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Listen to the tour by Helen Starr:

[Helen Starr]
My name is Helen Starr and I describe myself as an Afro-indigenous world-building curator. I was born and I grew up in Trinidad in the Caribbean and my mother is from a tribe called the Carib tribe, who were the original inhabitants of the islands. And we can trace our lineage back 6,000 years before Christopher Columbus sailed into our waters.

A large part of the work that I do is developing or writing about Carib cosmology, which is a way of helping… It’s a way of me expressing how my people think and understand the world to be, which leads us nicely into the concept of “what is it like”, which takes its title from a famous paper by Thomas Nagel is an amazing philosopher, who was grappling at the time with what is now known as the hard problem of consciousness. We have what’s the easy problem of consciousness?

That’s when you wake up and you want to get somewhere. You know how to get from point A to point B through following instructions. That is an easy thing to do. The hard problem of consciousness is about qualia. It’s about how our sense of things emerges into our consciousness. And qualia is very much linked to our senses and our sensory understanding of the body.

A big part of my work is framed around two main topics. One is the idea that the brain is a machine that renders reality. And looking at the very architecture of the brain as compared to the mind in order to understand how the mind emerges from the brain and how the brain interacts or understands the sensory experience of the body. This is linked to a second branch of my work, which is about the poetics of touch. So, how we understand touch as compared to understanding the world through our eyes, which tend to be our dominant… Or the way we think we understand the world.

The sense of distance is mapped onto the part of the brain which understands the spatial arena. And that’s why, for example, if I say, “You feel close to me,” you understand what I mean. But, you know most people don’t understand this in a literal sense. Or if I say, “You feel distant, I feel above you,” you think you’re below me. These things make sense even though they don’t make sense in a semantic, rational way. Because these are expressions of how we think through our feelings.

The structure of the exhibition loosely mirrors how I imagine the hard drive of a computer where you call things into being. So, you put a call out and then something appears on your screen. This is very similar to how our memories and our minds work. We get triggered by something, a memory emerges, and suddenly we are aware of the past, the present and probably sometimes the future merging into one. So, the exhibition is here to be played with. As you move through, you can interact through touch to all the screens, and watch as different iterations of the exhibition emerge, layered one above the other in a visual space. So, we can enter now.

Something I talk about, especially with Lawrence Lek’s work, is the idea of a threshold moment. A ritual moment where we can shift from one sense of consciousness to the other. We all know what that feels like, when you’re distracted and suddenly you lose your thought, you lose your sense of place in the world. That’s a threshold moment. And often, ritual is used to, to change our sense of consciousness or self. So, if we are going to do my makeup in the morning, that ritual of sitting in front of a mirror and that moment of applying material to my face transfers me to a different state, more polished, more ready to face the world. So, you can come through the threshold and have a ritual.

We can go quickly through the exhibition. There’s a wonderful pamphlet where I’ve written text if you want to delve deeper into the ideas behind the exhibition.

This is the amazing Katarzyna, who is an artist who thinks a lot about architecture and space, and how we move through space. You can see here on the window, there is a speaker which is actually pulling sound from outside and weaving it into the soundscape of the gallery. This is rethinking how we think of buildings as living, breathing beings, how the structure of architecture also aligns with the structure of the human body and is this work itself is a homage piece to a famous earlier work by a fluxus artist called The House of Dust, where they were looking for the first time at whether computers could cite poetry.

And while, of course, you can get things or words coming out that seem like poetry can an algorithm really understand poetics? We can make something that looks and sounds like a poet wrote it, but there’s no intent. There’s no sensory. They’re just words on a page. A computer doesn’t know what the feeling of of warm breeze drifting across your skin or a particular smell that suddenly transports you to a memory in childhood. It doesn’t understand poetics in the way that we do, and that’s a really important point about the whole exhibition, is to be very comfortable in admitting that the only response to “what is it like” is we, we don’t know. We don’t actually know what it is like to be another being. We can only imagine, and – how wonderful is that?

