, it would create an obvious basis for science fiction. WEC was a movement with a very positive outlook on the future; it did not take a negative stance on the technology of its day. Rather, they appropriated new knowledge and thought about how it could be used to create a better society.
Also, I am interested in using material from the past to talk about the future – instead of trying to create a new universe that reflects how you think the future will look.

WHOLE EARTH CATALOG:
Was published bi-annually from 1968-1972 and then sporadically up until 1998. It is a catalogue of books and tools aimed at a self-sufficient lifestyle. Each tool or book is accompanied by one or more of the following elements: Drawings, images, excerpts, price, stockist addresses, and a brief description.

The catalogue is divided into the following sections: Understanding whole systems, Shelter and Land Use, Industry and crafts, Communications, Community, Nomadics, and Learning. Each category has its own editor and a very great number of contributors.

DIPLOPIA I
In the spring of 2011, while Honey Biba Beckerlee (HBB) was working on Diplopia for the Aarhus Art Building, she and Sidsel Nelund (SN) spent about a month speaking about the themes of the exhibition. HBB and SN share an interest in history writing and in the use of archival materials within contemporary art, but take different professional approaches to the subject.
HBB’s artistic practice is expressed in audio-visual installations, performance, and texts, all exploring how identity is formed and history is written somewhere between fiction and reality. She has studied art at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2008), Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt, and at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2006). SN’s theoretical work is concerned with how artists incorporate archival materials and historic figures in their works, and with how knowledge is generated within contemporary art. She has studied comparative literature, modern culture, and audio/visual culture at the Université Denis Diderot, Paris 7, at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2007), and at the University of Copenhagen (2009), where she is currently working on her PhD. What follows below are excerpts from their conversation.

THE PICTURE I
SN: WEC belongs to a Californian late-1960s/1970s scene and reflects a specific ideology that centred on moving “back-to-the-land”, on becoming self-sufficient, on organic farming, on building your own dome in which to live and so on. What is it about the WEC movement that captures you?

HBB: One of the main starting points of my work is the idea of the image of Earth seen from space. That image is the point of departure for the WEC aesthetic, which revolves around the round shape. The editor of WEC, Stewart Brand, believed that if NASA would only release their picture of Earth, people would realise that it is a fragile, isolated sphere and that our resources are not inexhaustible. He believed that this would spark off a sustainability revolution. Indeed, the picture has had a strong impact, and that is a result of the WEC agenda. Yet we did not all start living in a radically different way when NASA’s picture was released. Even so, I think it is a very beautiful notion that a picture could potentially be so crucial to us; and I thought that playing around with that idea would be fantastic. So that is what I am exploring in this exhibition, but I also look into how their ideology was implemented in an aesthetic form and what that form can do when it is unfolded visually.

SN: How are these explorations present in the exhibition?

HBB: One example would be a photograph that I took of the sky using a fish-eye lens so that it looks like the picture of Earth seen from space.

SN: Which is on the cover of the WEC you found and were inspired by?

HBB: Yes; I’d call it a third-degree copy, a copy of a pastiche of a picture of Earth. In this way I inscribe myself in continuation of the gesture of hope that resides in using the picture of Earth. I, however, suggest that the potential for changing the world may reside in the copy instead.
As regards the issue of how ideology and aesthetic forms are expressed in the exhibition itself, it is worth noting that Stewart Brand was tripping on acid when he came up with the idea of the potential symbolic and transforming force of a picture of Earth viewed from space. I think that their aesthetic and universe has been built around something reminiscent of an acid trip; a sense that everything seems logical or cohesive. That is the kind of universe I am building in this exhibition; everything is interconnected in this kind of geometric …

SN: … and visually associative movement. I don’t know what takes its starting point in what or where it all begins, but we certainly have the circle shape of the dome and the hexagons, and those shapes also appear in the images …

HBB: … exactly, the forms and shapes recur in a displacement between inner and outer spaces where cells and stars, the Earth and the embryo are all constructed according to the same geometry. A kind of micro-macro movement into the body and all the way out into outer space again.

STEWART BRAND:
In 1966 Brand launches a campaign aimed at persuading NASA to release the first pictures of Earth seen from space. “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” he asks. The first picture of the entire globe was made public in 1972. During his campaign Brand meets Richard Buckminster Fuller, the man behind the geodesic dome, and the two men start working together.

FORM
SN: If we think in terms of the potential of an image and of how an ideology can be expressed through an aesthetic, it seems obvious to consider the dome as form. The dome has been used in widely different contexts, ranging from self-sustaining habitation to military radar stations. What are your reasons for being fascinated with it today and for including it as a form within the exhibition?

