Project 35
 Anthony Discenza – Recrudescence

Anthony Discenza’s exhibition is a meditation on humanity's relationship to technology and the irrational undercurrents that inform its supposedly rational field. Discenza’s practice incorporates and entangles concepts, materials, and relations from a variety of arenas. He makes no distinctions between industrial technologies (fossil fuels) and social technologies (divination objects; spiritual practices; or in a larger sense, fiction, and reality), nor between the systems that produce an image (Artificial Intelligence) and the image itself as an aesthetic output (artwork). For Discenza, these systems, their outputs, and their effects all function as materials that can be treated recombinantly.

The exhibition’s title, Recrudescence, is a term describing the reactivation or reanimation of a dormant system or alternatively the recurrence of a disease condition in a biological organism. Represented on a graph, it is shown as a peak of activity following an extended period of quiescence. The reversal is a destabilization of baseline systemic normality, or an agitation of dormant conditions—an awakening, or a return of something long suppressed. Discenza’s use of “recrudescence” in the context of this exhibition indicates a series of simultaneous glances forwards and backwards. The glances—or perhaps visions—are anticipatory, yet also have already arrived. Like the spectral presences invoked in a séance, they are in the room with us—the viewers—[removed];

Demonology—a practice defined as “the science of demons and their actions”—provides an organizational index for material themes and concepts addressed in the exhibition. Discenza posits a Faustian bargain in the harnessing of fossil fuels as the engine driving technological advancement. This relationship is not merely literary or metaphorical: reminding us that the sun is the ultimate source of carbon-based energy, Discenza proposes that all fossil fuel-based combustion represents a functional summoning up of solar energy sequestered by biological organisms living 300 million years ago.

These entanglements are staged throughout the exhibition with a spare but theatrical economy. Visible from the gallery’s exterior, a pair of saturated green curtains—recalling possibly those cloaking the eponymous Wizard of Oz—frames a small office table and chair. On the table, resting in a cell phone cradle, sits a tablet of hand-polished anthracite—a metamorphic variety of coal, known in the fossil fuel industry for its energy density and high carbon content. The tablet and its placement echoes simultaneously the profile of a personal touchscreen device, a mineralogical specimen, and the mirrors and crystals used for scrying—a subset of divinatory practice employed by many different cultures, and the origin of the term “black [removed];

A small sculpture of a poodle cast from coal dust and resin—a souvenir from the American mining industry—serves as a direct reference to Goethe’s Faust, wherein the demon Mephistopheles, appearing as a poodle, brokers a deal with the protagonist; his eternal soul in exchange for knowledge he could not uncover through mortal studies. Within the matrix of the exhibition, such an exchange appears to be close at hand, either in the near future or the immediate past. It is ambiguous exactly where the exhibition is positioned in time: if we stand already at a precipice, or if the unleashing of malevolent forces has already occurred… on what side of “des Pudels Kern” are we?

Discenza extends the metaphor of an infernal summoning of nonhuman forces into our recent and rapidly expanding harnessing of generative and predictive AI tools. AI systems are frequently conceptualized in the language of the immaterial (the Cloud), but their existence relies on massive physical infrastructures—vast server farms consuming massive amounts of electricity (in much of the world, electricity still produced from burning coal). Some Engines (Vessels) consists of a pair of framed, gelatin silver prints, seemingly photographic images which have been produced by prompting the popular AI image generative model Midjourney to visualize computational process as early industrial infrastructure. The resulting diptych—reminiscent of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s images of industrial sites—depicts two nearly-identical versions of a peculiar industrial object, a sort of hybrid of blast furnace and alchemical vessel.

Along with environmental degradation and resource depletion, another key by-product of all the intensive computation required for AI systems is heat. A second wall-mounted diptych, consisting of a pair of industrial-scale heatsinks—machined metal blocks used for the dissipation of excess heat in an electronic system—serves to further amplify the thematic of an exchange of information mediated by thermodynamic expenditures. Extracted from an industrial site, the sculpture also stands in metonymically for the physical infrastructure of computation itself. Discenza rounds this out, including in the exhibition a single lit candle—one of humanity’s earliest and still-relied upon harnessings of combustion.

– Nate Hitchcock Lévy

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Anthony Discenza (American, b. Brunswick, NY) is a multidisciplinary, conceptual artist, living and working in Western Massachusetts. His work employs various media including text, video, found objects, sculpture and sound. Through installations and public works he addresses ideas of artificiality, narratology and interactivity. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH; Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp; and Et al. Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

His works have been included in exhibitions at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; V-A-C Foundation, Venice, IT; Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, IT; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI; ICA London, London, UK; and Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX.

In 2020, Discenza founded lower_cavity, an artist-run residency program and project space located in a former papermill in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts.