Elsewhere
On a frigid winter morning over a decade ago, I walked into the dark and cavernous warehouse that was Eyebeam’s former home in the West Chelsea district of Manhattan. This space was huge and was rumored to have previously existed at various times as both an S&M club (apparently called Paddles) as well as an auto repair garage. I like to imagine them somehow sharing the space.
On that cold morning, I walked into the rough hewn interior and noticed the outline of a huge square, chalked in white on the concrete floor. The demarcated area inside the square was filled with random objects: stacks of tin cans, a fat bottle rocket, an electric fan, as well as some sheets of paper with numbers printed on them. And hanging from the ceiling was a projection screen which showed precisely that same space with all of its objects, but rendered digitally.
The project being built was Elsewheres (2014), a performative installation by (2013-2014 Residents) Chris Woebken and the late Sascha Poehflepp. As random people interacted with the staged installation, they would “become agents of the simulation, affecting the real world in order to make it resemble the speculation of a machine.” This was a prescient and poetic insight about humanity’s relationship with technology, typical of Eyebeam artists who often work far ahead of their time.
I believe that Eyebeam has attracted hundreds of extraordinarily insightful artists over the years because it is committed acting as a “public amateur” (in the words of Claire Pentecost) – instead of performing expertise, Eyebeam allows artists’ ideas to be excavated in public, often at early stages. This approach helps break down power structures within knowledge and creativity, allowing for exploration far outside of any one discipline.
Eyebeam, at its best, fosters breakthroughs because it is able to relinquish the notion of discipline itself. This is an idealistic way of thinking, to be sure, particularly for an organization that still has fundraising requirements and reports to be filed. But somehow we have been able to pull this off for nearly a quarter of a century. And while the world is currently in deep trouble, I hold a sense of curiosity about what comes next, perhaps similar to (2014-2016 Resident) artist Torkwase Dyson when she spoke about emergent cultural fissures in 2022, “What I’m excited about or what keeps me curious is the responses to this particular wave of insanity, this particular wave of violence, this wave of injustice and unwellness. What will we do as a collective in response?”
As troubling as the current state of the world is, I remain stubbornly optimistic that a collective response can be built from idealistic imaginations of artists, probably some of them supported by Eyebeam. We will need their insights, in part, to wrangle esoteric technological developments into more just and humane visions for what can be. I look forward to following the trails yet to be blazed by this organization long into the future.
Roddy Schrock