HBB: My point of departure is the copy as a concept. It is quite telling that Richard Buckminster
Fuller is famous for being the one who created the geodesic dome, and he is the one who is always credited with the invention. But in fact the geodesic dome was invented 30 years before then, and that is the interesting thing here: the double invention. Things are often developed simultaneously; for example, photography was invented in both England and France around the same time.
Both Bauersfeld and Fuller developed their dome on the basis of the exact same approach, i.e. on the basis of the geometric form known as the icosahedron, which Leonardo da Vinci also drew back in his day. The marvellous thing about that form is that it is reflected in nature. It exists at a microscopic level, at nano-level. Carbon, for example, binds itself in accordance with geodesic principles. These principles have been named after Fuller, and in fact “fullerenes” have just been discovered out in space. So even though people have been unable to actually see the form, they have still been able to perceive it as a natural pattern or as a geometry arising out of our universe.

THE DOME: The first dome based on pentagons and hexagons (the icosahedron) was developed by
Walther Bauersfeld after World War I and again by Richard Buckminster Fuller after World War II. The WEC appropriates the dome as an ideological project. The structure is regarded as the ideal dwelling, and one of the editors of the catalogue, Lloyd Kahn, publishes a series of dome books that include manuals on how to build your own dome. The books also include pictures of people who have built their own dome in the Bay Area, California.
When Lloyd Kahn publishes the third dome book, interest in the subject is waning. The preface states that the dome is difficult to build, and that it is difficult to get it to cohere in purely mathematical terms. There is no perfect, holistic accord between living quarters, structure, and ideology.

COPY ORIGINAL COPY
SN: Is your choice to build the domes created by both Bauersfeld and Fuller a comment on how there may be a version that predates what we regard as the original?

HBB: It is about exploring how our concept of originality is completely entwined with the existence of copies – even though we don’t realise it. Our concept of originality – the one we have applied in the Western world since Plato – is deceptive in many ways. I want to accentuate the inherent copying properties of originality. For we all mime each other; no one can sit on a desert island with no input whatsoever and create.

SN: Here we might touch upon the act of reusing images. In some of your previous works you have worked with images that are already circulating on the Internet; a trend that Hito Steyerl describes in the text In Defense of the Poor Image. In your exhibition it would appear that the only photograph you have taken yourself is the picture of the sky photographed to look like Earth seen from space. The rest are all images that someone else has given you or which you collect from the Internet or publications. Why reuse visual material and bring it back into play?

HBB: It is interesting to renegotiate the denotation of images, our self-perception and cultural self-image. I renegotiate the symbols we employ by recontextualising them instead of producing new images.

SN: It seems as if certain motifs fascinate you and prompt you to enter into a kind of visual investigation of the motif and its meaning. Referring to the photograph of Earth, you speak of the potential that images can have and of how the exhibition constitutes an exploration of what a picture can do. The way I see it, this visual exploration takes place through the use of e.g. copy and scale, for example when you copy the dome form and reproduce it on different scales.

HBB: In order to challenge our concept of originality and venture out into a study of the copy and its many aspects you need to get your own hands dirty and do some copying. I have been greatly inspired by Rebecca Schneider’s text about Dolly, the cloned sheep. Here, Schneider turns the copy/original dynamic upside down and transfers it to concepts such as time.
The copy reveals the dismissal of boundaries that takes place when you “go back in time” so that it also becomes a movement ahead in time. This makes it only natural to use material from the past to explore the future when you work with the copy as a theme.

HITO STEYERL: Artist and author of a range of theoretical texts. In her In Defense of the Poor Image she says: ”The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution. […] The poor image is no longer about the real thing – the originary original.
Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation. In short: it is about reality.”

REBECCA SCHNEIDER: Is a philosopher of performance. In her “Hello Dolly Well Hello Dolly: The double and its theatre” she investigates how cloning renders habitual, linear concepts of time and repetition impossible.

ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE
SN: You employ a certain approach that you call archaeology of the future. There is a general interest in the past in contemporary art today, but it mostly centres on how we can use the past today.
The act of creating a fiction in the future by using material from the past is a rather special approach that can open up to new scenarios, new ways of conceiving of the world. Is that where you want to go with your archaeology of the future?

HBB: Yes. I certainly think that an archaeology of the future offers a way of thinking outside of the box because it can accumulate sequences of associations that would not arise if you simply take your point of departure in the present day.
I have worked with archival material before, for example in the work Space Dog Odyssey (with Mathias Kryger); there, we used stills found on the Internet to rewrite the history of the Cold War so that it got a happy ending; it ended before it actually did, and the Berlin wall was never erected. In many ways there is something naïve about this, but there is also tremendous potential in taking up the past and going: What would the world look like if things had turned out differently? Playing with the materials of the past opens up new vistas, new opportunities. In Diplopia I take the next step and apply the past to the future, but what I find interesting about visual art in general is to not lean on existing symbols and perceptions of particular concepts, but to try to imbue them with new meaning. Archaeology of the future can help you do that.

