Michael Eddy

M for Leviathan
05.18–06.17.2023
Room 2

Technical autonomy is the instrumental principle behind the interconnection of machines, making humans the submissive spectators of a global, macrostructured complexity¹.

City council no longer controls anything, but continues to churn out developments. Permits are handed out left and right, groundbreaking ceremonies are enthusiastically celebrated, as much for the purposes of building conviction as for partisan fervour. Local administrations feed off data meant to optimize the city’s operations, but what we mostly create is more exclusion and more food or medical deserts. We build faster lanes for the technosphere, we are ordered to increase and build links, but not just any links: aqueducts, tunnels, and highways, all within a generalized framework of surveillance that is crucial to prevent the captives of precariousness from overflowing. Information travels fast, leaking from everywhere. The rhapsody of the street is asynchronous, the noise is one of urban sprawl and overheated housing markets, not a melancholy chant at all, but a dissonant electronic soundtrack generated by robot-obsessed humans. These flows, creatures of uncontrollable growth, reproduce and colonize everything. We want to stop new developments and mega infrastructure projects, but their backers have an insatiable thirst for pulverizing the old and the living. The City is a Leviathan that feeds on networked bodies, on the animated data of countless citizens who are subjugated to the avatars of power and their corporate mascots.

Michael Eddy’s M for Leviathan invites us to consider the unassimilable and the intractable, which, in human production and existence, will remain unacceptable to systems of digitized capital capture. This thing that won’t integrate itself in the machine, either willingly or unwillingly, is impossible to break down into quantifiable and reproducible information because it is too extraordinary. Those who want to withdraw from the tech hub must embrace degrowth, be critical and anti-disciplinary. They will need to muster playful and futureproof techniques to confront the cold face and reptilian brain of the Leviathan-Metropolis, to open rebellious and clever pathways in its waste, through its disconnections, and in its not-yet-desiccated areas. “Maybe, with enough care and faith, we can even make desert flowers grow. Maybe tech can be a part of the solution, rather than the force that denudes tender life with its twisters of nihilism².” It’s not quite Hell, but it still looks like they’re building it around here.

— Alexandre Piral (translated by Jo-Anne Balcaen)

1 Fanny Lopez, À bout de flux, éditions divergences, 2022 (our translation).
2 Michael Eddy, Koh-I-Noor, forthcoming.