27015348

Reading School of Art,

University of Reading

The Abyssal Space, Mythopoiesis, and the Self.

A Consideration Developed from Joey Holder’s

Abyssal Seeker [Demersal Zone].

Student number: 27015348

Dissertation supervisor: Dr. Galia Kollectiv

Module: FA3VCD – Art and History of Art Dissertion

Date: 9 February 2022

Word count: 8692

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INDEX.

Introduction. 3

Chapter I. The Abyss as Multiplicity. 7

Chapter II. Following Currents from Abyssal Seeker. 12

Chapter III. Fictioning. 34

Conclusion. 42

Bibliography. 44

Appendix. Interview with Joey Holder (Nottingham, November 2021). 45

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INTRODUCTION.

The depths of the ocean have long been ground for legends, from krakens

and great whales to sirens and sunken cities. In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under

the Sea (1870), professor Aronnax reflects, “The human spirit is very given to

grand conceptions of supernatural beings. And the sea is their best vehicle, the

only environment in which those giants can be produced and developed (…).”1.

Here he is referring to the chthonic beings that some of these legends have

produced, but I would like to take the ‘giants’ in that sentence to allude to the

great fictions (stories, worlds) that have scope to bloom in the dark, vibrant

depths of the sea.

As we will see, myth-building can have generative qualities, in the sense

of producing reality, that is, ‘fictioning’ it. This dissertation is formulated as a

consideration around one of such fictioned worlds: Joey Holder’s exhibition

Abyssal Seeker, a project that has now passed through Seventeen Gallery London

[Demersal Zone] (2021), Futura Gallery Prague [Benthic Zone] (2021), and the

Ljubljana Biennale 2021. Abyssal Seeker is an audio-visual installation, consisting

of a two-channel projection, usually on curved screens, which shows the 3D-

animated inside of a deep-sea cave. The film appears alongside a different

installation each time. I will focus on Abyssal Seeker [Demersal Zone], the first

iteration of the exhibition. The show was staged in two rooms, the first one

1 Jules Verne, Veinte Mil Leguas de Viaje Submarino: 42.

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[Littoral Zone] contained a wallpaper installation, and the second one [Demersal

Zone], the video on a large, curved screen.

Any reflection that puts Holder’s work at its centre demands to be built

through multidirectional exploration and research. I will be alternating ‘voices’

and splicing theoretical concepts between analytical passages about Abyssal

Seeker to produce a composite (non-linear) discursive study. From the

arrangement of elements on the wallpaper to the creatures in the video, the

constituent parts of this exhibition participate in a patchwork world, and the

structure of this essay aims to reflect that format.

Firstly, we will see how the abyssal space might be defined in terms of

abundance rather than emptiness, guided by various mythologies, its scientific

description, and some useful philosophical theories. Twenty Thousand Leagues

Under the Sea, a novel by Jules Verne narrating Professor Aronnax’s voyage

aboard a submarine, the Nautilus, will guide the initial approach to the abyss, as

its perspective captures various pertinent contradictions. Much like Captain

Nemo, the owner of the Nautilus, Holder effectuates an immersion into the ocean

in an attempt to escape beyond human reach, using technologies invented and

manufactured by humans. It seems that we cannot escape our own grasplater

I will propose that this might not be a productive attempt in the first place.

Diving into the world of Abyssal Seeker, a very prominent characteristic is

that it constantly edges on the unrecognizability of what is on view, as both a

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fetish and a move against classification systems. The latter is inscribed within a

larger discourse in posthumanism and its impulse against ontological boundaries

and representational knowledge systems, taxonomies, as it considers these

discourses can have a flattening effect, damaging the way humans perceive and

act upon the world. For this, the text will turn to thinkers like Donna Haraway

and her “Situated Knowledges” (1988), or Stacy Alaimo’s material ecocriticism in

“anthropocene seas”2. The abyssal space is particularly fitting for this discussion

as it embodies that which is beyond human perception and comprehension, but

still within reach of the debris and aftermath of human activity, thus we must

learn to engage positively with it.

