Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 5: On horizonless futures — with Patricia Reed
Speakers: Jamie-Leigh Gonzales, Melissa Roach, Maria Cecilia Saba, Am Johal, Patricia Reed
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Jamie-Leigh Gonzales 0:06
You’re listening to Below the Radar, a knowledge mobilization project out of 312 Main. I’m Jamie-Leigh Gonzales and I work for SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. This podcast is about bringing forward ideas to encourage meaningful exchanges across communities. Each episode we interview guests on topics ranging from environmental and social justice, arts, culture, community building, and urban issues. This podcast is recorded on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
Melissa Roach 0:30
Hi, my name is Melissa Roach.
Maria Cecilia Saba 0:32
My name is Maria Cecilia Saba.
Melissa Roach 0:34
This week our guest is Patricia Reed. She is an artist based in Berlin. Patricia was at SFU Woodward’s in October to give a talk on Horizonless Futures and she is here interviewed by Am Johal, talking more about her practice and the theory work that she does around her practice.
Maria Cecilia Saba 0:54
To see the whole talk, make sure to check out our Knowledge Mobilization Audiovisual Gallery at sfuwoodwards.ca.
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Am Johal 1:10
Hi, welcome to our podcast everybody, glad that you could join us. We’re here today with writer, designer, and theorist Patricia Reed, who’s based in Berlin. Welcome Patricia.
Patricia Reed 1:21
Thanks Am, nice to be here. Thanks for the amazing hospitality here in Vancouver.
Am Johal 1:26
I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about your intellectual trajectory. You moved to Berlin in 2002, I know you did your undergrad at Concordia, in Montreal, and then later went to European graduate school, but it would be great if you could talk about some of the work that you did previous to what you’re working on now.
Patricia Reed 1:45
Yeah sure. I mean, I moved to Germany in 2003. First to Stuttgart, in fact, because I had a really nice fellowship there. And, you know, prior to that had always been, you know, way back when, I went to an arts high school in Ottawa. Public arts high school, a wonderful place. I was always doing a bunch of theoretical readings, since a really long time it’s always been an interest and coincided with artistic practice. But then it started to really become much more dominant, in many cases, unfortunately maybe, more dominant than the art practice.
Patricia Reed 2:26
So that’s kind of why I decided to, much later, like I was 30 or something when I went back to do a Masters. So I’d been doing a bunch of writing and stuff like that on my own and continuing reading, but I think that one thing that was important about doing the Masters was like, if you’re kind of doing a lot of that reading on your own, you don’t necessarily feel so confident with the material. Or I kept feeling like ‘oh, I’m probably misunderstanding everything’. But you know, having done a slightly more formal thing, I mean you studied there, you know it’s not very formal either, just getting a little more confidence that okay, you’re not a total idiot, you can negotiate this material, and so just having an active life with theory.
Patricia Reed 3:12
And then of course getting involved with other people, mainly via online channels, I would say. Yeah, it’s kind of been a pursuit and really, I think it’s kind of interesting that, coming sort of adjacently at it, like not being a proper academic or something, I’ve actually got to meet and work with so many thinkers via design practices, and that’s always been really cool, because I had jobs doing sound to metrics when I was younger. So like, stemming from the social studies of science, like how bibliographies become analyzed, information visualization in order to map disciplines and map trajectories and map certain economic practices driving disciplinary research and so on and so forth, you have to negotiate with scientists and other disciplines that you have no idea about, and then figure out ways to work and find, let’s say, information cartographic strategies to best display the complex information that they want to convey. So that’s always been an amazing position to get in contact with a bunch of other fields that I think that if you just do theory, you don’t necessarily have that. And so I felt really lucky that basically I could offer services to these people. So it was that you were useful to them, but then you got to engage with all this stuff that you maybe would not have picked up on your own.
Am Johal 4:38
And even today, you continue to work as an artist, you’re giving public talks in many places as well. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about that relationship between art and theory that you’ve worked with for a while, and also the kind of tensions that function when you’re trying to work in those various ways.
