Ami Clarke interviewed by arebyte Gallery curator Rebecca Edwards

Set in a parallel present, The Underlying draws out the failures of the current system to deal with the impending climate crisis, as the future comes up increasingly short. The financiers tool of live sentiment analysis of the news, drives an 8 screen video work, focussing on the current predicament that shows the BPA molecule (Bisphenol A) - a synthetic oestrogen and byproduct of plastic production - polluting the planet at a molecular level. Sited in the City of London, just outside of 1 Poultry, the Virtual Reality work questions how 'virtual' the effects of the markets are on the environment, as data from the sentiment analysis influences the sandstorm polluting the landscape at the financial heart of the British nation state, born of tax evasion and offshore banking. The sand escapes from the virtual landscape as an enormous drift amasses up against the windows of the gallery, where outcrops of spawn-like prosthetic eyes, reminiscent of surveillance capitalism, remain evocative of collective potential.

Rebecca: The Underlying is a complex body of work which you've been thinking about since 2010. Can you explain a little about your research and approach to grasping some of the ideas within the work. 

Ami: My works been focused on speculation in language and the economy for a while, now - finance interests me as it affords a glimpse of a highly volatile and paradoxical model of mass-behaviour and the focus of cognitive bias research for some time.  It also provides a focus on the economic underpinnings to everything from the sub-prime mortgage crisis, to Brexit, at a particularly fraught time of hyper-financialisation of quite literally everything, via neoliberalism. The figure of homo economicus as a deeply in-debted subject, is also interpellated through the highly quantified protocols of platform capitalism and a lifeworld increasingly seen as a system for the notation of market trend data.  I don’t think it’s coincidence that the de-regulation of neoliberalism really kicked in around the same time as environmental concerns in ’88, either, so I wanted to grasp something of these ideas as they converge in the current moment.

I tend to view things as assemblages, which necessarily include the hardware, the software, the infrastructural networks, as well as government legislation that affects net neutrality, for example. The specificities of geographical location, and the financial security that underpins this… such as the regulations designed to safeguard ordinary folk, and so on, or rather, the lack of these, with potentially worse to come, which make clear how much change needs to be systemic and political.   

The work in The Underlying tries to grasp something of the complexities, multi-temporalities and scales that coalesce around these new, and very old power relations, that come of, and are revealed by, technologies associated with the interdependent ecologies of social media, finance, and the environment. The contractual condition of both the derivative, and insurance, was key to thinking about environmental concerns in ways that reveal the negative effects of capitalism on the environment, through a relationship with the past, just as the future comes up increasingly short.  They tell a story that Britain wants to forget, central to the climate crisis, as neoliberal profiteering via free market ideologies runs historically through seams of colonialist extraction to digital neo-colonialism: as the futures markets meets behavioural futures. Here, the underlying, the assets that come of land theft, slavery, and resources, come of an extractable relation, that inscribes race, and ongoing inequalities, as colonial pasts predict the most volatile environmental futures.  

R: There's references to the synthetic oestrogen molecule BPA within LAG LAG LAG but also in the particle storm in the VR work Derivative. As well as this, there's also a small reference to the Tall Girls Clinic within the video work. Can you expand a little on these angles within the work?

A: Works previously have focused on behaviours common to both the digital/analog assemblage through which news emerges, via the loss of the referent in both language and the economy, and the financial assemblage of HFT that Katherine Halyes picks up on, in her recent book Unthought - the results of which go on to undermine democracy itself.  Cries of ‘fake news’ that characterize the times, are by no means new, but in this era, facilitate the gaming of who has the authority to speak. During my research I spoke to the managing director of the sentiment analysis software RavenPak, who was at pains to assure me his data was quality goods - none of your fake news muck - which is why they’ve starting prices of 10K p.a. as they plot the rise and fall in reputation. It’s no coincidence that it’s an era also characterized by ‘shamelessness’ indicative of issues regarding class and privilege, perceived or otherwise.

In The Underlying, material substrates and particulates, the BPA dust that escapes the VR in the form of the sand drift, crystallize in a panopticon that points to how surveillance, rather than a rogue element of capitalism, enmeshes with market forces at a molecular level.  As the glass expert Phoebe Stubbs who assisted me with The Prosthetics pointed out, the dwindling supply of sand is of great concern to glass blowers right now. It’s a work that tries to grasp complexity, fleetingly, but I’d hope that it was possible to experience it as a whole, as well.  The Prosthetics draw upon the fates, the three sisters that had to share but one eye, pointing towards both limited resources, but also to the way the subject binds with their tools; prosthetics, with a capacity to engineer things to different ends. 