This work called META by Anna Bunting-Branch was a work that I commissioned in 2019. It’s based in speculative fiction and, in particular, science fiction from the ’60s. Anna works across many mediums. She also is a scholar of Luce Irigaray, and this work in particular pulls from a famous book called “Memoirs of a Space Woman” about a woman who is a space woman, who travels not just to far distances, but backwards and forwards through time, which becomes quite interesting as her children are on standard linear time. And the work itself begins in a mythical planet where the scientists are anthropologists and they’re archiving the creatures that live on that planet, pulling into the framework of – can you ever possibly know the other?

One of the most extraordinary things about this work for me is that, this is a technology where in the second scene of the work, the VR technology hacks your system and you get the sense that you’re actually flying, which is something unique to the artistic canon. So you fly in the air and you see the same scene, but at this point from the perspective of the alien being. So the first scene you see from the perspective of a human. The second scene you see, you see from the perspective of the alien being looking at the human looking at it.

There’s the mythical planet. There’s the anthropologist, and there’s the alien. And as you go through it, the story unfolds into what happens to these worlds eventually as their value becomes extracted, what happens to creatures when they’re thought of simply as commodities and not having personhood or how through humanism we’ve learned to think of the world as denatured and just a source for humans to extract wealth. So this work is very much about themes of post-humanism more than humanism and how we live in the world. Anna, I don’t know if you’d like to add anything else?

[Anna Bunting-Branch]
So this work it’s a kind of the fruits of a long collaboration with Helen and a long conversation with Helen about ideas of worlds meeting and dialogues across difference. And this is something that I’m very proud that we’re still working together and still having these conversations after so many years. So thank you for that.

Just to say that the work is on the screen here, but it’s also on the VR headset. It was designed to be experienced as an immersive piece of technology. My work is with painting and animation, but it was the first time that I’d worked with… The invitation from Helen was to work with an immersive technology. So it was the first time kind of thinking about orienting a viewer in this kind of performative embodied technology of VR headset. The work has outlived the headset that it was designed for, which is the Oculus Go, which I’m quite pleased with ’cause I always, you know, found it a, a crazy, weird technology, so that’s quite fun. I think there is a kind of interest in the politics of representation and technology, which are conversations that we have. And it really uses this kind of DIY spirit to craft these worlds from a quite modest means of painted puppets and the, the VR technology. So yeah, I’m just delighted to be able to share it here and thank you so much.

[Helen Starr]
Thanks, Anna.

This is a two-part work with Damara, who is an amazing artist, who was talking about her particular culture and how she fits herself into a world when she inhabits a very different cosmology. The fascinating thing for me about this work is that during COVID. Damara during COVID, she was in this virtual space, with the two curators and having a conversation with them. And for some reason, she felt so safe, that this was the first time that she felt able to talk about her mother’s early onset Alzheimer’s, and the fact that she may be looking at the similar fate. And I found it really interesting that we think of these spaces as artificial worlds and yet, in this world, dressed in her extraordinary traditional outfit, her conscious self was able to feel safe enough to share this deeply moving story.

So, I always like to think about where we are and how we occupy the virtual. And again, it was a sort of magical, ritual moment where she traveled to another space and was able to talk about it. Around the exhibition, I’ve tried to do an example of digital technologies. So, we have digital sound, we have virtual reality experience. We have an extraordinary AR experience where you get to perform yourself as if you are, Damara, and dance and move in the space. Take selfies, send them around the world and travel to distant lands, a bit like, you know, the scientist who traveled through space to a different planet.

This is the extraordinary Ka Fai. Ka Fai uses performance and movement with technology throughout his entire practice. And this particular work is a homage piece to the very famous Butoh dancer called Hijikata. Choy talks about visiting Japan. He’s from Singapore. And being transported by a cassette of Hijikata’s work. He wanted to embody the spirit of Hijikata or have the spirit of Hijikata embody him, which is a very Butoh philosophy. In order to do that, Choy had the film, and in order to retrain his muscles, which had been trained for years in classical dance, he put electrodes on his body that will map to the movement of Hijikata. Butoh is a dance practice which is about the transformation of being. And it understands the body as a trans-mechanical device. So, you often see in indigenous cultures, you’ll often see very specific movements when we dance. So, the vagus nerve on your heel, it’s stopped, which triggers it. The body moves from left to, to right to break the way that we normally move. Through breath and oxygen and the shifting of our body, we literally transform ourselves. We reconfigure ourselves into different beings and into different states of being. So, often you will see people reaching particular states of ecstasy, or talking about how they were transported into a different state of consciousness.

