Jak Ritger
July - September 2021
COLLIDER | REVERSE CAUSALITY: C-Print - 36”x72” - 1/3+AP - 2021
Before the city of Holyoke was formed, the land was home to the Algonquian peoples, settled by the Pocomtuc who referred to the valley as Agawam or Nonotuck. Colonized by the English in 1633, then known as “Ireland Parish” when incorporated in 1786. In 1849 the construction of the South Hadley Dam and the Holyoke Canal System began. As one of the first planned cities it became the leading paper producer in U.S. with Philadelphia as second. The population of the city grew from 5,000 in 1860 to over 60,000 in 1920.
The paper pulp factories are located between the two canals and were rapidly constructed by brick. Water flows under the buildings through raceways, turning water wheels that powered the factories. Lower Cavity is located in one such building. As I wondered around the city, I thought of fifty-five thousand people who flocked here in search of work. These structures are futuristic entities pulling us forward. Or, perhaps a post-apocalyptic scene to those who had known the natural landscape of the past.
STARSEED GANGSTALK: C-Print - 36”x72” - 1/3+AP - 2021
The Dinosaur Footprints of Holyoke were uncovered during excavation of the land during construction of a roadway that would later become Route US-5. It is the demand of capital for circulation that brought humans in contact with deep time: a byproduct of rapid industrialization acting upon the landscape.
As coal power generation and electrical grids came online Holyoke experienced a flight of industry. With no reason for factories to be located in Western Massachusetts, firms fled for more fungible power sources and easier shipping routes.
The city regenerated as the rubber industry sprung up, but it struggled to maintain its former prominence. In 1979, the Holyoke Mall at Ingleside opened its doors. Located on the edge of town by the highway, the mall pulled business and investment away from the city center. The non-place of consumer shopping malls are a monuments to poststructuralism: the hollowing out of civic life and flattening of time and space through step and repeat hyper-marketization. Nevertheless, for people that grew up in the area, the visual of the Holyoke Mall brings potent nostalgia for the hours spent there as a teen.
In the distance we see the symbol for anxiety of contemporary capitalism. A communication tower delivering us news, images, and conspiracy theories. The fifth generation telecom ballast arrives from space as if an extraterrestrial; an inevitability with no meaningful way to opt-in or out.
COLLIDER | MULTIPLE PATHS (Black&Yellow): Risograph - 8”x10” - 1/10 - 2021
COLLIDER | MULTIPLE PATHS (Pink&Yellow): Risograph - 8”x10” - 1/10 - 2021
COLLIDER | MULTIPLE PATHS (PInk&Cyan): Risograph - 8”x10” - 1/10 - 2021
Risograph printing (also known as Gocco) was invented in 1980s Japan as an office printer-duplicator. The technology caught on as it is far less expensive than traditional photocoping. A Risograph printer uses a mimeograph to burn a “master” stencil with a thermal plate and then presses individual colors through the stencil onto the paper. Because of the rich semi-opaque colors and the unique textures produced this office tech was appropriated by Mail Artists in the 1980s and 90s. My mom, Amy Volchok was part of a Mail Art collective called RUSTMARX in which members would send “Gocco prints” adorned with stamps, drawings, typewriter text and other ephemera to small mailing list. This transference of corporate communication technology and networks into decentralized artist communities persists today as Risograph popular choice for printing zines and band posters.
I used a Risograph printer at Looky Here, a local community art space in Greenfield MA, to produce this series. The hyper-contrast and algorithmically placed tape call to mind the way a computer vision system might see the world. Be using Risograph to perform computer vision, I challenge us to think about how emerging technologies of control and capture can be used for radical, liberatory aims.
RESEARCH MATERIALS: Folding Table, Plastic Sheet, Reflective Film, Bungee, Carabiner, Inkjet Print on Office Paper, Books, Media, Laptop, Video Call
At the opening for my show, my family, friends and friends from the internet devirtualized into Lower Cavity. One friend went to local bar beforehand and managed to bring a crew of locals to the gig. The table with books became a tool of disarmament. Everyone gathered around the media and I was able to explain the complexities of digital ex-academic institutions through sketchbook drawings and print-outs of essays.
This moment was like a microcosm of the past couple years online. I spent this time trying to get to the bottom of political theory, art history and locate the sites of power. As one model became clearer, darker patterns were then revealed. Thinking must be non-dogmatic or the model becomes stagnant. The bungee cords holding down all of these concepts are loose and might snap back at you if the tension is released.
At the end of the party, my friend decided to give away my copy of Capitalist Realism to one of the locals. They had struck up a conversation about the book and felt it was necessary to expropriate the text. I enjoyed this moment, but it’s also the reason why the book is missing from this documentation photo.
INTERDEPENDENT SCAFFOLDING: Vinyl Banner w/ Grommet - 60”x 84” - 1/1 - 2013-2021
As a recent graduate in the 2010s, I often traveled from my parent’s basement in New Jersey to NYC for job interviews and freelance gigs. As the city scrolled by the bus window, construction scaffolding appeared as faded static over the architecture. The city was never complete, always in a state of deconstruction, rebuild or brand new layering. This digital photograph was captured during one of these trips. I wove the beams and boards in and out of each other as if an artifact of the multiplicity of collisions in the city. The manipulation process was a form of digital knitting; quiet and contemplative. This action in opposition to the jackhammers droning when the picture was made. I brought this piece with me to Holyoke as a way to tether my new work to way of seeing I have cultivated over the past decade.
DAMMED FLOW DOMICILE: C-Print - 36”x72” - 1/3+AP - 2021
The Holyoke Dam in South Hadley turns the natural landscape into a means for production. The water wheels spin, attracting populations to gather towards their centripetal force. Capital works like this, an eddy in the flow, creating pools where people are caught, used up and replenished by new bodies. The layout of the streets of Holyoke are drawn along the vectors of the canals which are in turn diverge from the dam. All roads lead back to the constant circulation of liquid, material and value.
This piece is a continuation of a long running series titled “Blind House” where the windows and doorways of homes are removed to visualize atomization. In this instances I am visualizing my own experience of trying to understand a city as a visitor, an interloper, traveling along a digital map of the city served to me through a smartphone.
SENTIENT OIL FUTURE DEBT: C-Print - 36”x72” - 1/3+AP - 2021
A smokestack advances forward, a canon threatening a home behind an Easthampton cemetery. We race towards the future, the past in bubbling up in the earth. Petroleum is an organic material, the result of millions of years of life and death. Is it such a stretch to believe that the accumulated synaptic energy of the animals and plants is also compressed into a raw form? Maybe, but nevertheless, the way that this black goo from the earth has driven history gives us the feeling of a sentient superbeing making marionettes of geopolitical actors.
And as we struggle to unwind the result of this freed carbon, its ghost haunts us. A vapor in our air, slowly changing us. Diffuse and deadly. We must re-materialize this specter, undo its effect. As our houses are turn to headstones, we must devirtualize this entity and capture it.
DATA CENTER CONSUMER FLYWHEEL: C-Print - 36”x72” - 1/3+AP - 2021
A flywheel is a one of the oldest forms of power generation. A heavy wheel spins very fast; once it gets going it will continue spinning, gathering kinetic energy that can be converted into power. In media and capital, the flywheel is a model for how systems become steered by non-human entities. Once a process takes hold, supply chains are set up and demand is developed: it must continue. No one is at the wheel. The circulation is on autopilot.
The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center is a public/privately owned deep learning organ. 100 years later, the canal / water wheel technology has returned as the perfect infrastructure for machine intelligence. Inside the MGHPCC, massive flywheels spin constantly as a bridge between the hydro and backup power, serving potential energy for 15 seconds if a switch is needed.
Meanwhile, the glass dome of the Holyoke Mall watches as consumers circulate around its eye. Shoppers carrying out the processes of fashion, trend, and consumer technology that have continued to flywheel since the birth of capitalism.
NEGATIVE DOUBLE JEOPARDY: C-Print - 36”x72” - 1/3+AP - 2021
The digital world is composed of castles, moats and bridges. We see this in the smallest unit: the post, the word, the timestamp to the largest: entire communication stacks, platforms, under-sea cables. Digital architecture is built upon the binary logic of access. We perceive images washing over us and seek out what is behind the paywall-gated access. Information systems are either connected through Amazon Web Service or built in parallel with separate but identical structures. Even the so-called “decentralized web” duplicates this architecture. You can either be on the blockchain or not.
In the shadow of this binary choice is the fluidity of organic life. The more we learn about mycelium fungal thread networks under the ground, passing enzymes and energy between trees, the clearer it becomes that there is no single “tree” but rather only “forest.” This extreme interconnectedness is an enticing proposition to be grafted onto cyberspace, but resist this tendency. Horizontality is sold back to us as a legitimation narrative for new political hierarchies. We will not find love on the blockchain.
RECURSIVE CANAL PASS: C-Print - 36”x72” - 1/3+AP - 2021
The corner of Canal St. and Lyman St. is beneath a train bridge. I passed through here on my way back from the Holyoke skatepark. Skateboarding has always been my main mode of discovering a city. When you flow through the cement and asphalt you are drawn down by the natural gravity of the landscape. I end up under this bridge, following the former path of the Connecticut River as it flows through the human-made eddy called Holyoke.
Skateboarding makes you aware of the many sub-textual layers of the city. When I cruise I see stair-sets, ledges, handrails and embankments as potential obstacles for performance. How many different layers to a city are there? The orange jersey barriers and spray paint scrawled on the ground are messages to construction crews. A shared language only the ordained can decipher. Street signs take on a holy significance; how many people were sacrificed to the moloch of the automobile before this stop sign was installed? The ghosts of these victims seen in the two dimensional figures crossing the street. The street sign marks the common space, a paved over offering to the gods of industry.
MUSIC AS SUBMERGED HYPEROBJECT: C-Print - 36”x72” - 1/3+AP - 2021
Ten years ago, in my home of Allston, MA, a development firm bought a warehouse building and turned it into music practice space. The plan was to generate rent while letting the property investment mature. In the ensuing years, multitudes of sounds were produced. Scenes and collectivities formed and dissipated. As artists traveled to the space to practice, they frequented the bars and nearby businesses. The cohesion created by this node for culture is hard to distill in words or data, but immediately apparent to those who attended our small private music shows in the space, Studio 52.
Last year, as Covid-19 pandemic shuttered all physical culture, the owners of Studio 52 decided that it was time to move the studio and began development on the warehouse space. Time was up for the pocket of sound that had opened up. But, the time and energy that took hold inside of this sub-space continues on. Music persists. In coming out to Holyoke I brought the studio with me. Long time collaborator Duane Gorey installed their Public Announcement system. They used the time and space in Lower Cavity to produce a collection of songs based on some of the concepts in my show along with threads that developed over a difficult past couple of years.
SOLAR RADIATION MANAGEMENT: C-Print - 36”x72” - 1/3+AP - 2021
Even conservative estimates show global temperature increase locked in at 3 degrees. This is an unlivable reality in the long and near-term. As this becomes a clearer reality, more drastic options will become probabilities.
One such option is Solar Radiation Management. This plan would consist of a twenty-four hour drone fleet dispersing clouds of reflective particles above the stratosphere. These particles would bounce light away from earth and stall the greenhouse heating process. There are many unknown variables, such as a possible collapse in crop production, or if SRM is stopped abruptly the heat increase would rebound, quickly cooking the planet within a couple of years.
One thing is certain, if a nation or group of nations begin SRM the sky will become a gray, glistening rainbow. A constant sunset, a permanent dusk or dawn. How will the individual filter back into a global society locked in a fight against our own systems? How will new life grew in this reality? Between the cracks, down the hill.
ORGANIC SURVEILLANT EXHAUSTION VENT: C-Print - 36”x72” - 1/3+AP - 2021
The Data Center is all about heat management. The conversion of water into energy into computing power with heat as a byproduct is a miniature of how an AI superintelligence might see the world: fodder for conversion into thinking time-energy or Computronium. This is the long-tail effect of brutalist architecture. A style of building that forces us to interrogate our relation to nature, or own impossibly insignificant consciousness against the awe of natural forces. Today, the mall parking garage is the most recognizable brutalist form.
AI is being developed as a geopolitical tool. Nation-states that wield AI will be able to dominate the globe as super-intelligent systems undermine and take control of encryption, supply-chains and communication networks. National sovereignty will become increasingly harder to maintain, as ASI (artificial super intelligence) overtakes leader’s power. In this way, ASI is the devirtualization of the process of neoliberalism. This time coming home to sites of power and abdicating them of the steering wheel (as neoliberal capital has done to levers of the economy.) Leaders will continue to assure us that are in control, but our window onto this world will increasingly become a sunset on agency, as the ASI overwhelms us like an invasive wild flower patch.
DEEP TIME RECLUSE: C-Print - 36”x72” - 1/3+AP - 2021
Lower Cavity was my first experience at an artist residency. I am used to working on my art between a mix of client work, personal projects and other social engagements. Having the time and space to dedicate to my art was truly formative. The isolated tunnel vision allowed me to follow through on ideas that I had been stewing over for a long time.
This time for reflection was liberating, but also presented the threat of spiraling. I am accustom to the constant barrage of images and information that resist reflection. I feel comfortable in the noise, in the whir of discourse, memes and low quality images. This high fidelity silence can be dangerous if not eased into. After about a week descending into the conceptual pathways of my art I started to lose my grip. I needed noise, I needed confusion. Clarity became an enemy. So, I fled. I went to the shopping mall to be around people. To bask in a light of corporate comforts. Something brand new and stagnant to protect me from the slow transient tidal wave of brick and cement that is Dwight st.