I’d come across the financiers tool of sentiment analysis whilst working on Low Animal Spirits, and Breaking News – Flash Crash in 2014, and wanted to utilise this key mechanism of our hyper-connected times in a performative way, whereby the value derived from machine learning, trained on social media, and news production, feeds the work in a critical sense.  The 8 screen video work conjures the interfacial regime of the financier, through, which, you might say, all other value is measured. Sentiment and emotional analysis is applied to mentions of BPA’s (Bisphenol A) via the live news feed and twitter-sphere (shown on the screens with other financiers graphs including a candle graph, and google map showing geo locations of tweets relating to BPA).  A toxin and synthetic oestrogen, particularly good at binding with humans, produced during plastic production since the ‘30’s - now quite literally flooding the worlds water supplies. There’s an HUD screen in the VR that shows live readings of the sentiment/emotion analysis that influences the environment within the VR space itself. I’m perhaps fascinated by this in particular as I’ve recently gone through the menopause and was thinking back to when I was prescribed 6 times the dose of synthetic oestrogen during adolescence, at the Tall Girls Clinic, at the Department of Growth and Development, Great Ormond st Children’s hospital, in a desperate bid to stop my growing.

R: Can you expand a little on how the sentiment analysis of mentions of BPA’s on twitter and the news, informs the pricing model at the centre of the interface, and where the data for these are drawn from? 

A: At a very basic level, I was aware that xenoestrogen was some kind of technology as I emerged from this biochemical prosthesis as a young adult.  I’ve been interested in Preciado’s emphasis on reworking Foucault’s history of sexuality (for Foucault was no feminist), and how biopolitical forms of government play out in the pharmacopornographic era with progesterone and oestrogen becoming best sellers in the history of pharmacology, and key elements of global capitalism.  Here, molecular entanglements enmesh with Deleuze’s modulatory control of data, as sentiment analysis mines Twitter’s ‘firehose’ and a sophisticated scoring of the relationships between words in play, uncovering grades of expressed ‘emotions’ as well as “importance and social meaning - in order to ‘predict the present’ and thus transform social media signals into economic information and value”. (Karppi, Tero and Crawford, Kate. Social Media, Financial Algorithms and the Hack Crash. State University of New York at Buffalo. Microsoft Research and MIT Center for Civic Media.)  

A phase transition in cultural research, social scientists analyze patterns in the massive datasets used to study emotional sentiments on Twitter, to deconstruct narrative tropes in the media, to identify joy, anger, fear, disgust and sadness. ‘Emotion detection’ has grown from a research project to a $20bn industry in machine learning as value is accrued through an opaque, but meaningful process of assessment, in that the analysis in no doubt fuels decisions made by financial operators on an everyday basis. 

The pricing model, built by ex-derivatives trader Jen Elvidge with programming by Rob Prouse, develops a live interface in the gallery space analysing news relating to BPA’s, to map the rise and fall of reputation in real time, using weather futures contracts, pollution data, and the FTSE to plot the fluctuations in the stock prices of the top 100 polluting companies in the world, responsible for over 70% of emissions. It utilises a financial quantitative model that takes BPA sentiment analysis, the FTSE (as a proxy for the general stock market), and CME Weather Futures contracts from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange that map the weather at London Heathrow, used to settle weather futures contracts, as well as pollution data taken from the latitude and longitude of the gallery.  The model is entirely speculative, but anticipates the moment where the 100 most polluting companies will find that their investments in coal, gas and oil become stranded assets, as public pressure means these fuels simply need to stay in the ground.  The insurance industry is by far the largest investor in fossil fuels, right now, and as a result holds an important role in stopping these investments altogether, although thus far, they’ve not exactly been quick on taking up this challenge.  

R: The VR work situates you at the centre of London's financial industry - the 'square mile', with 1 Poultry at the epicentre of this parallel world. The gallery is situated within walking distance from London's other financial district of Canary Wharf. What are the correlations of this for you? Is it important that Canary Wharf is visible from the gallery?

A: The VR work is sited around Bank within the City of London Corporation for historical reference, as you say, the new epicenter of banking appears to be in sight of the gallery through the windows of the gallery.  But, the innocuous looking server buildings just across the way from London City Island speak more of the high speed trading that goes on today, as well as housing the reuters servers and another massive building that facilitates UK internet/worldwide comms.  (John Wild’s Dark Fibre Network Drift is really great for finding out more about this if you’re interested). 

The area around Bank points instead to the ancient semi-alien entity lodged inside the British nation state in the form of the City of London Corporation – that exists outside of parliament's normal legislative remit – an offshore city within a city – that facilitates a third of all tax evasion in the world today.  There’s a reason the Brexiteers don’t want more transparency around their financial affairs that EU legislation is keen to introduce. This is where the current moment crystallizes around wealth derived from a relation that inscribes ongoing inequalities. It’s where the secret sauce of memetic media meets the magic sauce of right wing billionaires, underwriting political campaigns to facilitate a wholesale move to the hard right, as various survival strategies emerge as the planet continues to heat up, facilitated to a greater or lesser degree by the ‘freedom’ that blockchain supposes in terms of citizenship, as progressives and the alt-right meet, and Davos man doubles down for the long game, to ride out the winter of democracy altogether.

