“Our Non-Understanding of Everything” is a sixteen part video-series that explores how the structures of architecture, semiconductors, and circuits become forms of expression reflecting hierarchies, cognitive processes, and relationships to the natural environment. > see excerpts below
Our Non-Understanding of Everything is the daily practice of observation, questioning and switching perspectives in order to understand our relationship to our tech-devices and their existence in the world. Motivated by finding ways to imagine what our smart phones want from us and if we can communicate with them, we are using our natural and human built environments to possibly entertain, relax and stimulate the technical devices, that so profoundly influence our conception of the universe and our relation to it. Our findings are presented in a growing video-series that is made accessible via single channel video-screenings and multi-channel video-installations.
The guiding motto of “Non-Understanding” comes from an article Hannah Arendt published in 1954 called “Understanding and Politics” in which she states that one can fight totalitarianism without understanding it. “Many people say that one cannot fight totalitarianism without understanding it. Fortunately this is not true; if it were, our case would be hopeless.” Understanding as an activity, she explains, is “unending and therefore cannot produce final results. It is the specifically human way of being alive; for every single person needs to be reconciled to a world into which he was born a stranger and in which, to the extent of his distinct uniqueness, he always remains a stranger.”
The existence of our smart devices raises the question of their essence, which makes us curious about semiconductors – which leads to a set of further questions: How does intelligence evolve? How is this knowledge retained? Memory? Memory chips? And how is adaptive behavior connected to advanced logic chips? How do memory, knowledge, understanding and nature coexist?
The surfaces of semiconductor wafers, observed in the sun and shadow play of the quivering leaves of an Aspen tree or during a heavy downpour, when the raindrops on the wavers’ surface become magnifying glasses, seem infinitely detailed and as delightfully engaging as observing the ever-changing patterns of a kaleidoscope. The reflective surface capacities of these integrated circuits, that have been embedded into the silicon substrate (wafers) through the amalgamation of hundreds of highly specialized physical and chemical processes, seem to contain the same sort of (human) potential that resides behind the facades of corporate, skyscrapers dominated by hard-gridded glass facades, an observation that makes us ask: What impact do rigid grid structures of modern architecture and semiconductors have on our thoughts and emotions, on our sense of freedom and democracy, on our experience with hierarchies, flows, vibes or intuitions? Are these surfaces reflecting or signaling expressions by Things or signs of their agency?
Semiconductors regulate the flow from lower levels of energy to higher states of energy. Quantum mechanics describes energy levels in atoms, ions or molecules in terms of their excitement. In semiconductors higher and lower levels of energy are produced through electrons that carry a negative and a positive charges. When the situation becomes unstable, if for example the temperature rises, charge carriers mediate between the two states. Mediating between two states in political terms is called diplomacy, which loops us back into Hannah Arendt’s “Understanding and Politics” and thus embeds our project within the global, political, interconnected climate crisis of our shared future and its relations to technology and the natural world.
Parts of this ongoing video series have been exhibited in different formations, installations and contexts.
Reviews:
“Our Non-Understanding of Everything” by Natasha Chuk
eteam’s Video Art Reflects on Our Pervasive Physical Entanglement with Technology by Jeong-A Kim
Interviews:
Ginger Radio Hour with Justin Maiman on wgxc
Blurring the Lines: eteam’s Exploration of Art, Nature, and Technology with Vladislav Alimpiev