Text by Gabriel Bogossian
Exploring the ever new crossing territories between installation, performance and moving image, The Goldfish club is a multimedia piece that draws on the history of technology and its transformations to address our relationship with sound and image devices – cameras, mixers, keyboards and all kinds of screens – and how these equipment stimulate our contemporary sensibility and its visuality regimes.
The installation is composed of a variable but large number of vintage devices of different ages, working simultaneously in their emissions. The variety of origins and functions highlights the sculptural aspect of these objects and their design, adding to the cacophony of moving images a great variety of shapes and forms. Fully occupied and functioning, the exhibition space is turned into a small workshop of sorts, open to the audience to walk in and be touched by the different objects assembled and their emissions.
As Bill Viola once noted, the surveillance camera in a parking lot has no memory of the changes in fashion and car design, nor of the small events it has witnessed. In this sense, as the accumulation of devices here composes a sort of time travel across different poetic and industrial paradigms of (audio)visual culture and its programmed obsolescence, it reflects the concurrent transformations of our sensibility, somewhat also dragged by such progress.
The performance activates this rhizome of screens, cables and speakers and gives one more step into the experimentation of the moving image in the expanded field. While in the infrastructure of the work the perception of accumulated time materialized in the plethora of equipment opens many doors to our contemplation, in the superstructure level of the performative action the effect is the opposite, and a more meditative tone prevails.
Like in Bill Viola's surveillance camera, it is as if a human intervention was needed to conduct contemplation from disorder to order and give meaning to the debris of our progress. And to illuminate the corners of our memory: with materials rescued from discard, the activated installation seems to make a remark on the acceleration of our time and the desire of oblivion that sustains it.
In this sense, the question that the contemplative space opened up by The Goldfish Club ultimately brings can be formulated as in relation to accelerationism and its dilemmas; after all, the speed of progress drags up not only our sensibility, but also our attention. If, on the one hand, it is true that in order to move on, abandoning a surpassed position, one must make choices and leave things behind – it is not possible to remember everything –, on the other, in this age of anxiety, it is legitimate to question: should we go this fast?