Whilst much emphasis is put upon the individual as a consumer with the suggestion that lifestyle choices might bring about the dramatic changes necessary to avert environmental disaster, the extractive principles of capitalism, that point to colonial pasts and digital presents, remain unchallenged.  In contrast, the work in the exhibition seeks to position the subject emerging in synthesis with their environment, which sites the individual enmeshed within collective action, through expanding mutual ecologies that include environmental concerns, as well as contemporary digital milieu. It’s necessary to think of things at the level of structural and political change now, to thwart environmental disaster, that would mean it were possible to not just reproduce the extractive principles of yore, as well as tackling more recent problems arising from both the false claims of neoliberalism and austerity.

R: You talk a about multiple ecologies, and the way it's impossible to think about such things as being separate.  The molecular level of synthetic oestrogen you evoke as a technology, the particles of dust in the VR and how these seep into the room in the form of the sand drift, seem to speak also of this posthuman position you adopt, where you describe the subject emerging in synthesis with its environment, or in The Cyborg Manifesto, a hybrid formed of machine and organism. This is something I see prevalent in the work, especially thinking about the prosthetic optics, or even the use of a VR headset. 

A: Yes, but also, really simply: writing as a technology - the prevailing thesis of ‘Error-Correction: an introduction to future diagrams’ (2010- ongoing) – an openly appropriated text through which any ‘subject’ to speak of: the ‘eye that remains of the me that was I’ - is constituted through other people’s words.

As the remnants of hurricane Ophelia made themselves known via the orange skies above London in 2017, where we’re used to relatively bland weather, everyone made the same Bladerunner joke. 

I’d been reading Sylvia Winter’s writing on the combination of mythos and bios she describes, and it struck me, anew, how important it was what stories people were telling right now. The VR work Derivative draws from this popular imaginary of film productions, as a result, but located amongst the City of London’s financial district, for something more akin to ‘Bladerunner 2019: the burnout’ in the year the first film was set of 2019. The replicant in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner had been important to me, growing up, as a construct, and one that was left ambiguous, as Deckard’s status is never revealed, whilst the 2049 film lost this nuance almost entirely, through its emphasis on biological determinism, despite the implicitly hybrid nature of the child.  

I really struggled with the VR as I’d seen so many works in this medium that were just bereft of criticality. I was adamant that the spectacular/immersive aspect inherent to VR somehow engage critically.  I’m not adverse to tangling with the sublime, in a critical sense, either, I just think it’s early days yet for VR – the technology is really medieval still in what it can do. I’ve enjoyed watching people get lost in the immersive experience, though - it went far beyond my expectations in this respect.

The multiple layering of technologies, both analog and digital, I hope speak to a posthuman complexity, inextricable from the hardware, the software, the tools, the governmental policies that decide on whether to act on emissions data, for example, or not.  Here, any subject to speak of emerges via an untrustworthy body, with faulty equipment, produced in synthesis with it's environment, that feels through prosthesis, with a body that matters, without mattering. Here, the posthuman subject, in all its complexity, that refutes any notion of natural versus artificial, or indeed, any binary at all, prioritising a hybrid approach in all things, could afford a scrutiny to all the contributing factors to specific assemblages emerging throughout history, that construct gender, race, class, sexuality, and ableist bias’ and discriminations.  Any referent-we that claims to speak universally is troubled with a crucial criticality that questions the humanist project for only ever having afforded some humans rights, and not others.

R: The exhibition has a soundscape which feels totally integral to all of the disparate elements of the exhibition coming together. Can you tell me about the ideas for the sound and how it came together from the different sources?

A: The soundscape comes from years of performance work with samples collected from numerous sci-fi’s: ex-machina, Andromeda Strain, all these great sounds – often incredible experimental music of their time. Sound is particularly evocative of sci-fi and I like the way that this can bring about a relationship with the body that can be quite visceral.  I was thinking of sonic experiments of the sort that would bring about a physical response, and at the same time cradle you. 

I was incredibly lucky to have Paul Purgas mentor me via a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from the Arts Council over the last year, which meant he helped me with the spatial aspect and this phenomenal layering of sounds we developed together.  There’s this extraordinarily low bass sound I found, that throbs underneath everything, drawing everything together in a physical way that is evocative of deep time, for me, that’s really important. The kind of sound you experience, but don’t really hear, like being on a plane for 14 hours - the deep compression of a molecular spaceship, far out in space, off the shoulder of Orion. 

This interview is part of the exhibition The Underlying by Ami Clarke, at arebyte Gallery 13 September - 16 November 2019