Sprawl

Morphogenesis has begun. The system, temporarily halted at an indistinct point between growth and decay, is occupying its surroundings with a totipotent force of transformation. The latter opens up an unpredictable area, with individual vortices in the structure that subside and then, transformed, seep at another, distant point in this anomalous complex … Sprawl is a spatial organisation of forms that establishes an asemic taxonomic practice as a radical departure from the linear and hierarchical understanding of evolution. In the setup, classification is recursively embedded into the formation process to activate the performative productivity of the diagram as an organism. The system, which is both a taxonomic model and an organism, operates horizontally and in dynamic interdependence of its parts. These occupy states in between the processes of growth, folding, differentiation and decay, which emerge from different directions simultaneously and materialise at the nodes as strange remnants. If the system is observed as a process where technology mutates into a body – the physical material of an organism – the artefacts are the sediments of specific temporalities and dimensionalities of the processes of procedural generation, which, much like taxonomic practices have historically done, hallucinate entirely new (and non-existent) evolutionary branches and organisms. As a process where the body mutates into technology, however, it is permeated by an uncanny tension between the structure and its non-transparent operation. The system resists dispersal through self-interpretative feedback loops, producing new forms of organisation of its material, which in turn restructure the parameters of the emergent self-cognitive logic. The affect of ambient horror, usually neutralised by a taxonomic or diegetic operation that links the unclear to the tangible, is thus never resolved, as the system continues to develop new states, relentlessly resisting entropy and further expanding its productive orbit. Credits: Author: Blaž Miklavčič Curator and author of the text: Maja Burja Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2024 Part of the U30+ production programme for supporting young artists Financial support: The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana