Inorganic Demons

"Reality is understood as a set of axioms. Demons are the forces in the material world to force our understanding of reality to become sharper using holes in axiomatic logic," Harris Rosenblum tells me. Are the images generated through stable diffusion and midjourney by independent contractors, and post-processed by additional contract labor, in Infinite Generative Potential of God a mechanical turk or a mechanism capable of modeling the "bugs" in representation whose Millennial absence from history troubles reality?

Any universe informed by the digital corresponds to differences in space and differences in time: computational linguistics translate between two embodiments of materiality in the rules that determine the sequencing of data and code. The demogiography Harris Rosemblum's outsources to an assembly language. The 3-D printed lace he's showing me on his phone that is not in this show. Does it matter? This is about tooling, which is the part in the exhibition where Harris is going to have to pull out his phone to explain a model dictated by the computer as a method of pattern. The presentations in Inorganic Demons do the same: not with a luxury calculator, but according to the cosmological rules that conflate axiomatic law with the determinism of the occult.

Mourning Bracelet (for Hatsune) 2022 is not a Victorian Mourning Bracelet in scale and substance, but a woodchopper nestled like a wedding ring in three different kinds of glue. This is not a fetish object, despite the fact that it's scaled like one. This is a Gum Baby made of Egyptian bracelets.

Like many of the objects in view, we are presented with forms that vary in space on an axis of time that is undeniably invariant: what do we perceive as memory when bits (of material, of information) embodied in sequential installations suggest a code? Something demonic: "Gates are the intersections where bits span both worlds at the moments of transition from one instant to the next."

There is no platonic form. All a demon does is accelerate the irreducible intendedness of the subject not as consciousness, but s/he who "shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge," utters the phrenologist in Edgar Allen Poe's The Imp of the Perverse: "To indulge for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed."

The dining room table is finished in the flat latex exterior of a Hampton's beachhouse. A Denali 4-piece 1/4 Router Bit Set sounds like but a fraction of the Amazon wishlist from hell. The lap dog patched together in rags of walnut glaze looks less like a sacrificial lamb and more like a new kind of craft. Rosenblum: "It's a lamb". Throughout the exhibition on the breathless expanse of Sarah's World, the chaos of Five Points recedes into the intersection of DeviantArt and Woodcraft. The table's four legs call to mind

A preterist: one who collects cold nests. (Pale Fire)

There is a science fiction angle on this show that feels too easy, and of course there is a copy of Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia floating around. Bridget [TK] has her nose in it as I gravitate around her husband's Xenohistory Museum, but laughs when I ask her if she's read it: this kind of literature feels more appropriate sourced from Pirate Bay than the Verso section. Yet the accumulation, the aggregation of language as units of meaning that undergo a process of mechanical translation; this is not "process based abstraction", rather: abstraction as a kind of condition of condition that leaves itself open to an increasing number alternatives to be managed by someone other than the immediate maker.

Surrealism, "post-internet", next-gen neo-geo: all a neutralization of the operations that "complicity with anonymous materials" engenders. Sara Blajez apparently really hated the hunchback scale head mounted on a pole, which accounts for its material substrate as, simply, "materials". But what makes Rosenblum's press release more readable than Nick Land is that hyperstitial abstraction slows down. (Returning to Poe's protagonist, recall that phrenology is a theory of evolutionary biology that the size and shape of one's head is deterministic of aptitude.) As large as a watermelon, it is unclear who the subject of time is in in the "sets of abstract relations, tactical gambits, [that] are as real in a fiction about a fiction as they are when encountered raw." What makes ccru radical is neither its Deleuzianism nor its schizophrenia, but the recognition that capitalism is sofa king Re: Todd Ed. To disable the disabled requires "subjecting such semiotic contraband to multiple embeddings allows a traffic in materials for decoding dominant reality that would otherwise be proscribed. Rather than acting as a transcendental screen, blocking out contact between itself and the world, the fiction acts as a Chinese box-a container for sorcerous interventions in the world. The frame is both used (for concealment) and broken (the fictions potentiate changes in reality)."

The pretexts of this exhibition feel more like Kiki Smith than Mike Kelly. Earth and New Miku is mounted like something in the Egyptian Wing but would make sense on the set of Succession. Unclear if this is trophy or diorama: two kawaii figurines, one manufactured in cosmetic mica, then modeled using raw clay harvested from a Wendy's parking lot. Both are the same Sailor Moon, but represented the way that actual artifacts from other planets are displayed in science museums-- the way they show us a real moonrock, but approximate gases from Neptune more accurately that the real. "PLA, Walnut, MDF, Cosmetic Mica, Steel, PVA glue..."

Maybe the discrete objects in Inorganic Demons are subject to means of poetics, or maybe they're sorcery. Or maybe this artist was

...brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud
a poet and a painter with a taste
For realistic objects interlaced
With grotesque growths and images of doom.

Two cocoons hang from the ceiling, like banners, like pillars: their weight is on the outside. Coated with tar, the fossil fuels scale the LARP set to the timescale of the Jurassic. Perhaps this is from whence and where Louise Bougeoise's spiders emerged The "preternist" in Nabokov's 1962 novel about literary exegesis is one who believes that the apocalypse happened in the past-- not that it won't happen in the future. Negarestani feels like a thematic envelope, but Nabokov hits closer to home.

Like the Denali 4-piece 1/4 Router bit set. Crystallized vape juice stemmed in glass. A perfume that never gets out. Sorcery is fast.