[This is a catalogue essay written for Daniel Della-Bosca's exhibition Untouched Histories held at Logan Art Gallery, Queensland from 6th August to 13th September 2014.]
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| Daniel Della-Bosca, Factitious, 2014 |
It is in our nature to be against nature. Our subjectivity as humans has often been predicated on our opposition to the natural world. Our efficacy as a civilisation is wholly proportional to the degree of power we exert over the natural world in terms of both knowledge and literal destruction. It is a fact that without the wholesale assault we have waged on the environment to extract precious metals, we would not enjoy the level of technological advances that we do, nor would we have access to the highly technically complex devices that have become common, ubiquitous elements of everyday life. What is most fascinating about this process however is that such technologies, in their ubiquity, have become so iconic of our modernity that their origins in the natural landscape has been long forgotten. But also hidden beneath this signification is the technological complexity that enables these devices to function at all. This is a complexity however, that is not at all unique to technological systems and networks but also an omnipresent feature of the natural world itself
In Untouched Histories,
Daniel Della-Bosca confronts the paradox of simultaneous technological and
natural complexity through a series of images, objects, animations and
holograms. His forms occupy a strange space in our consciousness, they are at
once familiar and strange, organic and synthetic, natural and technical, real
and virtual. But crucially rather than settle at one side of the binary, the
forms problematise the very possibility of the binary. Complexity requires a far
more, vast dimensionality than a binary opposition will
permit. Della-Bosca’s deployment of fractal mathematics in the creation of his
forms provides sufficient context for complexity to be encountered in a
meaningful way.
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| Daniel Della-Bosca, A Delicate Moment, 2014 Inkjet Print on Rag Paper |
Fractal geometry has a reputation of being overly and
unnecessarily complex, and that it should be left to geeks and scientists. This
is based on the assumption that complexity, particularly the complexity of
nature, is something that should be overcome, a problem to be solved. But in
actual fact we all experience, engage with, and are likely fascinated by
fractal forms every day of our lives. Complexity is something that is easy, if
not natural, to experience but difficult to think about, perhaps because our
thinking is based on classical linear systems and Cartesian dualism. We already
have the capacity to apprehend fractal complexity on a tacit level, but our perception
is polluted by certain aspects the
very everyday life the classical systems were designed to understand.
The French cultural theorist Paul Virilio uses this trope of
pollution to formulate his argument for a “grey ecology” which addresses the
impact of speed, or “the acceleration of reality through new technologies” as
the “pollution of time and distance” which he sees as “much more severe… than
the pollution of material substances.”[1]
Modelled on the “green ecology” that concerns nature, Virilio calls for a “grey
ecology” that concerns the techno-cultural sphere. The important aspect of
Virilio’s argument is that despite the colour differentiation of green and grey
ecologies they are not necessarily treated as entirely separate spheres of the
natural and the techno-cultural. Conversely, they are in fact united in their
characterisation as “ecologies”. This implies that a green ecology is only one
part of the ecological spectrum, and in Virilio’s view, the concerns of a grey
ecology have as much, if not more of an impact on the world than a green
ecology. One is not a model of the other, they are part of the same ecological
continuum, subject to the same threats of polluting forces.
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| Daniel Della-Bosca, Uncatalogued Thing, 2014 Inkjet Print on Metallic Paper |
Virilio’s transgression of ecological binaries opens up a
more complex mode of understanding concepts of ‘technology’ and ‘nature’. The
natural forms, such as clouds, in Della-Bosca’s work are not invoked to serve
as binary points from which the fractal forms can act as examples of
technological imitations of nature, or even for indexically drawing out
similarities between the natural and the technological. Such an approach to
this work would rely on the outdated binary of real versus virtual, nature
versus technology, green versus grey. The forms are entities in themselves, not
of nature or technology, but both. Or more accurately, they do not operate on
the assumption that there are similarities between the two spheres, but on the
fact that they are not even entirely discrete. Increasingly the concept of
nature as something other to the
processes and objects of human evolution is becoming outdated. Della-Bosca’s
forms demonstrate that technology and nature exhibit self-similarities, not
because they are discrete spheres but because they exist on the same fractal
trajectory.
Fractal form effortlessly traverses both green and grey ecologies
because it is in fact a fundamental characteristic of both. It is more than a
mere coincidence that the same geometries that feature in the natural world are
used to understand the behaviour and structure of complex digital networks and
indeed to design them.[2] The
organic/synthetic tension that Della-Bosca’s forms evoke, or the simultaneously
green and grey space they occupy in our perceptual taxonomies, is in fact a natural state for them by virtue of the
fact that their fractal substrate is an anathema to the limited dimensionality
of such taxonomies. There is only tension or confusion if we rely on outdated
linearity and dualism. The work in Untouched
Histories should therefore not be met as an intellectual challenge to be
overcome, or a cryptic mystery to be solved. In the same way that we don’t need
a functioning knowledge of fractal geometry to be mesmerised by cloud
formations or coastal topographies viewed from the window of a plane, we
respond to Della-Bosca’s forms with our bodies and not our intellect. Our
bodies are both the mortal organic reminder that we are part of nature and also
the point at which nature morphs into technology.
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| Daniel Della-Bosca, Where Wishes Are Woven, 2014 Inkjet Print on Metallic Paper |
