Arieh Frosh

Beginning with a 16th century illustration by Ulissee Aldrovandi, included in his 'Ornithologiae hoc est de avibus historiae libri XII' (1549), this project uses the ‘Harpy’ as character. Harpies tend to be bird/woman hybrids, although often include elements from other creatures, and have been written as personified storm winds, always placed in a derided position by histories of writers. Here, Harpies are voiced in opposition to this misrepresentation; taking them as referents to hybridity, able to talk across species & genre, and ultimately embodying a long-standing, continuing politic of ‘radical interconnectedness’.

Shown here is a mix of animation, text, renders, and documentation of motorised sculptures, that perform sequences of programmed movements. The embedding of the harpy in technology attempts to engage in a mythotechnical process (O’Sullivan, Burrows; 2019), in which a new entity or assemblage is formed using technology and bio-matter, or its written and artistic representation. This form of fictioning takes on a “critical power”, during which the hybrid half-bird-half-person welcomes the technological addition to its already mixed up self, and becomes a perplexing combination of at least three halves.

The dialogic writing places the harpies interminably within a city’s unspecified green-space-under-development, where they (using their own malformed terms) reminisce, account, and predict, influencing those that mingle below. Small community signals are discussed with heightened importance, such as playground apparatuses, or the remnants of a pre-Passover picnic. The harpies flick between an omnipresent ‘all-knowingness’, and making sense of things as they come. The piece brings Aldrovani himself into consideration, and takes into account ‘the gender of sound’ (Carson; 1995), with the harpies' lucid comments often reacted to by inexplicable overt male-mania, which they play with.

The works here are an iterative moment: an extension of the motorised sculptures into a larger series of responsive, discoursing harpies, and an embedded audio piece to be overheard, and indirectly received by visitors, will follow.

A series of short animated films, texts, and collages narrated by a CGI tortoise, always between fall and collision, using the supposed demise of Greek tragedian Aeschylus as an initiating, narrative point.

As the tortoise falls towards Aeschylus – to double death – released from a vulture’s grip above the planes of Gela, it reflects on the relationship between motion and possibilities. Such as the tension between micro-scale generative ways of moving – like vibrations, flux, the ability to move across responsively – and macro moments of stasis, of lockdown passivity, where potentials and elsewheres seem to diminish.

How do ideas of becoming as fluxes of matter in motion (Lucretius/Nail; ~99BC/2018) operate alongside the safety net, which has its own softened movements? How does interspecies connectivity, such as that of individuals never preceding their relatings (Haraway; 2016), operate within a returning to your teenage room, a supposed pause? Or a resistance to artifice being supplement to the human (Colebrook; 2019), alongside the mathematically generated forms, connected nodes and quadrilateral meshes, within the infinite but corruptible computer generated space?
These are some underlying ideas that trouble the tumbling tortoise.

The tortoise collides continually with a filmed person, seen from behind, each time reacting in a way appropriate to a different material (such as a T-shirt, or an airbag) – slithering, slipping or bouncing off the figure, who appears unreactive.

//

iv.
Once, I uncovered a humble origin story from a celebrated chemical source, that to me brought the precise drumming of scientific clarity: “Tortoises are the children of a frog and a rock”. (Levi, P. Quaestio de Centauris, the bit where he talks about the frog and the rock).
This really sums it up, really smacks it out, I thought: the motion, the life, the possibilities, or lack of. The confusion. [Laughs] Orientations too, as - look closely - the frog moves at interruptions in the xyz plane, whilst the rock maintains its original positioning. Offspring are therefore both an increase in the possibilities enabled by motion (as rock is to tortoise) and a simultaneous decrease (as frog is to tortoise). [spits] Once I had been lit-up by this, my own parents rattled in my mind, and I pictured my father - the frog - perched upon my mother - the rock - and saw a paltry imitation of myself. How alike we are as a three, I thought to myself, but only as a three.

(Later on I discovered: “Vultures [are children] of a worm and an owl.” Jubilation! That the over-confident feather stinkers are nothing if not half-worm, slippering in the mud in total naked abomination.)

/

v.
The end of a fabric painting rolled around a cardboard tube rakes the back of 3524 Schulz’s head as he is driven home from Scotland, with all the meaningless things and excuses at work that he has accumulated over three years. Driving is a close friend and former colleague, who will sometimes visit, with lengthy intervals. [laughs]. The first roads are empty and generate the thinking space of wide open fields, with that dramatic northern light of countless layers. They talk shit about former colleagues. And about US stream media. ‘A long car ride for the uncertainty of 3524 Schulz’, he calls it. But really there’s a sense of possibility. A runoff. Later it’s the Amazon warehouse, how you can drive alongside it for minutes at 70mph, and sometimes more. Soft, smooth, blue and tremendous. Like a great vessel of the times - absolute untraceability. “This place really smacks of it” says 3524 Schulz. [Spits] Of what? (The familiarity of tiled flooring and a quick unload - der-dun-der-dun-der-dun - the ex-colleague heads off and it’s all where it is; greyer and more of it.)