Jason Loebs “Cold Flow Creep”

Essex Street

poster for Jason Loebs “Cold Flow Creep”

This event has ended.

Rubbing the wrong way back

Heat isn’t exactly an objective form; it might be better described as a gradient between one body and another. It neither produces itself nor is created through social arbitration; it gathers and diffuses itself through time. It’s an energy that resonates matter and plots its escape route through rhythmic vibrations of colliding atoms and oscillating molecules. A frenetic dance among microscopic materials, what we call heat is the measurement of that which is immeasurable in itself. Heat as a measurable, exteriorized phenomenon appears historically as thermodynamics. While the discipline results from constructed, contingent categories, acknowledging its socio-historical mediation does not undermine its independence. Thermodynamic law exists empirically and autonomously; social intervention is required only to render its truths legible.

The energy generated by heat is an important conceit in The Accursed Share, Bataille’s esoteric and influential attempt at economic theory. The titular accursed share is any economy’s surplus, which he likens to a gift from the sun. The gift is of such richness that it has to be spent—knowingly and lavishly—without gain on the arts, in sex, or on the production of opulent monuments. If contained and hoarded, this gift, this surfeit share, like the sun’s effervescence, would burst open catastrophically. In ancient economies, this manifested as unproductive sacrifice; in modernity, it means war. For Bataille, this is a universal condition: all societies struggle with the economy’s dependence on the circulation of heat. How we collectively mediate this energy that exists independently of man defines the contradictions and social contracts of each and every society. If the sun gives continually without ever receiving, the question remains: what does one do with a solar gift?

The earliest experiments with industrial thermodynamics were with a device called a steam digester (or Papin’s digester, for its inventor Denis Papin), a pressure-cooker-like apparatus that detained steam to generate high pressure. Early models exploded from pressure until Papin conceived of a release valve fashioned as a piston with a cylinder engine in 1697. Watching the valve rhythmically move up and down, Papin might have glimpsed, if only for a flash, both the transformative potential of rationality and the terror of its eventual regression into a monotonous, mindless loop of retention and release. Thermodynamic science helped to produce more efficient locomotion, regulated temperatures for the printing press, and is now used to refine infrared surveillance photography for low visibility target detection. Advances in infrared photography (thermography) in the early 20th century quickly found their way into military use when in 1929 Hungarian physicist Kálmán Tihanyi developed an infrared-sensitive electronic television camera for British strategic anti-aircraft defense. Ever since, thermographic imaging has been used to optically reduce the fog of war or exploit the advantages of terror-by-night.

Thermographic imaging approximately visualizes the ghostly transfer of thermal energy flowing through solids, effectively indexing a contested ambient commons. Increasingly, surplus value is extracted from this ambient sphere, our environs are privatized (thus subject to surveillance), instrumentalized and deployed in the service of the state. In 2013 a predator drone’s surveillance footage was quietly deployed as evidence for the first time in a U.S. customs and border case. Reports speculated whether the warrant covered the thermal images produced by the drone, foregrounding one of many legal perplexities that emergent technologies birthed—and an increasingly militarized state exploited. One might claim if the public loses its right to this ambient commons, we are divested of heat: effectively numb. Capital has a way of lubricating friction while heating other bodies. Proliferating cryptocurrenies and other digital mediums of exchange belie the heretofore intense physicality of commercial transaction (the friction of swiped plastic, the crispness of fresh banknotes). These invisible (or, as it were, evanescent) transactions meanwhile heat up mining rigs, lithium batteries, and graphics cards. E-commerce systems dump digital micro-fractions into virtual wallets like bits of combustibles into superdense trash compactors. Pile on pile of source code multiplies demands for retarding heat waste, creating economies of its disposal and management. These in turn produce capital by identifying, securing, and extracting value from the mechanical equilibrium, phase changes, or potential efficiencies of a system. Yet these technologies brim with possibilities exceeding their dystopian dimensions. Take, for example, a recently released proposal by Microsoft research to install cloud servers in residential homes. Functioning as central heating units, these data furnaces would reduce Microsoft’s costs by outsourcing its thermal waste to homeowners. Imagine a future city of clouds customized for maximum climate comfort: user-generated content from all people streaming into different homes, providing warmth, potentiating an unimaginable intimacy that would shine through the cracks of its encrypted and alienated forms.

The laws of thermodynamic transfer and circulation as a kind of natural economy with its own exchange rates, production methods, and cycles—it’s a seductive model of thought. But this way of thinking incorrectly conflates the freighting excesses of social contingency and natural forces. If we perceive the ecological sphere and anthropic time as disunited, craving synthesis, we mistakenly assume similitude and congruency among all sorts of market occurrences and physical law. The reciprocal dependence between the development of the physical sciences and capitalism by no means obliterates their differences; in fact, it’s an argument for the necessity of disarticulating of the laws of natural processes from the economy as natural law. In the face of imminent ecological disaster art-making continues to be like any other production: a globalized operation in which value is created at industrial centers distant enough from their authors to create the appearance that value derives from nothing more than moving stuff around networks, or fingers pirouetting over touchscreens. The study of heat transfer, the politics of its administration, and the invention of thermodynamic law points to a complex dynamic whereby the metabolic processes of the earth are transformed into objectified matter. Our capacity to grasp the degree to which every objective appearance has a reality hinges on remembering that all appearance is fundamentally split from within by that which it does not reveal. This split demands not only that we consider the possibility of that which might have been, but also invent new ways of representing the cosmological and geological time that mediates socio-historical understandings of nature. This task would oblige us to confront what it means to dominate the natural world while simultaneously acting as the subject by which that world struggles to become conscious of itself.

Media

Schedule

from May 04, 2014 to June 29, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-05-04 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Jason Loebs

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