Patricia Reed 4:58
Yeah. I mean, obviously I’m not the only artist who writes and does work. There’s a tradition, I think, actually stronger in North America, because I think that writing is a little bit more part of the artistic education here. You know, I guess every artist negotiates it differently. I have to do them in different headspaces, basically. I can’t do it in parallel. So you go through phases where you’re writing and you’re kind of thinking about things in terms of arguments and definitions and what have you. And then, of course, when you bring that into material practice, that’s definitely not how you want to think. Like I don’t think a good artwork is about setting an argument, it’s about providing a condition of a certain type of experience that you want to convey, but it’s not as, let’s say, pointed or fixed as a theoretical argument. So I tend to do them differently and I guess the reason, the way that I always rationalize spending so much time in the theory world is because I think it helps to train your intuition a little bit better. So if you’re thinking about a lot of problems, so even if you’re not necessarily illustrating it in a one-to-one way, which I think is, I wouldn’t want to do necessarily in an art practice, you’re kind of training your intuition of how you set up the problems that you want to negotiate in an artwork, maybe how you think about the relationship between ideas and materials a little differently. So kind of try to see it in a way of training intuition, a bit, if that makes sense.
Am Johal 6:29
In a number of your theoretical projects, you’ve tended to work in collectives with groups of people through technology in various ways, and I’m wondering if you could talk about the difference between working on theoretical projects on your own and then when you’re working in collectives with people.
Patricia Reed 6:48
Yeah, I mean I think that the one that certainly got the most attention is the Laboria Cuboniks group, and we actually tend to describe it more as a working group rather than a collective, because I think a collective is maybe more associated with having a, let’s say a more uniform position or a certain focus that there’s a consensus necessarily around it and that it is put forth in a collective voice. And I think with the Laboria Cuboniks thing, obviously there was a kind of consensus on a diagnostic terrain, but there’s much difference between us in terms of where our personal interests are more emphasized. Like, let’s say we’re interested in different disciplinary pursuits via this common thread of what we call xenofeminism. But what’s been great about that is again, of course you get exposed to a whole other set of concerns, a whole other angle through which to see the world that you weren’t necessarily thinking through on your own. So it’s a kind of immense learning curve because I think we kind of recognize that we can’t properly address reality from one perspective or one discipline or someone. There’s not going to be any sort of way to monopolize that if you want to get a bigger picture. Yet, of course, one person can’t do that, so it’s interesting to try and work together and try to find ways to interface these different pursuits and figure out where they join, where they don’t, and so on and so forth. So that’s been really incredibly useful, incredibly humbling as well to work with particularly in that group with these 5 other women.
Am Johal 8:40
In being at your seminar yesterday, it’s interesting see you speak and the role that diagrams, models play in the way - I guess that’s the design side of you coming out in particular ways - and I find that quite unique, actually, in terms of art talks that I go to and these types of things. I’m wondering if you could speak a little bit about, have you always had a fascination with diagrams and models, or did it come in a particular way?
Patricia Reed 9:12
Yeah, I think definitely yes. I’ve always had these mind maps or whatever, they look like those crazy conspiracy, you know, diagrams where you’re connecting a bunch of things and so on and so forth. So diagrams, I think, to be quite frank about it, it’s possible to write a text and be a little sneaky and you could include certain things in there that you’re not entirely sure are fully fleshed out or not, and I think that a diagram is a kind of bullshit meter test. I don’t think you can bullshit a diagram. And so, I feel like when I really properly understand a concept, then I can make a diagram. So it’s kind of like a Litmus test for understanding a position that you’re trying to map out, and yeah it’s kind of like the ultimate compressor, and I like that challenge of having to take something that, you know, maybe takes 30 minutes to explain. And of course, it’s helpful to have a narration over a diagram, but that it’s still possible to work on that compression and get it into one, succinct, two-dimensional surface. I think that that’s what I enjoy about the challenge of diagrams, basically.
Am Johal 10:33
I’ve visited you in Berlin when you’re in the middle of working on one of these, and I can see all of these things pasted up on your walls and it looks like a madwoman working!
Patricia Reed 10:44
Yeah, kind of! It’s not an unfair position. I’ll have to just… that’s why we’re doing a podcast and not a video interview in my house! But thanks for revealing it!