The position the viewer is thrust into is a recurring theme in the essay, and

it will let us think through the implications such a shift might have for

understanding selfhood. Two or more partial (“split and contradictory”3) selves

join in the body of the gallery visitor: that which they come into the show with,

and those that the show arranges them into. I will suggest that the viewer (as

original observer) is rearranged into a fictitious creature that shies away from

being observed themselves. The lessons on the myth-functions of contemporary

art from Fictioning will provide an effective tool to look at Abyssal Seeker’s agency

as a fiction, and how the self might just be fiction too. It is important to note that

2Stacy Alaimo, “Introduction”, Exposed: 2.

3Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege
of Partial Perspective”: 586.
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fact and fiction do not exist separated, nor on a gradient or continuum in Holder’s

work. They are liquid and muddled and produce a science-myth of their own.

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Chapter I. The Abyss as Multiplicity.

Both in language and mythology the words ‘chaos’ and ‘abyss’ have

intermingled histories. The word ‘chaos’ comes from the Greek one ‘khaos’,

which means “vast chasm, void or abyss”. In early Greek cosmology, chaos

referred to the “primeval emptiness” that was before anything else existed, or

“the abyss of Tartarus”4. Tartarus, himself deity of the abyss, was descended from

the primordial goddess Chaos, who emerged at creation.

If we look at Egyptian mythology, the father of the creator god Re (god of the

sun) was the ancient god Nun. He represented the primeval waters of chaos out

of which Re rose, creating himself and other gods56. In this case, ‘chaos’ cannot

mean emptiness, but something fluid, formless, and disordered. Charged and

active. This is more similar to use of the word today, which derives from Ovid7.

In the field of oceanography, the abyssal zone encompasses the part of the

benthosthe sea floorbetween the depths of 2000 metres and 6000 metres,

under the bathyal zone and above the hadal zone8. Whilst the Greek word ‘abyss’

means ‘without bottom’, ‘benthos’ refers the deepest part of something, in this

case the bottom of the ocean. Stacy Alaimo contends that the word ‘abyss’ is

4 Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia, “Chaos”.

5 Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia, “Nun”.
6 Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia, “Re”.

7 Ibid. “Chaos”.

8 Carol Lalli and Timothy Parsons, Biological Oceanography: An Introduction: 3.

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almost too dismissive of the ocean depths as empty, drawing from Philip

Steinberg’s social construction of the ocean in industrial capitalism, which he

claims has corresponded to a “‘vast void’”. The fact that ‘abyss’ is the name used

to refer to the depths of the sea, as well as the contradiction between ‘benthos’

(bottom of a body of water) and ‘abyssal’ (bottomless), carries the underlying

proof that it seems to humans so distant that we think it as an unreachable space,

surely beyond the effects of human activity9.

However, in light of the above observations on the intersection between chaos

and the abyss, it can be argued that the abyss does not refer to emptiness, but to

a space that frustrates the human mind to the point where defining it proves a

fruitless attempt. Alaimo borrows from Derrida in “Violet-Black”, where he

speaks of the ‘abyss’ as a word to describe “too much being … rather than

nothing”10. Similarly, Gastón Gordillo talks about the “oceanic void”, but clarifies

that he follows Badiou in that the void is for him “a positive presence that is a

productive and disruptive multiplicity of intensities, singularities, and rhythms”,

and that it is a void in the sense that it voids human notions of spatiality11. The

issue, then, is not the connotations of the size or emptiness of this abyss, but the

ones of uncertainty or lack of knowledge about it, as “the depiction of the depths

9. Stacy Alaimo, “Violet-Black”: 233-234.

10 Jacques Derrida and Marie-Louise Mallet, “But as for Me, Who Am I (Following)?” 66.
11 Gastón Gordillo, “The Oceanic Void: The Eternal Becoming of Liquid Space.”  the first few

pages of this book are published as a blogpost under which a conversation between Gordillo and
Steinberg ensues in the form of comments, precisely around the controversial use of the word
‘void’ to talk about the ocean.
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as alien casts them beyond the reach of the human when, in fact, all marine zones

suffer anthropogenic harms”12.

In Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Captain Nemo says of marine life

that it is “more intense than on the continents, more exuberant, more infinite”13,

and refers to the sea as “movement and love; it is the living infinite”14. Professor

Aronnax’s accounts of the underwater world are long strings of identifying forms

of life, from the smallest algae to the largest organisms. Every page is plagued

with profuse lists of beings that surround the characters in their voyage. Captain

Nemo claims that the sea is the “immense desert in which man is never alone, as

he feels life shudder around him”15. The illustrator of the original novel,

Alphonse de Neuville, shows the submarine emerging within this darkness,

lighting up the masses of creatures that speed away from the glare as the vehicle

goes past (Fig. 1). The resemblance between this illustration and Abyssal Seeker

(Fig. 4) is great. Both are drawn from the point of view of one of the creatures in

the water. In both, light is dangerous and intrusive. The Nautilus is a threat

because its fishing nets are extended (the book describes) and capturing prey; the

floodlight in Abyssal Seeker is linked to the expectation of surveillance.

12 Stacy Alaimo, “Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea.”: 113.
13 Jules Verne, Veinte Mil Leguas de Viaje Submarino: 195.
14 Ibid. 119.

15 Ibid. 195.

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Nevertheless, both images show abundance of life in this space that we majorly

think of as just filled with water.

Incidentally, ‘just filled with water’ is already a more than the expression lets

on. Water is “indisputably voluminous, stubbornly material, and unmistakably

undergoing continual re-formation”16 and what we imagine it devoid of, is beings

large enough to be perceived by humans, but water is brimming with tiny

zoophytes and other forms of life invisible to us. The ocean abyss, specifically,

joins ideas of the abyss as full and active with the corporeal dynamism of water

that assimilates everything into the thickness of its being. Such a site opens doors

to rethinking the relationship between bodies, as well as the supposed separation

between them. As the main forms of human cognition fail in the sea’s dark

depths, space for imagination unfolds. It is from within this watery abyssal

framework that I want to consider Holder’s work from.

16 Gastón Gordillo, “The Oceanic Void: The Eternal Becoming of Liquid Space.”
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Figure 1. Illustration by Alphonse de Neuville for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
(1870), Jules Verne.
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Illustrations_from_Twenty_Thousand_Leagues_U
nder_the_Sea_by_Alphonse_de_Neuville#/media/File:Vingtmillelieue00vern_orig_0147_1.jpg]

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Chapter II. Following Currents from Abyssal Seeker.

A dimly lit photographic installation of a beige and grey rocky landscape

receives visitors upon their arrival to Seventeen. Along the muted wallpaper,

mysterious critters furtively peep out from their hollows. At the centre of the

longest wall, a brooding panopticon. Faint floorplans for the same building

surround it. The environment is peppered with distorted phylogenetic trees and

drawings of the chemical structure of DNA. Straight lines run vertically and

horizontally throughout the walls in diagrammatic fashion, forming empty

charts that dip in and out of the foreground. It is a layered setting in which

unfamiliar creatures shine brightly in dissociation with the sombre systems that

supervise and classify them.

On the opposite side of the room hangs a singular 3D-printed dildo in the

shape of an insect’s penis, Ambunticoris sulawesicus (2021). The sinuous shapes on

it as well as the eerie illumination make it look like a ritual object of some sort.

All the creatures in the room have witch sigils printed on and around them. This

room is named the [Littoral Zone] in the show, in reference to the shallow waters

between land and deep sea, an area of transition in the process of immersion.

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Figure 1. Abyssal Seeker [Littoral Zone] (2021), installation view.

[http://www.seventeengallery.com/exhibitions/joey-holder-abyssal-seeker-demersal-zone/]

Surveillance as a panopticon may be an outdated mode of representation, as

many have postulated it now exists internalised within societal behaviours.

