Thinking inside out: Enchanted Objects

As part of the joint lecture series thinking inside out organized by ZKM and HfG, we invite guests from the fields of philosophy, literature, and art. This time, Enrique Rivera Gallardo discusses “Enchanted Objects”.

A Glimpse into the Genealogy of Chilean Scientific Culture: In the early 1930s, Chilean advocates of functional syndicalism imagined a state in which trade unions and professional bodies would replace political parties as the basis of representation, taking the decentralized functioning of neurons as a model for the organization of society. In 1960 the scientists Carlos Martinoya and Nahum Joel exhibited the Chromatic Abstractoscope in Santiago, an experience they recounted in 1968 in the art and science journal Leonardo, and in 1972, a year after the nationalization of copper, Stafford Beer and a design team led by Gui Bonsiepe built the operations room of Project Cybersyn, through which Salvador Allende's government intended to follow the country's industrial production almost in real time, three chapters in which scientific imagination took root in the political and cultural life of a tectonic country.

In his lecture, Enrique Rivera Gallardo reads these devices as enchanted objects and proposes that, taken together, they show how science has served in Chile as a scaffolding of the nation, shaping its institutions, its economy and its images of itself, a structure whose public understanding and integration into cultural life has become urgent now that the country's minerals feed the global infrastructure of data. Raúl Ruiz belongs to this lineage through Poetics of Cinema (1995), where he described a shamanic cinema in which objects and images acquire a life of their own, and through films that can be read today as a symbolic decoding of the hypnotic economy of attention later built by social networks and artificial intelligence.

In the present, lithium, copper and the rare earths that state-funded Chilean research seeks to recover from mining waste sustain the batteries and servers of data science, while Chilean artists and architects turn these materials against the supposed immateriality of the cloud through media art installations and sculptural volumes of coal, resin, marble and lithium that examine the minerals and water consumed by data centers and their impact on nearby communities, a situation that now places the ethics of media art production, and its own dependence on those resources, at the center of the debate.