SN: So you use images from the past to create a virtual reality. You also use music, some of it cover versions of songs from the 1968-70s period that deal with the future. As far as I can tell, the future fiction and virtual aspects reside in the voice-over track of the video, which creates an imaginary fictional space on the basis of the concrete material. Is this were the archaeology of the future resides?

HBB: Yes, but it also resides in taking a past vision about the future and taking it into the future combined with elements from our own time; elements that can affect the vision and let it unfold in a different way. The WEC and its entire aesthetic is extremely futuristic. So are all the songs I found. There is an entire 1968 movement that looked to the future: David Bowie, Sun Ra, etc. They looked towards the same space age as WEC and Buckminster Fuller. That doesn’t exist anymore. It was a product of its time and did not continue any further into the future. Nevertheless I take specific elements from that past and combine them with more recent technology to stage a reflection on the self, subjectivity, and individualism.

THE PICTURE II
SN: In the exhibition video you also take your point of departure in a picture from the WEC. What picture is that?
HBB: It is a picture from a book called Domicile Kit that the WEC recommends in their 1970 catalogue. It almost doesn’t matter what the book is about, for the picture in itself is absolutely fantastic. It is a photograph of three little girls, a few years apart in age. They sit in a structure that is neither outdoors nor indoors.

SN: Which could be a kind of dome structure.

HBB: It could be the framework of a dome, yes, and in front of them is a model of a geometric form that probably employs the same principle that the dome does. The picture is quite trippy; what do those three girls have to do with geometry? It is a very interesting image to work with in relation to e.g. reproduction technologies. The entire video tries to find out: “Who are they?”

So the picture acts as a catalyst for a reflection on subjectivity, their subjectivity.

SN: Yes, in a way you might say that it would be an obvious choice to be inspired by the WEC to create a science fiction narrative that makes their Utopia a reality. That is, a collective, eco-friendly, organic, self-sustaining community, a life led in harmony with nature where everyone lives in domes and where everything comes together. But that is not what you do. Instead, you incorporate queer theory and stem cell reproduction. You deliberate on how the three girls might have several different mothers; perhaps they come from the same cell; perhaps they are triplets born several years apart who can then mirror themselves in each other. Why do you take this approach?

HBB: First of all I employ a future scenario that is not entirely alien to the WEC: the Noosphere. Gene Youngblood is among those who have worked with the noosphere concept, and he came out of the WEC scene. If the picture of Earth had indeed sparked off the revolution Stewart Brand envisioned, the ecosystem may or may not have been saved. That is not the issue that interests me about WEC; I am interested in the concept of the picture’s potential. Here, a more or less randomly selected picture from the catalogue becomes the catalyst for how stem cell reproduction – i.e. a recent challenge to our concepts of originals and copy – can affect our culture, self-perception, and subjectivity. Also, I am not really interested in conjuring up a Utopia or dystopia; rather, my interests concern an unfolding of the future scenario of stem cell reproduction without any prejudice or preconceptions, all within this sphere of thought that is the noosphere.

NOOSPHERE: νοῦς (nous “mind”) +σφαῖρα (sphaira “sphere”. Designates a third step (the first being the geosphere followed by the biosphere) in life on Earth where only thought exists. It is not quite clear which of the three thinkers Vladimir Vernadsky, Édouard Le Roy, and Theilhard de Chardin invented the concept back in the 1920s. In I 1970 the media arts theorist Gene Youngblood published the book Expanded Cinema, arguing that an expanded version of the film media can be understood via the concept of the noosphere.

DIPLOPIA II
SN: About the title Diplopia … It means double vision, or to see two images of the same thing, only displaced. The concept can be applied on many levels in the exhibition, and I am wondering whether it might also constitute a way of conceiving of an archaeology of the future: To see visions from the past and future together in the same exhibition? Or what is your take on diplopia?

HBB: It is a way of seeing, a particular perspective on the world where you see everything in its copied reality, as something that unfolds in repetition. But you present a fine analogy. It reminds me of the stereogram, which is one of the very early forms of 3D. It consists of two different pictures placed next to each other. If you cross your eyes, a third picture appears, and within that third picture a sense of depth arises. Perhaps that is what happens when a picture from the past is juxtaposed with the concept of the future …

SN: … which becomes virtual. The virtual is something that steps out of the two-dimensional image in the gesture of combining past and future.

HBB: Yes, as a result of the double vision.

SN: Even though the exhibition is called “double vision” and is about copies, there is a strong sense of trinity, of tripleness about it; the three girls, the triangle, the three media: video, photographs, and the architectural elements …

HBB: I am pleased to hear you say that, for I have been very careful to avoid having the copy fall into a dichotomy or dualistic logic. The copy is not a polar opposite; it can unfold itself much further than mere duality.