However, the segmentation implied by a panopticon’s architecture resembles the

separated boxes in charts. The mapping of the wallpaper with different scientific

representations suggests that this is how humans think we understand life, as a

set of coded diagrams, a perfectly rational taxonomy. There comes a point

looking at the creatures and at the 3D-printed object where the mind stops trying

to grasp whether this one is an eccentric bat, or that one a strange-looking species

of shark, pocketing the exhibition map because it has given up on trying to

recognise the creature in its provided scientific name. It comes as no small

realisation that as much as you are looking at them, they are looking at you,

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almost as if asking, “and you? What are you?” Facing the creatures, then,

becomes a curiosity-laden creature-to-creature confrontation.

Light and the position of the observer.

The demersal zone, which is the water that exists just above and connected to

the seabed, gives name to the adjacent room. A curved screen in the middle of a

pitch-black room hosts the two-channel projection of a panoramic view from the

dark inside of a deep-sea cave. Once again, strange aquatic creatures swim

around the cave. Between the darkness of the room and 33EMYBW’s rhythmic

sci-fi music, it is not hard to enter a quasi-meditative state. This tiny, contained

peek into the massive expanse of the ocean has a distinctly sublime quality,

reminiscent of Bukatman’s assertion that “the rhetorical construction of grandeur

and the infinite” happens in great part through “obscurity” and partiality of

view17. In this cave the viewer communes with the thought of what cannot be

contained, the myriad of possibilities of what could exist in this great unknown

ocean. Flashes of eel-like beings twisting around each other interrupt the view

for a few seconds. Later, a couple fish swim into a brine lake too opaque for us to

see inside.

The implications of light can be observed distinctly in each of the parts

that make up Abyssal Seeker. In the first room, light reveals the beings in their

17 Scott Bukatman, “The Artificial Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime.”: 91-92
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hiding places. They are pigment prints on cotton paper mounted on aluminium,

giving them a slight prominence from the wallpaper and brilliance of their own.

Rather than being caught by the swift move of a searching flashlight, they might

be showing themselves secretively, in order to get a good look at you. However,

in the [Demersal Zone], the light coming from the background of the video is

blinding, aggressive and artificial: a harsh searchlight pointing directly at the

spectator, backlighting the creatures so that only the contouring colours of the

silhouette of their figures can be discerned (Fig. 2). Rather than illuminating the

side of the swimming creatures the viewer sees, it sinks them into the shadows

by virtue of the contrast with the harshness of the oncoming light. Thus, the

spectator is here one of the creatures being illuminated and observed by the light.

Following the track of representations of Bentham’s building in the previous

room, the source of the glare holds panoptic undertones as it moves through the

background in an arched motion, covering from side to side of the curved screen,

as much territory as the screen allows to be displayed. The viewer, as part of the

surveyed, can only attempt to find uncomfortable privacy behind the protective

rocks, to not let themselves be observed in the position of ‘the strange’,

bewildered to be occupying the same post as all these eccentric creatures.

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Figure 2. Abyssal Seeker [Demersal Zone] (2021), Joey Holder. 2 channel HD video with sound,
projection screen. 7' 41. Film still. [http://www.seventeengallery.com/exhibitions/joey-holder-abyssal-
seeker-demersal-zone/]

“The tension that obtains between visibility and obscurity, the explosions

of vivid chromatics and sounds, the evacuation of language and narrativeall

this speaks to the powers of the human sensorium even as it also seems to

diminish and displace the human.”, writes Bukatman, describing Douglas

Trumbull’s special effects18. The same can be said about Holder’s video. Later, it

will become evident that the repercussion on the human specifically touches

upon the viewer’s understanding of the boundaries of their human body and self.

