Here Is My Eyes Aren’t :: composed - and decomposed - as an AIR at Zaratan, Lisbon, Portugal.
After looking at a mountain some time ago in a mining town and seeing the black, blue, green, red striations,
Laura turned their inquiry to the clay and the ceramic process, breaking it down into its material parts and
asking about the story of the minerals, oxides, pieces of earth.
Kathyrn Yusoff and Lucy Lippard informed this practice greatly, helping to think through how geology isn’t
neutral and in fact has a part in shaping our subjectivities, on a spectrum of extractive resource to human
resource. At Zaratan, Laura expanded this intersection of materiality and subjectivities, pushing the western
notion of the boundary of human as it is challenged by indigenous relationships to land, by bacteria, and by
artificial intelligence. All three are demanding we question the enlightenment belief that man is an individual
entity, separate from nature.
For one month the artist engaged in a collaboration between organic materials (kombucha
scoby, agar, mycelium, raw clay, salt crystals, cobalt, iron oxide); artificial intelligence (training a bot to create
a contemporary improvisational score); and themself, to compose a sculpture with no one author, a sculpture
which will begin decomposing as soon as it is composed, in fact, even before.
Ideas of weeds, bacteria crossing borders, energetic sculpture, non-rational data sets, the unseen, have
been present. Following the AI generated score, the sculpture was created over an hour as Laura followed the directions given, their movements shaping the raw materials.
In “Here is my eyes aren’t” the sculpture holds the place of a fluid monument, one that is not memorializing a
moment in history but rather is the imprint, the record of an event, a performance. its goal is fluidity and
decay; becoming immediately abject and illegible.
The live performance engaged with the AI generated score as an improvisational
exploration into dance scores, technology, translation, and glitch.