After returning, was able to engage again, to open myself up to the brutal silence of the space. To try and pin it down and make it feel real. I don’t know if it worked, but something inside me shifted, something was changed by the brick and cement holding over hundred years of psychological energy and production.
COLLIDER | FRACTIONAL AGENCY: C-Print - 36”x72” - 1/3+AP - 2021
Holyoke is a futuristic landscape. Or, too those who lived there before the colonialists, a post-apocalyptic vision. Either way, there is no going back, we are pulled into the future by these structures. The brick demands to be answered. The water that flows under the buildings is subterfuge, the humans that came here to labor are raw material. Collider is what happened, continues to happen, will always happen. Art can be a mirror for this process. Art can help us see ourselves through, to carve out temporary mental facets. And, in these dark spaces we can begin to regain a sense of agency.
In the next 100 years, the human race will split into two classes: those for who cognition is augmented by computer thinking and those who are forced to manually labor in to support these thinking systems. This class divide is a continuation of the existing intellectual divide. As these cognitive class diverge, those left to toil will dream of revolution. Cognitive class struggle demands a re-centering of human experience away from the quantitative or qualitative and towards preciousness of human flourishing.
HAUNTOLOGY IN MEMORIAM: Light Panel, Color Gels, Aerosol, Polystyrene, Zip-Tie, Tape, Climbing Rope, Carabiner, C-Stand, Sandbag, PA, Sound Mixing Board, Laptop, Folding Table, Extension Cord, Haze, A.I. Drummer, Local Field Recordings - Dimensions Variable - 1/1 - 2021
Over the past year and half, I fell into an online radical politics group. The aim of the group, “Josh C’s Super Secret Sleeper Cell” aka “Do Not Research” was to track shifts in the Overton window and try to chart a path for left-leaning political analysis. We read various political texts, essays, books, and met every two or three weeks on Zoom to discuss. The first book we read was Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher. In this book, Fisher describes a sense of cultural stagnation. Rather than new sounds and music marking the passage of time, 2000s and onward have been marked by technological developments: iPod, iPhone and Social Media. Music industry becoming a kind of aggressive nostalgia reasserting itself to destroy the sense of the new. While the desires of capital dominates the part of human society that used to be known as culture. Capitalist Realism is the awareness of this predicament, but a loss of agency in pushing past it. Hauntology is what Fisher calls the sense that there was a different path and that we are haunted by this parallel timeline where culture has continued to flourish and neoliberal austerity has not taken over. For Fisher, musicians like Burial typify this haunted, empty club atmosphere: industrial spaces that once held raves, now reverberate an emotional yearning for connection.
One of the aims of DNR is to dream a way out of Capitalist Realism, a path out of this stagnation. Hauntology is a wall; there is something beyond this psychological barrier, we just haven’t been able to open it up yet. A beam of light, frozen in place is the remnant of a brief journey through the veil. An artifact from the future or different timeline. An attempt to reclaim to the potential for the futuristic from the undead specter of capital.
Bio:
Jak Ritger is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and activist based in Allston, MA. Ritger’s practice combines photography, theoretical future-casting, and tech-materialism. In an effort to construct new vectors for collectivity, Ritger (along with longtime collaborator K8 Howl) has recently instigated a series of film screenings/underground music shows in para-institutional spaces.
In early 2020, TRLLM (Ritger & Howl) hosted German artist and director, Loretta Fahrenholz for a local premiere screening and discussion of her feature film “Two A.M.” The screening took place in Allston’s Studio 52 shortly before the space was shuttered permanently. The event was a final installment of four years of programming that blended drone music performance, poetry, promenade theater, political discourse, visual art, and film.
During the Covid-19 lockdown, Ritger migrated to digital localities to continue his research into intersections of politics and art, catalyzing collective projects (and collectivities) primarily through online message board discussions. As part of the New Models community, Ritger collaborated semi-anonymously with user @phmm on “Astroturfs of Offense” a glossary of terms that was published on NewModels.io. Ritger was also one of the central architects/collaborators of the recently published New Models Y2K20 Codex, a massive swarm-crafted compilation of threads and discussions extracted from the New Models Discord community.
In the sister-space of Joshua Citarella’s Super Secret Sleeper Cell, Ritger helped develop and launch the collective blog project: DoNotResearch.net. One of the first contributions to the site was Ritger’s essay “Towards Crypétournement,” which applied the Sleeper Cell’s deep political historical analysis to a critique of the burgeoning blockchain art genre.
During his time at lower_cavity, Ritger will picking up the thread of IRL event orchestration, visual art, and writing.