We imagine sublime abyssal spaces containing worlds and creatures that are

alien to us, but then again, as Holder mentioned in the interview, “Everything is

alien. We’re aliens! What is an alien, as well? Something from somewhere else? I

18 Scott Bukatman, “The Artificial Infinite”: 104.

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don’t know.”19 This ‘I don’t know’ is what we hold on to, an open question that

includes the subject and is unable to dissociate the external unknown from the

one within the skin.

The act of naming.

When Verne introduces Conseil, the assistant that accompanies Prof.

Aronnax in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, he says of him that “he could

skip with acrobatic agility through the whole scale of the ramifications, of the

groups, of the classes, of the subclasses, of the orders, of the families, of the

genres, of the subgenres, of the species, and of the varieties.” However, when it

comes to the practice, he was so non-versed in it that he probably “could not tell

apart, as far as I believe, a cachalot from a whale.”20 How is this great dissociation

of the name from its bearer, the same one that happens when we try to put image

to name with the creatures in the [Littoral Zone], possible? A chasm is open

between the human and that which he has named and then forgotten about.

Building her argument for an agential-realist ontology, Karen Barad observes

that “representationalism separates the world into the ontologically disjoint

domains of words and things, leaving itself with the dilemma of their linkage”21.

19 Joey Holder, Interview with Joey Holder.

20 Jules Verne, Veinte Mil Leguas de Viaje Submarino: 47.
21 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes

to Matter”: 811.
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At the beginning of the same novel, as they chase the unidentified creature

that has been sighted in different waters on the globe, their main concern is

discerning what exactly this huge animal is. In order to dominate it, and kill it,

they must first know what it is that they are facing. Professor Aronnax ruminates,

“that revealed to me its mode of respiration and allowed me to definitely

conclude that it belonged to the vertebrates, class of mammals, subclass of

monodelphs, group of the pisciforms, order of the cetaceans, family… […]

Variety, species, genre and family I didn’t yet know, but I didn’t doubt that I

would complete my classification […].” 22.

Throughout the novel, not only does he make sure to identify every living

being he comes across, but he seems to take a distinct pleasure in doing so.

“…that science has endowed with its most charming names,” he remarks when

enumerating molluscs. There is something beautiful about the disparate words

that appear in his long enumerations, but they seem to pile up on the page as

bricks meaninglessly labelled. The titles of the different artworks and sections in

Abyssal Seeker deliberately produce this effect. Written on the exhibition paper,

they appear as lovely, vacuous assortments of syllables that exist completely

detached from that which they are referring to. “There’s a categorization there

[in Abyssal Seeker], but then it doesn’t really categorize,” the artist says in an

interview. Holder uses these labels in a playful way, one that can serve to

22 Jules Verne, Veinte Mil Leguas de Viaje Submarino: 75.

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produce a blurry internal structure in the show while simultaneously indicating

that nothing is “that clear-cut anyway.”23

Is it through the act of naming that man dominates that which he is

naming, feeling as the creator of such a creature’s existence by virtue of having

verbally acknowledged it? Many have considered the use of the word to be the

defining difference between humans and animals, so is assigning a name to a

being that cannot name itself a symptom of humanity’s perceived

exceptionalism? For this question of naming, Derrida refers back to the Genesis,

and the moment when God tells Ish (before Ishah, the woman) to name the

animals, focusing on the narrative in which this happens before the original sin,

before sees himself naked, before, unlike the others, he feels the need to hide his

nakedness (he is only naked because he sees himself as so; the animals cannot be

naked because they do not feel a need for clothes. This is another factor that has

been used to establish the difference with nonhuman animals,)24.

Bob Dylan sings it, “man gave name to all the animals/in the beginning, in

the beginning”25. ‘The beginning’ here is the moment in which man bestows

names upon the animals, thus marking the beginning of the animal’s existence by

verbally delineating this thing that is called ‘animal’. However, despite the

23 Joey Holder, Interview with Joey Holder. Pg. 48 on the appendix.

24 Jacques Derrida and Marie-Louise Mallet, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’:
5-17.
25 Bob Dylan, Man Gave Names to All the Animals.