Am Johal 11:01
I was going to talk to you a little bit about the talk you gave last night about horizon-less futures. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you came to this topic and why this is of concern to you now.
Patricia Reed 11:12
There’s like a primary interest in this sort of, like, underlying spatial temporal relationship to the surroundings, so that’s obviously the geometric interest, and how horizons sort of mark a human biosensory limitation. And of course we all intellectually know that wherever our line of sight ends, the world doesn’t drop off. We know that. But do our corresponding behaviours, activities, and the way we figure relationship to each other, to other species, to the world itself, do those actually not respond more to the illusion of the vanishing point rather than that which is beyond? And that, put in a more simple way, would be like, it seems like we as humans find difficulty in changing behaviours for things that aren’t directly present to us, right? And I think, that’s why the example and certainly your work on climate change activism, I think it’s a really difficult to bring this into a political, or a potlicizable question, because it’s almost existing only in this idea, only beyond the vanishing point, at least for the immediate condition in Canada. Certainly climate change is not beyond the vanishing point in many places around the world. But how do we understand different ways that we are motivated to change behaviour, to change positions and so on and so forth, because it seems to me that simply knowing alone isn’t enough.
Patricia Reed 13:03
And so, one of the general questions that I certainly have is what is the relationship between knowing and doing? Because I think that there’s a lot of assumptions in especially theoretical positions, or even certain modes of consciousness erasing, and so on. These are obviously important, we need to have access to information, better descriptions of the world, or better accounts of the world, as Harraway would have said. But that alone doesn’t seem to be enough of a motivational impetus for us to change. So the question is how do you exist in those new ideas? How do those ideas become transformed into instruments, into tools? And so I think that there’s a big negotiation that needs to happen between the way we know the world and the different ways that that knowledge can be articulated through instruments, right? It doesn’t have to be a one-to-one translation. So that’s the sort of, that’s like one interest in the horizon which I guess is kind of sounding very obtuse at this point.
Patricia Reed 14:12
But then, and this is very early stages of this, so it’s going to be fairly ignorant what I’m saying to you at this moment. But I’ve been really inspired by the work of this philosopher, Giuseppe Longo, who also happens to be a thinker of mathematics and biology. And one of his interesting insights is that this sort of computational logic that seems to be a very dominant logic of our moment. It doesn’t coincide, you can’t map it into biological processes, which are all about particularity. So he has, I think, work in a lot of cancer institutes. When you see him speak he’s talking about each lab rat is like, you have the full genealogy of that particular lab rat. It’s not just generic lab right, right, because biological systems require that degree of particularity that’s not necessarily accounted for in a computational, logical system. So he’s kind of interested in the tension between these.
Patricia Reed 15:15
But his work in geometry is really talking about the tension or the interplay between human abstract conceptions and phenomenology. So I think it’s an interesting way, I think geometry is an interesting way to see where those two worlds meet: the abstraction and the everyday performance in life based on a conceptual understanding of space. So it seems to me like an interesting way to, while critiquing this sort of immediacy of phenomenal experience, to also recognize that it plays within this abstract system, so you’re not disavowing human experience, either, but you’re rather demanding something other of it, let’s say.
Am Johal 16:02
Now, I know you’ve been involved a little bit with the Strelka Institute and you’re involved with a number of projects now. I’m just wondering, what else are you working on right now?
Patricia Reed 16:13
I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily...I’m involved with Strelka, I had the great privilege to go and do a couple remote talks there, but also the great privilege to see the final student projects for the second year in Moscow this summer, which was just incredible what these young people are able to do in a very compressed amount of time, and the scale at which they are thinking, but not only that, the different forces that they are bringing together in articulating their projects. What was particularly of note for me in seeing this year’s cohort was the general approach to design, away from how we typically tend to think of design which is ‘you make something, you’re an industrial designer, you create an object; you’re an architect, you create a building’ and so on, is that they are really approaching design from a question of enablement. So what are the forces at work that enable certain practices, modes, evaluation to emerge? So it would almost be like, let’s say if we take an example of architecture, it would be like, you would say the most influential architect would be like AutoCAD, the software, right? The thing that everyone has to use in order to even make the building. So that was kind of a general observation that I thought was really, really useful. So it seemed to be a lot of focus in that program about, at least this year, of this kind of design from below in a way.
