STOCKHOLM.- For Mud Muses – A Rant About Technology, 19 artists and artist groups from all over the world have been invited to address the issue of art and technology from a variety of perspectives, including cyber-feminism, textile punk, artificial life forms, and cosmologies at the limit of nature and culture.

Mud Muse, Robert Rauschenberg’s performative sculpture from 1968-1971, in which nearly 4,000 kilos of bentonite mud is activated from below by sound waves, is back at Moderna Museet. In the exhibition Mud Muses – A Rant about Technology, the sculpture is joined by a constellation of works that were either produced specifically for the exhibition or created over the past fifty years of technological history, at points in time when the relationship between art and technology has taken a new direction.

In 2004, the American science-fiction author Ursula K Le Guin (1929-2018) wrote an essay titled A Rant About Technology. In the text, Le Guin delivers a poignant definition: “Technology is the active human interface with the material world.” This open-ended understanding of the idea of technology undoes its preordained essence of being perpetually and exclusively modern. Hereby it is uprooted from the rationality of the now and made mobile in time and space: in Mud Muses – A Rant About Technology, this is the starting point for a collective time travel.

In the exhibition, technology assumes other guises and meanings in the encounter with art. Our senses, along with our world views, are challenged, as in Branko Petrović’s vertiginous cybernetic diagrams originally created for the UN environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972. For unknown – presumably political – reasons, they were not shown here then, and his works are finally presented in Sweden with a delay of half a century.

To examine the spirit of intelligent machines, Jenna Sutela connects lava lamp heads with psychedelic magma to a machine learning program that looks for patterns, signs and meaning in the random movements of the coloured goo. Anna Sjödahl’s Centraldatorn i Sundsvall (The Mainframe in Sundsvall), an oil painting from 1978, is no less paranoid: it portrays a computer constructed to store data on all Swedish citizens. In accordance with the 1970s techno-scepticism, the mainframe in Anna Sjödahl’s painting is presented as a veritable totemic presence, watching over the population.

The interaction between art and technology is a reflection of the time when it took place. Charlotte Johannesson created satirical and punk tapestries in the 1960s and ‘70s but exchanged her loom for a personal computer in 1978. She noted a similarity between the two machines: “The computer had 239 pixels horizontally and 191 pixels vertically, and that corresponded exactly to what I had in my loom when weaving,” she explains. In the series A Curriculum on the Fabrication of Clouds (2017/2019), one of the new projects developed for the exhibition, Lucy Siyao Liu traces the prehistory of the digital cloud back to artistic and scientific depictions of clouds from the early 19th and 20th centuries. By demonstrating that human models and dynamic systems are historically and environmentally conditioned, Curriculum liberates the cloud from its contemporary meaning of data infrastructure.

Mud Muses – A Rant About Technology combines a scintillatingly wide spectrum of visual practices. From Suzanne Treister’s Time Travelling With Rosalind Brodsky (1995-1997), where the avatar Brodsky uses her ability to go back in time to change the course of history, to Ian Cheng’s BOB (2019), a giant animated snake-like AI creature that interacts with the audience via an app. Before the visitors’ eyes, BOB acts and reacts to things that happen – but only if visitors to the show succeed in finding the wormhole into BOB’s parallel universe.

The patriarchal technological order is also dealt with in the exhibition. In the installation Undaddy Mainframe (2014), the Melbourne-based duo Soda_Jerk both celebrates and expands the playful cyber-feminist approach to technology as being gendered. On her own and as a member of the Cultural Capital Cooperative, Sidsel Meineche Hansen explores a feminist concept of social reproduction and how its conditions have changed in a digital world order that transforms workers into isolated, autonomous production units: Here, the artist is the exemplary freelancer and informal worker who must constantly prove her value in order to get work.

The Berlin-based architects Kooperative für Darstellungspolitik have created the exhibition architecture for Mud Muses. The Koop has produced a display system where no art works touches any of the museum’s permanent walls, as a way of accommodating an art show that consists of many small exhibitions-in-the-exhibition.

In Mud Muses – A Rant About Technology, it is not technology that sets the terms and dictates the conditions for art, but the other way around. Or, as its curator Lars Bang Larsen sums up the essence of the exhibition, “Artistic intelligence before artificial intelligence”.

Participating artists: Ian Cheng, CUSS Group, Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Cultural Capital Cooperative, Charlotte Johannesson, Lucy Siyao Liu, Anna Lundh, Antonio Brasil Marubo, Armando Mariano Marubo and Paulino Joaquim Marubo, The Otolith Group, Branko Petrović and Nikola Bojić, Primer, Robert Rauschenberg, Anna Sjödahl, Soda_Jerk with VNS Matrix, Jenna Sutela, Suzanne Treister, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, Vision Exchange Workshop with Nalini Malani and Akbar Padamsee.