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presumed significance of such a moment, the unconcerned tone with which

Dylan sings, “ah… I think I’ll call it a bear”26, conveys that this name man gives

is the whimsical product of a playful arbitrariness or nonchalance. And what of

this nonchalance? Is it because he knows the other animals will not recognise

themselves in their human-given names? Is it not important for the one being

named, therefore neither is it for the one doing the naming?

But, at end of the song, he sings, “He saw an animal as smooth as

glass/Slithering his way through the grass/He saw him disappear by a tree near

a lake…”27, he does not finish the verse about the animal that will be cursed above

all. The only name that is important in this song is the one that is never uttered,

as it comes to life in the silence. Without having pronounced it, Dylan finishes,

leaving the word ‘snake’ ringing through my brain. He leaves me to follow after

it, behind the tree, knowing what is about to happen with the serpent and the

tree, a sense of discomfort washing over me at both the realisation of the

impending doom as well as the dissatisfaction of having been left with an

incomplete rhyme. Now the name of the ‘snake’ matters, precisely because of

what is to come from this interaction with that which is called a snake, and what

26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
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we expect it to do, in the myth that attaches definition to name for the ages to

come.

Figure 3. Centurio Senex (2021), Joey Holder. Pigment print on cotton paper mounted to aluminium. 40.5 x 53 cm
[http://www.seventeengallery.com/exhibitions/joey-holder-abyssal-seeker-demersal-zone/]

Giving name to something allows us to talk about it in isolation, having

painted its borders by enveloping it in a word, which then lets us describe it,

concretise it by joining other descriptive words to it. The act of naming, then, is

an act of intellectual domination, a claimed ownership of the knowledge of a

thing’s being. A reduction. Now, with a word that carries other words attached

to it regarding a thing’s being, it is established what that thing is and is expected

to be, moving forward. The encounter with that which gives it name renders the

thing stagnant. This thing, which previously did not know of itself, now has

something specific to be. The epigraph Scott Bukatman includes in his essay

“Taking Shape: Morphing and the Performance of Self” uses Proust’s fitting
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words to elucidate on this matter: “Perhaps the immobility of the things that

surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and

not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them.”28

On embodied vision: taxonomy as control.

In “The Artificial Sublime,” Bukatman examines what Wolfgang

Schivelbush called “panoramic perception”, which refers to the changes on the

human observer effected by the developments in mobility the world has seen

through locomotion, travel, tourism, and subsequently digital media, since the

19th century: “vision was put in motion”, but also distanced from the body by a

window or a screen. Bukatman calls on Jonathan Crary, who believes that this

schism meant “the objects of visual contemplation were ‘sundered from any

relation to the spectator’s position within a cognitively unified field’”. Crary is

critical of this ‘disembodied vision’. He points out that empirically splitting the

visual from other forms of perception allowed for its “‘quantification and

homogenisation’”, and, after Foucault, sees this as embedded in the surveillance

and control systems that are diagnostic of industrial capitalism.29

Schivelbusch, however, contends that panoramic perception remains and

embodied experience, as the new figure of the “mobile observer” also bears the

impact of “velocity” on their body. Not satisfied with either position, Bukatman

28 Scott Bukatman, “Taking Shape: Morphing and the Performance of Self.”: 133.
29 Scott Bukatman, “The Artificial Infinite”: 84-85.
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mediates between both, observing that, although it is true that visual perception

does suffer a certain disconnect from the observer’s physical body, it is in favour

of the creation of an “illusory body”30 (the one who experiences what is on screen)

to which vision gets reattached. This process takes place in Abyssal Seeker when

the observer’s ‘new illusory body’ is submerged into the animated cave and first-

person vision is attached to them. I will return to this idea of an illusory or

fictitious self later to see how such an artefact, the production of a different

perspective into which the self is inserted in first-person view, might contribute

to the acknowledgement of the fiction of the self.

