Crossed Wires and Digital Divides: Steve Miller

Artist Steve Miller has long produced mesmerizing art that engages at sophisticated levels with scientific thought and practice, as he critically documents socio-environmental politics in the Age of the Anthropocene.  He explains that while sheltering in place he's been pondering global vulnerabilities in the face of SARS-CoV-2. In so doing, he's been thinking a lot about wires. And about wireless-ness. And the power and data that flows, or doesn't flow, across these visible and invisible networks.

All of us are vulnerable to the Covid-19 pandemic, but some communities are, we anticipate, vastly more at risk. A rough approximation of these risk factors can be gleaned from what kind of wires people have access to, as well as what kind of wi-fi service they have, or don't have. Sheltering in place, as we know, is a lot more educationally and professionally enriching, not to mention more easy to endure, for those plugged into a sophisticated techno-information infrastructure than for those who are entirely off-line, or have shaky. intermittent wi-fi and limited electrical power supply. 

Those who dwell in the enormous shantytowns and favelas, off the formal electrical power grid and without resilient wifi networks, are less likely to have adequate running water and sanitation, or spaced-apart, well-ventilated dwellings, or unemployment insurance, or gloves and facemasks, or food delivery services, or substantive medical care. The frequent injunctions to shelter in place, maintain social distance, and wash our hands multiple times a day are nearly impossible to conform to. It is possible that the virus will increasingly run rampant in these vast peri-urban amalgamations around the great urban cores of Mumbai, Karachi, Lagos, Nairobi,  Cape Town,  Rio, Yogyakarta and  Mexico City.

Source Materials: Wires around the World

Source Material: from CERN (Theory Group chalkboard)

Lately, Steve has been spending time in locations with some of the most highly engineered, and some of the most chaotic. wiring systems on planet earth.  He has done a residency at Switzerland's CERN, site of the Large Hadron Collider, where physicists simulate conditions of the early universe and have discovered a dizzying array of elementary particles.  As source material,  Steve has photographed chalk boards where researchers in the CERN Theory Group have been sketching out the strengths and limitations of the so-called Standard Model in physics, wondering if there really is way to reconcile quantum theory with general relativity, and why the Big Bang didn't simply cancel out all matter and antimatter in the universe, leaving us only with light ever-lasting and nothing else at all?

The rapidly drawn lines on the chalk board, echo, in Steve's imaginings, the enormously complex electrical power conduits that enable CERN's vast magnetic fields (100,000 times greater than the earth's magnetic field) which in turn enable the vastly accelerated invisible lines of colliding particles that produce, for the briefest of instants, the most elusive of the universe's tiny particles, which leave the faintest of trace lines. Lines beget lines beget lines beget lines.

Source materiaL  Favela Rocinha, Rio.
Steve Miller 

Steve has also spent time in Rio de Janeiro's Favela Rocinha, Brazil's largest shantytowns. Here, people live surrounded by lines of a very different sort. The community is criss-crossed by jury-rigged extension cords and repurposed non-insulated wires, drawing unlicensed and unmetered power from  electrical power authorities and the homes of rate-payers. As an artist he has been entranced by these ingenious, seemingly chaotic looping networks, which have their own undisciplined beauty.


 Overlaying Sciences

To create "Cosmological Horizon" (2020),   Steve digitally printed a rotated image of the favela photo as a digital inkjet print on canvas, then painted the canvas and finally superimposed the CERN  Theory Group's chalkboard on top of the painting, using the silk-screen technique. This allowed him to overlay the looping informal lines of the favela with the rigorous lines of the theoretical physicists diagrams and equations. 

Steve Miller. Cosmological Horizon, February 2020
inkjet, pigment dispersion and silk-screen on canvas
40 x 53.5 inches

Steve has thus drawn (and overcome) a contrast between what the great anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind  (1966) terms the pre-planned "science of the engineer" as opposed to the rather extemporaneous "science of the concrete," favored by the improvisational "bricoleur," who creatively makes do with this and that, endlessly recombining a set of elements to solve problems as they present themselves, day by day.

Steve Miller. Bodacious Wires, January 2020
Inkjet, pigment dispersion, silkscreen on canvas
29.75 x 40”

In "Bodacious Wires" (2020) and "Active Development" (2020) Steve goes even further.  Bricoleur to the core,  he continues rambunctiously to mix together these two kinds of science, in tantalizing curved assemblages that hint at the curves of Einsteinian spacetime.

Steve Miller. Active Development, January 2020
Inkjet, pigment dispersion and silkscreen on canvas
39 x 53.25

And then into this stew, Steve has omnivorously tossed visual citations from his much earlier work, inspired by the laboratory notebooks of the molecular biologist Rod MacKinnon, awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for research on ion channels within cell systems. (see Rose Art Museum 2007) These images reference Steve's large canvases of the 2000s re-imagining the dynamics of protein synthesis, the magnificent, nearly miraculous factories within our cells that make possible the full functioning of complex multicellular organisms, including human bodies

Thus, through his artistic process these different forms of science coexist in interpenetrating layers: the artist inkjet printed wire imagery from the favela, then applied paint, and placed a silkscreen print on top of the digital and painted images.

Through the Lens of the Virus

When Steve first painted his protein synthesis, works  fifteen years ago, they were celebrated as beautiful, serene, even life-sustaining. Yet now, seen through our current eyes, less than a third way through our Annus horribilis of 2020, these biological forms now seem uncanny, even frightening. The scenes that once bespoke the exquisite, methodical transfer of information from DNA to protein structures now summon up, to my anxious eyes at least, visions of viral invasion, of alien RNA hijacking delicate cellular machinery, turning each cell into a deadly factory of virus replication, infecting a million cells until shed outwards beyond the body, launching the next load of rogue RNA to piratically seize control of other bodies, eventually decimating the global human population.

Such are the changing eyes through which we view the work of art in the age of the pandemic.

Lines begetting lines. Those surrounded by the looping lines of the favela, many already nutritionally and imunologically compromised, far from ICUs and ventilators, may be most at risk for heavy viral loads and death, as line segments of RNA engender line after line of body bags and coffins. Computer-generated data projections show lines of viral transmission radiating from ground zero in Wuhan around the world. Those with the highest access to power lines and wireless networks are hardly immune but statistically have better odds of buying themselves a degree of sanctuary, of being part of the lines on the chart that constitute the hoped-for flattening of the curve.  

And so we wait for the vaccine. For the day when new pulsating lines across the global infoscape begin to radiate out, tracing successful mass vaccinations (administered presumably in long lines) as humanity slowly emerges into a new dawn, and we turn to ask one another just what kind of new world is about to born.

References

Claude Levi Strauss. The Science of the Concrete. The Savage Mind.  trans. John and Doreen Weightman (1962; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966.


Steve Miller : spiraling inward / the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University ; essays by Michael Rush and Mark Auslander ; interview by Marvin Heiferman. 2007.