“In the past, the digital landscape has often been dismissed as a trend, a gimmick, and still at times is. The lockdown has definitely seen it given much more serious consideration and at times helped to push the envelope of digital experiences.”

Interview by writer Brooke Hailey Hoffert

Specter is a curatorial platform for digital culture & posthuman practices relishing sentience in our human-tech playgrounds. Founded by Agnes Momirski and Georgia Kareola, Specter teamed up with Theo Ellison for their latest exhibition "Virtual Cocoons”.

Could you tell us a bit about yourselves and your background? Where did you study?

Georgia Kareola: Agnes and I started Specter in 2018 as a place to explore our shared interests in art, emergent technology, hyper-humanism, and spiritual practices.

After visiting Occulture in Berlin together, where we really enjoyed the discourse on esotericism and the occult and on the train journey back, we started talking about how to establish a stronger connection between the arcane practices with the current; a connection with art and technology. 

Our aim with Specter became to bring these worlds together: the aesthetics of art, the future-focus of technology, the deeper meaning of ancient esoteric/spiritual traditions, and ideas about the post- or hyper-human in which many of these notions come together.                                                                                                             

We developed a physical pop-up exhibition at V2_Lab for Unstable Media in Rotterdam where we hosted digital artworks and performances, as well as a sharing circle on the shared terminology between spiritual and scientific practices with a philosopher, a neuroscientist, a robotics expert, a biohacker, spiritual practitioners, and interdisciplinary artists. Following the show at V2_, we built an online exhibition for the Wrong Biennale, called Cyber Sanctuaries. Our aim here was to facilitate calming, nourishing experiences online, which offer possibilities for meditative transcendence in a space that’s usually a source of retinal overstimulation and information overload.

Our current show, Virtual Cocoons, reflects on digital coping mechanisms informed by the pandemic and is a collaboration with London-based artist Theo Ellison.

I studied at the University of Amsterdam and UCL, and both Agnes and Theo studied at the Royal College of Art, though a few years apart.

What is it about a cocoon that inspired you to use it as a symbol for this exhibition? How do you think that inspiration helped in molding the exhibition into what it is?

G: When we first started thinking about putting an exhibition together, in March, when COVID-19 was just entering Europe, our conversation was centered around anxiety and the coping mechanisms related to this new situation caused by the pandemic. We started to explore how artists responded to the lockdown as an ‘involuntary cocooning’.

Theo Ellison: Yes, it grew from there really. Part of it was connecting the dots in terms of the mechanics of transformation, but also the form of the cocoon lends itself well to the online nature of the exhibition. Websites are, understandably, generally geared towards accessibility and minimising the amount of required navigation, so encasing the artworks in cocoons reversed that process a little – reflecting the step into the unknown that the pandemic represented.

Agnes Momirski: The cocoon is an iconic symbol of metamorphosis. It is meant to invite the transformation process. The lockdown invited us to reevaluate our relationships, intimacies, and togetherness. Paradoxically, separation revealed that we are not separate at all. I feel that lockdown demonstrated how quickly people and artists can step together and hold space for healing, joy, and art; for shared and expanded experiences online.

G: And with that, it’s, of course, important to understand that in the grand scheme of things, we’ve been in a very privileged position to be able to experience and look at it like this.

In what ways do you want your exhibition to impact others? What is the takeaway that you think your artists collectively achieved?

A: The start of lockdown saw artists and communities seek myriad ways to engage online - not merely to communicate, but to care for others by extending knowledge and creating soothing, comical experiences to establish and keep a sense of togetherness in the face of the daunting separation. We wanted to capture this moment, by creating an online collection of artworks that were made with the intent to nurture online communities. Artworks such as the meditation by Annika Kappner (PRĀṆIC GRID), the movement session by Sophie Mars (Mindful Mutations), or MICRO-CLUB by NSDOS offer experiences that could ease this transformative and difficult time.

T: It was a pretty immediate response to what was happening at that moment. We didn't overthink it or attempt to future-proof it, so we relied on a certain spontaneity from the artists to generate an overview of that moment – whether it has managed to capture a snapshot of the zeitgeist, only time will tell! As the show was conceived of nearer the start of the initial lockdown, the works don’t indulge in speculation and neither are they explicitly about death, disease, or virology - that would’ve felt a tad premature. Instead, there’s an irreverent focus on the visual and behavioural aspects of lockdown and the digital processes that have kept things ticking over. Humour is a powerful coping mechanism, so we hope that resonates too.

G: We wanted to give people a sense of solace in a situation that felt scary and overwhelming at times, and bring artworks together that gave some perspective on the situation, but also added a sense of lightness. Many of the works take a playful approach to exploring coping mechanisms within a difficult situation such as Kaspar Ravel’s Quarantine Diary, Guy Oliver’s Haircut song, and Combrisi’s Exclusive products™ — Out of stock.