So, this work is very much about understanding the body as a piece of technology. And also, throughout the exhibition it speaks deeply about colonial issues. This is a homage to a particular piece of work by Hijikata which Hijikata made after the dropping of the bombs in Japan. And at that time, it took the government two weeks to tell the people that the Americans had bombed them. So, the regular folk didn’t understand what was happening. So, in order to create a stable consciousness, in order to retain the stability of their world, they imagined that one of their folkloric creatures called the Weasel, the wind with many blades, had manifested and that’s what had happened to them. And that’s how they sort of got through that moment of time in trying to understand what had happened, because they didn’t know. This is a poem of sorts to AI and the future of AI. It’s a blessing. It’s meant to walk under it. But as you walk under it, it’s also a bow. So I also think a lot when I’m curating about how people move through the space. And this is sort of accompanied by this film of a shaman that Choy visited in order to connect with the spirit of Hijikata.

So, we’re talking about very deep philosophy, but also thinking about in Daoist cosmology how AI can be thought of a manifestation of the Wanwu, the 10,000 things and how things come into being. So rather than thinking about it as a fracture or something that’s descended on us like some strange thing, we can understand it as a poetic, um, arising from everything that’s been happening around us. In other words, it was fated to be.

Here we have Lawrence Lek, who is an extraordinary digital artist. And this is a film. This is also something that I commissioned. It was originally meant to be played. It’s a playable game. So, you can use controllers to navigate your way around this realm. So again, I was thinking about all the different ways that artists are using technology. Lawrence talks here a lot about threshold moments, moments where you move from one place to another. The background narrative of this work is about the bombing of the Imperial Palace by the French. And something that Lawrence shared with us, which I didn’t know, is that the English were very concerned about the dogs that had been bombed. He found the original letter of the command of that mission to Queen Elizabeth, where he was talking about the sad state of the poor dogs and how they were trying to save as many dogs. And he brought to the palace in England a gift from this situation, which was a little Pekingese dog called Luti. So this is how these dogs came to be in the UK. It’s a really beautiful work, and the score is also very beautiful as well. And the letter is archived in this work for future generations who may look at it to find and understand what had happened.

Should we go here? This is the last work. Uh, I’ll let you discover it. This is a work that is irresistible to me. Kira is from my part of the world, and she is from the Guaraní tribe. So we have a lot of similarity in how we think about the world. This work is impossible for me to engage with without dancing, so I would really encourage everyone when you put the headphones on to enjoy the piece and to see how it changes the shapes of your body, to see how you feel before and after. Kira wanted this reflective panel specifically to bounce the light off her work because she wanted to talk about something that I’m very interested in – how information and understanding flow through our bodies, flow through our reflections of ourselves and each other.

The Guaraní people have a myth of the hummingbird. The island that I’m from in Trinidad is called the Land of the Hummingbird which was a sacred being in our time that is understood to be the mythical being that acts as a portal between life and death. Hummingbirds are extraordinary creatures, no one actually knows how they work. Hummingbirds will fly huge distances. No one understands how they know how to navigate. When you see a forest full of hummingbirds, you will not find any bird poop. If we think about that, they are such perfect beings that they don’t excrete. A hummingbird will drink its equivalent of a swimming pool of nectar in one day, and they eat all of the insects on the island. So, they are as close to magical beings and, oh, I’m sure I should mention that their wings are like nothing else. The technology that makes hummingbirds fly is something that we cannot even imagine creating even now. So, I just wanted to leave you with a thought of maybe “what it is like to be a hummingbird” and to live such an extraordinary life as you dance with Kira in her extraordinary artwork.

Thank you.