Artists Space

Sam Pulitzer:
A Colony for "Them"

March 16 – May 18, 2014

Sam Pulitzer

Cutouts of black and white illustrations arranged next to each other. In the center, several illustrated eyes form a circle. Above the eyes is a round, illustrated face, while two wings are positioned below the eyes.
[Cutouts of black and white illustrations arranged next to each other. In the center, several illustrated eyes form a circle. Above the eyes is a round, illustrated face, while two wings are positioned below the eyes.]

THE TROJANS
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EPISODE 3: VENTÔSE
(February 20 – March 20)

I know how unbelievable this must seem now, today, when our practices are if anything exactly otherwise and those who held court in the old massive shards were either forcibly unplugged or retreated on their own into ever more distant servers, unilateral dial-tone p2ps and desolate mirrors. But there was a time, remember? When the convention was to simplify the figures to the point of extinction. Before the full-repeater rumblepaks, before the PICC lines. Sinon… Are you listening?

The gallery forks but barely. Cass's hand finds the gauge at the base of his spine and feels the pulse on her fingertips through the small rose window.

That was how you procreated your brand, like a kind of voluntary absorption and cooptation and then splitting the whole thing down the middle. Mitoses all done at the backend of a prompt. You just had to know how to beg the question just right, you know? Si?

Sinon nods left and right, and the gallery forks again. A thin wedge of white walls advancing towards them comes to rest, as they do, against his forehead, creasing it along the axis of symmetry and trestled on his nose and chin against the thin blue bruise beginning to green slightly. Cass can't count anymore the number of times they've been given the option.

They're identical now, the paths. On both near sides a thin blindered transom above a central Tilt-N-Swivel 360 doorknob-shaped unoccupied wall mount, and on the far, an inch from the ceiling where Sinon can't see but knows it's there, two opaque disks like albino moles and ticking quietly in unison: the alarms.

With the edge splitting his horopter, each of his mutually blind eyes have an identical hallway all of their own, an identical depth of field the wall's collapse of parallax flattens out. His own inset disk threadily beats warmer. "What do you see?" Sinon sighs. He wants to say: pictures.

Thinking, Cass," rolling his right eye towards her puts the left fork out into smooth white paint. And rolling it back restores it, saying, "every time we do this, we choose one way or another, but I don't know which way. I know there are forks there, but the ones I see are the same, single one, in parallel to itself.

On edge, she says, grinding into his spine where the plasticine bows in over it, "Then it doesn't matter. If every unique instance is the same, I mean."

Cass, we've taken how many now, left and right? If they're really different, then why have none of them recrossed? They'd have to eventually, by now. What if each time we come here, we split. We keep walking down both hallways.

"Let's see, Si. Let's see." Cass pushes further in. A rivulet of blood flows from a vertical cut down Sinon's face and trails the wedge of the wall, tending left, and they follow it along what must be a slight and differentiating depression, pooling under the empty mount at the wall's horizontal center. Sinon pliés; Cass stops tracing the rim of his gauge and squats to lift him, her hands gripping the crests of his hips, fitting him around the cold metal of the knob. Where his back meets the wall its surface dimples, extending into a furrow from the ceiling to the floor. From eye level in Cass's unbroken squat, an engraved brass plaque reloads between Sinon's legs, and reads:

Instance Dungeon Containing Large Anthropoid Ribosome, 21st c. SoHo, New York. Gift from the Pfizer Sealed Air and Crystal Candy Corp. Foundation. In this Instance, remaining human characteristics are purely skeuomorphic. Not appropriate for immature visitors. Some discomfort is natural during the generation of new copies of the location. Expect sudden movements.

A sudden breeze in the otherwise dead air brushes her cheeks and the down on the back of her neck as she leans in to take Sinon's cock in her mouth, the compressed, clipped waves of information demodulating his pulse. Unregulated transfers of high-band current folded back on themselves bend his knees and softly pedal his legs in front of him, on either side of Cass's head.