The digital medium is very much the new frontier in the contemporary art world, are you excited about what the future holds?

T: It’s all exciting stuff – the accessibility of things like computer-generated imagery and photogrammetry will only grow exponentially, and artists will continue to explore the potential of new tech that’s available to them. There’s no way of knowing what will stick - perhaps much of ‘new media’ is a fleeting thing for the art world or maybe it’ll drift in and out of fashion. Post-internet art was already seen as a bit old hat ten years ago, and more recently there’s been a shift towards handmade objects, things that are tangible and that display their value of labour. Saying that though, technologies like CGI, VR, and AR provide so much for artists to tap into and will inevitably develop rapidly – lockdown has been a catalyst for that.

I’m currently involved with supporting SPUR, a virtual residency programme for newly graduated artists – anyone who’s interested to see how the next generation of artists are using emergent digital tech should seek out their public programme.

A: In the past, the digital landscape has often been dismissed as a trend, a gimmick, and still at times is. The lockdown has definitely seen it given much more serious consideration and at times helped to push the envelope of digital experiences. For me, its most exciting potential is in redefining community building, networks, and a new sense of togetherness. The notion of a post-social media era seems promising in its ability to form a different value system on platforms we use, and new ways of engaging with our intuitive, spiritual, and emotional needs and values.

G: The whole notion of futurity is something that feels very complicated these days, not just because of COVID-19, but also seeing the threats of climate change, mass migration, and extinction we’re currently facing. I’m excited about what art can do, but it feels important to look at this in the bigger picture of what is going on in the world and respond appropriately. 

How do you go about choosing the artists?

A: We had an open call and also contacted some artists directly whose work we felt would be a good fit. That led to an interesting combination of artists – I think if we had stuck to one method the show wouldn’t be as varied as it is.

T: Yes, we knew the range we were looking for – work that embraced the strangeness of the situation with varying degrees of irony and sincerity.

G: There were a few aspects that were important to us. One was an exploration into the archetypal aesthetics of the lockdown, which becomes present in the work of, for example, Ruby Gloom + Kaan Ulgener, and Paola Pinna. It may seem simplistic now but some of these basic objects, like facemasks, quickly gained significance and came to define this time. Then there are audio-visual, more immersive works, inviting people to meditate and reflect on their coping mechanisms. Simon Gwinner’s video A Last Flower reflects directly on the emotional state of isolation, while the more light-hearted works mentioned earlier are contrasted by Jonathan Yau’s eerie CGI interiors. Paprika Xu’s work is a poetic reflection on interconnectedness, while Grace Houghton’s interactive Isolation Archive logs lockdown experiences from around the world. Webtaura’s interview with a Human Hybrid is set in the future, after two years of consecutive, worldwide lockdown. So the show is quite diverse in terms of approaches. 

Do you think this project could be the start of many in a series of online exhibitions?

G: We’re definitely talking about some new topics to explore.

T: Yes, it has been a great exhibition to work on and we’re hoping a new collaborative project or exhibition will emerge. Perhaps we’ll return to the topic of the lockdown/pandemic at some point in the future too.

A: We have upcoming plans with Specter as well as a new project together with Theo which is in the early stages.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

T: Agnes and I are currently featuring in an online 3D exhibition called ‘The Preserving Machine’ that has just gone live at the time of writing at Implied Gallery. The show (and the research group we’ve formed) is named after Philip K Dick’s short story of the same name and involves 11 artists responding to the story’s themes of preservation, technophobia, distortion, mistranslation, and mutation. The project emerged from wanting to dig into the wider context of the post-photographic world we’re slipping into, in which images are rendered and no longer just captured.

A: In 2021 we plan to keep building the Specter website as a platform for interdisciplinary exchange on art, emergent technology, hyper-humanism, and spiritual practices; building bridges between these different ways of knowing. One of our upcoming projects involves creating an online archive of artist approaches to meditation and spiritual practices in the digital realm - a database of artist meditations, as well as spiritual, expanding, and nourishing experiences that create links between current technologies and arcane traditions.

G: The next upcoming Specter event is in conjunction with the Cyberdelic Society (José Montemayor Alba and Carl H. Smith) at Occulture Berlin 2021. We will host an experiential sharing circle with the intention to explore the practice of combining ancient wisdom with modern technologies, and its transformative potential to help us expand beyond our biological, sociological, cognitive, and spiritual limitations. 

At V2_ Lab for Unstable media in Rotterdam, we’re planning to hold a series of events, either in Spring or Autumn, depending on the situation with the pandemic.

Website Specter
Instagram Specter
Instagram Agnes Momirski
Instagram Georgia Kareola
Instagram Theo Ellison

All images are courtesy of the artists and Specter
Date of publication: 21/01/21