Patricia Reed 17:52
And other projects that I’m working on right now, I’m trying to think. It’s a little messy. Yeah, I mean a lot of the stuff is little bit pursuing more in this geometrical question, which is an immense amount of stuff to learn in the next bit. Hopefully with some collaboration with some mathematicians who can actually set me straight in a lot of it to get out of the nonsense. I think it’s interesting to work with the scientists.
Am Johal 18:25
I never got into Badiou’s set theory, I just ignored it and went into the rest.
Patricia Reed 18:30
I was always checking the, you know, you get ambitious in these interim chapters and the big books and you look at the legend in the back to at least, you know, verbalize the equations or the formalizations. But yeah, I’m not a set theory person. I think it’s interesting to negotiate that, but the thing is if you don’t know then you also have to be a bit humble because, you know there’s a lot of bad abuse of the humanities pilfering funny ideas from the sciences and they don’t necessarily have a grasp on the rudimentary thing that they are trying to take inspiration from. I have no problem with people taking inspiration or liberty with certain things, but you got to kind of know it. So there’s like a big learning curve, going into that. But quite honestly, I’m hoping to take a little writing break and get back into materials and stuff again and films and yeah.
Am Johal 19:24
Nice, nice. So our listeners are always interested in getting book recommendations or theorists that you’re interested in and looking at now. You mentioned a few yesterday and some of the work, but I’m wondering, who are you excited by in terms of the writing they’re doing now?
Patricia Reed 19:42
Oh god, there’s so many! Well I think we have to give a shout out to, I mean, there’s like one scholar that I’m really a fan of, I think she’s really helpful especially in terms of media theory and she’s new to - as far as I know - new to SFU, if I’m not mistaken is Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and she’s a wonderful thinker, very helpful. What I find really useful in my own thinking about technology and the sort of interfacing between the social and technical is that she just has a very profound knowledge of technical infrastructure. So she’s not just looking at technology as a kind of symptomatic, grumpy ‘oh Twitter is this’ and we don’t have attentions, blah blah blah, but she can really give you insight how these network structures are formed, under what assumptions do they come into being, and how they are shaping our reality today. So it’s a much more in depth analysis that I just find really useful because it’s neither technofetishist nor pessimist, but it’s a very solid, analytical thing and she’s done some wonderful books and amazing talks on this as well.
Patricia Reed 20:59
Another philosopher that’s been very useful for me is not a new one, it’s Wilfrid Sellars, this American pragmatist philosopher where this kind of principle of the stereoscopy of bringing the scientific image into sort of relation with the manifest image and that to me strikes me as a really important, or potentially, interesting angle to work with as an artist. And of course, without putting a positivist hierarchy, the scientific image ought to be instructing the manifest. It’s not this kind of hierarchical relationship anymore. But if you wanted to be more in general, like, how to bring this counterintuitive, insensible world into some sort of manifest reality, something that can be experienced, something that can be lived in order to transform how we understand ourselves. So that’s, I think, that is quite important. Who else would I recommend? I mean there’s like this infinite amount! You’ve got to give me that one in advance so that I can prepare.
Am Johal 22:16
Well that was good, that was good! I just wanted to say thank you for joining us Patricia. Ten years being away from Vancouver is far too long, so you’ll have to come back again!
Patricia Reed 22:28
Yeah, with pleasure, especially when it’s nice and sunny like this! I was not expecting. But yeah it’s been wonderful to be here and grateful for the hospitality and everything, and hoping to get to meet more of these amazing scholars running around the building here in the next few days.
Am Johal 22:46
For sure, thank you so much for joining us with Patricia Reed this week.
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Melissa Roach 22:57
Thank you so much for listening!
Maria Cecilia Saba 22:59
Thank you, Patricia Reed, for being here with us today.
Melissa Roach 23:02
And always, thank you to our production team, including myself, Maria Cecilia, and Jamie-Leigh Gonzales who is here with us in the booth, if you can call this a booth! We’re in our office.
Maria Cecilia Saba 23:14
Yeah, and make sure to subscribe to our podcast!
Melissa Roach 23:18
Thanks and catch you next week!
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