Decommission

Decommission features film, visual art, and movement-based projects that enact critiques of antagonistic infrastructures. Decommissioning refers to the practice of removing equipment or infrastructure from service. Often applied in a military context to retired weaponry, here, decommission plays against the idea of an artistic commission. Decommission’s featured projects exist in relationship to debt, material lack, and breakdown, rather than surplus and optimization. In spite or because of such depletion, these works exhibit rigor without regimentation, agility in the face of inaccess.

Dana Michel’s performance MIKE focuses on labor. The film program a gift horse’s mouth considers the impact of technology and its economy on the body. Constantina Zavitsanos’s talk concerns debt and dependency as it factors into their sculpture and performance practice. Together, these programs allow for inquiry into themes that are central to contemporary art, media theory, and other fields that engage with new media--such as the potential for technological innovation to be yoked to militaristic agendas; and whether artistic critique is possible under conditions of extreme financialization.

In Decommission, artists consider what is left of techne (instrumentality, technique, production) after obsolescence, destruction, or financial hardship puncture our sense of technology. Watching tools shift from vectors of innovation to compromised social artifacts, featured artists engage aesthetic methods that remain attentive to the physical fragility and social vulnerability of media.

–Katherine C.M. Adams