Sinon's gaped smile emits the characteristic sidetones, the feedback hum of baud on baud, as a white film of nanowebbing envelops him, pressing the length of his back into the groove. The transom above him dribbles a watery salve from its vents, running down his torso and onto Cass's flexed knee. She swabs it with her right index across Sinon's closed eyelids, binding the lashes together at their stiffened points, and down the open slit from nose to chin. The cut's lips pucker slightly outward, staying open where the fused crystalline blood stents them.

"Si," Cass says, gliding her fingers across the stucco of small, firm bubbles that cover him. Sinon, somewhere inside himself, is totally glazed.

Under a miniaturized and crumbling adobe arch dominating a palm-sized heap of fused silica shards a strange sort of coprolith curled up. He leans his good eye down to it and sees the tiny deadlights opening into the hollowed spiral. Inside, some of the shards are standing up.

Si?" Her breath is on his neck and he doesn't turn, tweezing out an upright shard between two fingers and twisting it in the light. "Where are you?

A cornice above the adobe lintel advances into his shadow like a hood.

Cass, I leveled up.

– Jeff Nagy

A freestanding white wall displaying a metal plaque engraved with paragraphs of text juts in front of another angled, white wall in an exhibition space. A large paragraph of wall vinyl text is displayed on the second, angled wall.
Sam Pulitzer: A Colony for “Them”. Installation view, Artists Space, 2014. Photo: Daniel Pérez. [A freestanding white wall displaying a metal plaque engraved with paragraphs of text juts in front of another angled, white wall in an exhibition space. A large paragraph of wall vinyl text is displayed on the second, angled wall.]
An angled view of a freestanding white wall displaying vinyl wall text in an exhibition space. The first sentence of the text reads, "A plea for funds seems to come again." An adjacent wall is covered with a large, abstract image of a figure
Sam Pulitzer: A Colony for “Them”. Installation view, Artists Space, 2014. Photo: Daniel Pérez. [An angled view of a freestanding white wall displaying vinyl wall text in an exhibition space. The first sentence of the text reads, "A plea for funds seems to come again." An adjacent wall is covered with a large, abstract image of a figure's portrait. It is rendered such that the figure's face appears to be emerging from a cloud in a night sky.]
A section of wooden flooring is displayed on the ground near four windows on adjacent walls of an exhibition space. A small bed, a candle on a night table, a metal stove, and a several chests stacked on top of one another are arranged on the wooden boards.
Sam Pulitzer: A Colony for “Them”. Installation view, Artists Space, 2014. Photo: Daniel Pérez. [A section of wooden flooring is displayed on the ground near four windows on adjacent walls of an exhibition space. A small bed, a candle on a night table, a metal stove, and a several chests stacked on top of one another are arranged on the wooden boards.]
A metal plaque engraved with text is displayed on a white gallery wall that extends into the left half of the image
Sam Pulitzer: A Colony for “Them”. Installation view, Artists Space, 2014. Photo: Daniel Pérez. [A metal plaque engraved with text is displayed on a white gallery wall that extends into the left half of the image's frame. Past and to the right of the wall, a series of colorful panels are staggered around a white column in front of a red wall. Some of the panels are decorated with cartoonish illustrations of animals and forests. Large text on one of the visible panels reads, "We're all going to really miss doing your work for you."]
A large, black and white illustration of a hand displayed on a freestanding gallery wall. The hand extends upwards, palm facing the viewer, with tentacle like creatures escaping a slit on its wrist. The illustration extends across the full height of the wall.
Sam Pulitzer: A Colony for “Them”. Installation view, Artists Space, 2014. Photo: Daniel Pérez. [A large, black and white illustration of a hand displayed on a freestanding gallery wall. The hand extends upwards, palm facing the viewer, with tentacle like creatures escaping a slit on its wrist. The illustration extends across the full height of the wall.]
A framed image installed on a white gallery wall that extends into an exhibition space. A glass wall framed by black, metal paneling is positioned to the left of the white wall. Through it, several freestanding, colorful panels decorated with cartoonish illustrations of pinwheels and forests are displayed in an open room.
Sam Pulitzer: A Colony for “Them”. Installation view, Artists Space, 2014. Photo: Daniel Pérez. [A framed image installed on a white gallery wall that extends into an exhibition space. A glass wall framed by black, metal paneling is positioned to the left of the white wall. Through it, several freestanding, colorful panels decorated with cartoonish illustrations of pinwheels and forests are displayed in an open room.]
A shallow white cylinder sitting on a dark wooden floor. A small green light glows from inside the cylinder.
Sam Pulitzer: A Colony for “Them”. Installation view, Artists Space, 2014. Photo: Daniel Pérez. [A shallow white cylinder sitting on a dark wooden floor. A small green light glows from inside the cylinder.]