The account Bukatman gives of panoramic perception holds certain points

in common with Haraway’s own analysis of vision and technology in “Situated

Knowledges.” Haraway argues for “the embodied nature of all vision”31, pitching

her critique against the untrustworthy notions of universally appliable

knowledge and objectivity that “masculinist scientists and philosophers”32 have

instituted in the academic field. Their vision, as the accepted universal referent,

cannot be traced back to a specific embodiment that generated it, precisely

because of its pretensions to universality.

Following a similar line of thought as Crary, Haraway notes that the in

appearance unlimited “instruments of visualization in multinationalist,

30 Ibid. 86.
31 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”: 581.
32 Ibid. 575.

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postmodernist culture” allow us to have an almost omniscient eye over (under,

inside, outwards of) the world by placing a camera in any given place33. This “god

trick”the illusion of boundless vision34, is the historical descendant of

Schivelbusch’s panoramic view through the window of the train. Like Crary,

Haraway is suspicious of the construction of a “‘transcendental subject’ no longer

limited to a single set of spatiotemporal coordinates”35, one who is detached from

the object of knowledge. In the case of the god-trick view performed by dominant

scientific models, the ‘illusory body’ Bukatman puts forth is territorialised as a

socially unmarked body (“Man and White”) who sees “everything from

nowhere”36. It is untraceable and cannot be held accountable, for it proclaims

itself as globally objective. It is a subject untethered from the object for it has no

position regarding it, the fallacy of a perspective that thinks itself exterior and

absolute.

The arrangement of visual material in Abyssal Seeker displays distorted

phylogenetic trees, which give a succinct representation of the evolutionary

relationship between species. Holder identifies the detached, reductive vision

from ‘above’ that taxonomy’s representationalist overviews epitomise. The

creatures in the [Littoral Zone] hide from the incontestable panoptic view that, in

its colonial project, seeks to immobilise and determine them. In the [Demersal

33 Ibid. 581.
34 Ibid. 582.
35 Scott Bukatman, “The Artificial Infinite”: 85.

36 Haraway: 581.

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Zone], we get, quite literally, the view “from below”. Haraway describes “vision

from below” as partial, locatable, “subjugated standpoints”37, and maybe

Holder’s creatures can be considered as such in relation to the aforementioned

flattening forces of classification. The object of study will always constitute a

subjugated position as long as, rather than being seen as an agent, it is taken “only

as matter for the seminal power, the act, of the knower”38.

The key displacement is the one that happens to the viewer: the shift from

‘observer’ to ‘the observed,’ as they now present one more potential element to

insert in the phylogenetic tree. Such is the illusory body created for vision to get

reattached to in Abyssal Seeker. Holder ensures that the illusory body being

offered is not that of a ‘transcendental subject’ who can suddenly see into the

bottom of the ocean, but that of ‘you-as-creature’. By submerging the viewer and

providing only a very partial view of a fictional, animated environment, rather

than attempting a realistic account of a sea cave, the artist rejects the

“technological feast” turned “unregulated gluttony”39 that the vision ‘from

nowhere’ wallows in. Furthermore, as other creatures in the cave swim in and

out of a brine lake and the viewer-creature themselves is unable to follow with

their sight as it is too opaque, they become a stranger amongst creatures as well.

37 Ibid. 584.
38 Ibid. 592.
39 Ibid. 581.

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Figure 4. Abyssal Seeker [Demersal Zone] (2021), Joey Holder. 2 channel HD video with sound,
projection screen. 7' 41. Film still. [http://www.seventeengallery.com/exhibitions/joey-holder-abyssal-
seeker-demersal-zone/]

