Emergency Ex

Catinca Tabacaru Gallery is thrilled to present Emergency Ex (2022) by Catinca Malaimare, an intimate encounter between human bodies and machines. In a choreography of movement, sound and light, human and non-human actors become equal collaborators in creating a sensuous and otherworldly environment. Suggesting not just a technical, but an affective codependency between us and our screens, Emergency Ex conjures a not-so-distant future where face and interface have become indistinguishable. Accompanying the film is a text written by Pita Arreola-Burns and Elliott Burns, intended as an aid to the installation, as an explanation it intentionally fails. Execute ‘shem’. An old Yiddish word for the names of God. Computer coding began when it was written on parchments and placed within the mouth or pressed into the clay forehead, transforming what was once inanimate into the animated but seville.↲↳ Golem, the first machine, was a defender of the ghetto, protecting against anti-Sematic pogroms. Though the story often ends in tragedy, human hubris inevitably ignorant to the literatim processing with which our commands are followed.⊚⊛ Several centuries later these fears would evolve, no longer the danger of literal interpretation, now in the figure of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein witness the birth of an artificial intelligence. Though it was not necessarily the monster’s strength or endurance or capacity for thought that underpinned the existential threat he posed, rather it was his search for a bride, a mate and means to reproduce. Ultimately the possibility to outbread and outnumber us. To blot out our species as we blotted out the neanderthal.⎄ *This text is intended as an accompanying aid to the installation and performance, as an explanation it intentionally fails.