With contributions by Matthew Adis, Joshua Brettel, Killian Eng, Simon Fowler, Bill Hayden, Denis Forkas Kostromitin, Jeff Nagy, Sam Pulitzer, Steven Vallot, Viral Graphics, and Vania Zouravliov.

This exhibition is supported by the Sam Pulitzer Exhibition Supporters Circle: Shane Akeroyd, Candy & Michael Barasch, Eleanor Cayre, Collective Native Informant, Bill Cournoyer, Lars Friedrich, House of Gaga, Allison & Warren Kanders, David Kordansky, Barbara & Howard Morse, Bernardo Nadal-Ginard & Laura Steinberg, Rob Teeters & Bruce Sherman, Thea Westreich & Ethan Wagner, and the Friends of Artists Space. With special thanks to Real Fine Arts.

Additional support from The New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

    A silver, metal plaque displayed against a bright red backdrop. Text engraved on the plaque reads,
    [A silver, metal plaque displayed against a bright red backdrop. Text engraved on the plaque reads, "Four hours of steady work face you. You rub blindly at one wrist with the other hand and reattach the brace, molding the various input/output feeds back into their ports, the audio, visual, haptic, mouth-smell and pure reason. It was typical, routine but aggravating, setting tons of exits dark, setting properties manually on editing, the west exit of the dining car that must be unpick able, the pencils that must be broken of their lead, the rotation speed on a deck of hypercard that must be trued with the accelerating average saccade rate. Then a bunch of identical or nearly-identical descriptions to reset on every atomically-detailed manual interaction object, re-spawning every item instanced in the idiorrhythmic skate’s mini-bar, for example, or buffering every one of the phalanstery’s refractor diodes. All it goes to show is that your’e working against the software too much, Now with three upward blinks interspersed with a short series of lip tics into the facial interface meshed into your latex balaclava respawn the set of tri-fold hologrammatic welcome brochures. You could be much more productive if you had the chance, but that’s how it goes. Athos is closed-source and always has been, the massive influx of new residents with new needs notwithstanding. Idle thoughts, ancient history, better to spend it artificially deflating the calorie currency on the skate’s all-you-care-to-eat buffet, to fuck just a bit with the schismatic flesh mercantilists in Madalay District. Set chafing capacity to maximum. What joy is there in living. You yourself had kong since ceased to register hunger. When you notice it, it’s not that you’re not hungry - you could choose to feel the effects, lightheaded every time you bend down to tap a pressure gauge, blurred vision when you stand back up, the constant headaches and fatigue. But the feeling of emptiness, that the stomach is a void to be filled with raw materials from the feed-cache or a sub auricular puff of enzyme slurry, that was gone. The propriety of that sense of internal space, of endogenous and unaccountable degrees of internal freedom for desire, bent back towards its opposite. Your tasks, the purest extension of a certain kind of unfulfillable desire, await you no less for that. If you simultaneously adjust a row of damper switches to their most neutral position, use the flat edge of your palm. The idea that in times of harsh exogenous conditions, in which so many resources are bound to sheer homeostasis, the tariff that must be extracted for the use of symbiotic system of immersion actually decreases. The last switch cannot be turned off, Paradoxically, as things get worse overall, the worsening situation costs increasingly less to maintain."]