A Time Capsule Or A Grave

Exhibited in Posthuman Vernacular, curated by Jesse Damiani at Rand Gallery in Dubai 

An essay written to accompany Field Collage: a collection of sound art by Tvordis Veeler, curated by a Sammie Veeler. Delivered at the second performance iteration of A Time Capsule Or A Grave at Human Resources in Los Angeles on 1/13/2023

Delivered at the second performance iteration of A Time Capsule Or A Grave at Human Resources in Los Angeles on 1/13/2023

Delivered at the second performance iteration of A Time Capsule Or A Grave at Human Resources in Los Angeles on 1/13/2023

Delivered for the third performance of A Time Capsule Or A Grave at NFT Tuesday on 1/17/2023

Delivered for the third performance of A Time Capsule Or A Grave at NFT Tuesday on 1/17/2023

Delivered for the third performance of A Time Capsule Or A Grave at NFT Tuesday on 1/17/2023

His And Hers Computers by Sammie Veeler

His And Hers Computers is a recurring asset in my work. This union of two local machines by a mass of cables between them symbolizes the digital bond between myself and my late husband, Tvordis. On the left, my avatar floats out of the glowing translucent screen of a Macintosh covered in the stickers that adorn my current computer. On the right, a replica of Tvordis’s personal computer, Theseus, depicts a portrait of him on the screen.

This artifact is spun off from A Time Capsule Or A Grave: a hybrid performance project initially commissioned by the Tezos Foundation for Octobre Numérique Faire Monde in Arles, France in October 2022. It connects a series of IRL performances with a persistent virtual environment on New Art City, each of which evolve between every iteration. Audio recordings of each performance are broken into clips and installed in the virtual environment at each place where they were spoken, forming an ever expanding dialogue between versions of myself across time.

A central conceit of the work is my grief ritual and preservation practice with Tvordis’s digital archive. There is more to preservation than storage. Digital artifacts only perform their objecthood when accessed. They always point back to an invisible original. We must not confuse information for memory. Information exists in the machine. Memory is constituted in the body. I would rather the piece live in your mind than die in a hard drive where it lies in suspended animation.

A Time Capsule Or A Grave is an ongoing process and this edition is a snapshot of a single state of its existence. Once minted, His And Hers Computers will be immutably written and perpetually preserved on the blockchain. If, as Jon Ippolito tells us, new media art can only survive by mutating, what role does immutability play in this process?

Included with this edition are an archival 4K TIFF render, a gLTF 3D file, and a .Blend file of the scene depicted in the image. The TIF format was released in 1996. It is a preferred archival format for digital preservation of images and is not likely to change in the near future. The gLTF format was released in 2015. While much newer, it is quickly becoming the new standard for 3D files in the WebGL era. It is a happy medium between mutability and fixity. Blender is about as old as the TIF, but in terms of longevity, it is the most precarious of the three. The most recent .Blend file version that can be opened by the current long term service version of Blender (3.3) is version 2.8, released in 2015. How long will files made with 3.3 be supported?

While open source projects can in some cases provide more resiliency than corporate platforms, the evolving nature of the software means the original tools for authoring this work will not be here forever. How will you preserve these artifacts? What does preservation mean to you? What role do humans have in this preservation process that entrusts the task of storage to a so called trustless system?

Format: PNG + Unlockable TIF, gLTF, .blend
Resolution: 3840 x 2160

Many of the artifacts Tvordis left behind were stereophonic field recordings and sound collages created from those recordings. These, too, are virtual spaces and he viewed them that way. He captured field recordings to construct incongruous sound spaces with them. His sound-worlds are embodied time, experienced durationally. They only perform their objecthood when they are accessed. These worlds, like all media files, are always accessed in translation. They point back to an invisible original. In his recordings he took care to make himself invisible, but he is present with us as a fellow listener. In five years of his field recordings I have not found a single trace of his voice. His absence, however, is a form of presence drawn out through his mistakes. I feel him when he jostles the recorder, jingles his keys, and clicks his tongue to test the shape of the room. I argue that a virtual space can be defined as a third space between two or more physical spaces. These can be localized in both space and time. Tvordis is only alone in his field recordings when I am not there to listen with him. When I join him in these spaces he left for me, our virtual selves are equally unburdened by time and the body. The boundary between our consciousnesses blurs. On the other side of time there is a hand reaching back to you; however, you must choose to grasp it. Can you be sure which hand is yours?

The architecture of the internet obscures the fact that you always travel with an avatar. The only difference between this and Second Life is the avatar can convincingly resemble your actual self. We must not make the mistake of identifying ourselves through the masks that we wear. Is the avatar your virtual embodiment? Why should we assume a singular identity online? Plato describes sight as an active process– our eyes project beams onto the world, reflecting it back to us. We now understand that sight functions in exactly the opposite way. This is, however, exactly the way cameras work in interactive 3D worlds through a process called ray-casting. The camera sees actively. Does this mean you do the same? The avatar is your clothes, but it is not your body. In virtual space, you are embodied as a camera and you see by casting beams out of your eyes. This sight does not necessarily confer presence. Presence, like listening, is active.

Tvordis imagined things for me that he refused to imagine for himself and our time together was painfully brief. As soon as I felt he could really see me, he was almost gone. He could envision me here in front of you more clearly than I could. It is ironic that as his life ended, mine seemed to begin. And so here I am walking through the world he spoke into existence, handling this mass of material he called his archive, which he never attempted to organize, and shared with no one. He left it for me to untangle in his wake. He viewed his life as a work of art, but he left before a suitable venue emerged to exhibit it. He poured art out of himself autonomically– it seemed so easy for him to accept what came and yet he failed to publish any of his work. I feel it is my duty to construct a mutable biography of this strange man from the documentation he left behind. Today I perform for you in the flesh. Tomorrow my voice will be automated at each obelisk and exhibition visitors will share virtual space with a dead version of me.