The human observer and the sublime

Let me return to the light source in Abyssal Seeker. It shines down on the

creatures and the spectator from the entrance of the cave. Its direction is an ‘into’

beyond itself, penetrating (into the cave), and descending (into the depths of the

sea). It is already immersed in the foreign environment, but regards it with

exteriority, nonetheless. This is the same motion the human performs with its

sight when looking at the abyss. It is always regarded as something one is on the

precipice of, standing at the edge of it, untouched by it (and thus able to

appreciate its beauty). The standpoint for talking about the sublime has always

depended upon the separation between the observing subject and the

incomprehensible enormity before which they stand. Coming into contact with

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the titanic phenomenon would endanger the human’s bodily safety, but more

importantly, the feeling of being tiny, irrelevant, would endanger the human’s

sense of self. And when faced with this precarity of the self, what Bukatman

refers to as a disruption of the “cognised relationship between subject and

external reality”40, the human might decide to, in awestruck terror, ‘dissolve its

shell’ and become another participant in the flow of such greatness, then all those

who write about the sublime experience would be left without their metaphorical

human observer. Thus, theories of the abyss and the sublime all rely heavily on

this separation (standing before something, never after or within it). This issue of

separation, as we will see, is recurrent in approaches that attempt a cognitive

overview of the object of study.

The human observer in Abyssal Seeker, though, is part of the unknown

being observed by the artificial light (Fig. 4). You, the spectator, are nestled in the

deep cave, floating in the abyssopelagic waters of the [Demersal Zone], amongst

other bizarre creatures. The physical (and by ‘physical,’ I mean the body of the

gallery visitor, not the illusory one created for them in the show) human observer

in this case is looking from within the abyss. Holder makes them complicit in the

experience of being vulnerable and being observed, but from within this vast

environment that we tend to dismiss as too alien to be affected by humans.

40 Ibid. 92.
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The light, whose master’s identity the viewer cannot but guess,

presumably ‘sees you’. And what do they see of you? We do not know. What we

get is the projection upon the light source of what we are seeing in ourselves

the creature-viewer sees itself seen by the light. It might be that a human is

presumed to be the unknown manipulator of the light, and that the viewer

recognises oneself as related to him in their humanity. In the next instances,

seeing oneself seen by this presupposed human and not seeing oneself seen as

human but as unfamiliar creature, the link to the word ‘human’ stretches thin,

and they who watch themselves become other, participating in the film, are now

falling into the precipice of the unnamed.

Part of the trance in which one finds themselves when watching Abyssal

Seeker comes precisely from the experience of being merged into the sublime

thing. This is an enactment of what Patricia Yaeger refers to as a preoedipal

sublime (a feminine sublime); one in which the desire to merge with the other,

the desire for closeness precedes that of control. Yaeger describes the

“conventional sublime” as a confrontation in which the mind, unable to grasp

that holds the potential for “mental domination of the other”41. Closeness

(preoedipal) is before control (oedipal), perhaps a more primal instinct, a “longing

41 Patricia Yaeger, “Toward a Female Sublime”: 202.

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for otherness and ecstasy”42 which needs not dominate or overcome the

incomprehensible other.

Dissolving the self.

The critique of the ‘God’s-eye-view’ from Haraway’s “Situated

Knowledges” is taken up by Stacy Alaimo in Exposed, claiming that “the

Anthropocene is no time for transcendent definitive mappings, transparent

knowledge systems, or confident epistemologies.”43 Following new materialisms,

Exposed argues for an understanding of the subject as enmeshed in the networks

of co-becoming that every agent in existence is both constituted by and

participates in. Karen Barad describes this as a process of “intra-activity”44.

Instead of representationalism’s atomisation of the world into ‘things’ (as

“independent objects” with a word attached to name each of them), Barad,

following the physicist Niels Bohr, uses the unit of “phenomena”45. In this way,

she accounts for the intra-actions that produce a phenomenon, as well as the

intra-actions amongst apparatuses that will produce other phenomena.

Phenomena are not static, nor unchanging, for it is key that the idea of

intra-action considers that every activity in which an agent participates results in

the agent itself emerging from it redefined. The word ‘phenomena’ is dynamic in

42 Ibid. 209.
43 Stacy Alaimo, Introduction: 3.
44 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity”: 803.

45 Ibid. 815.

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this sense, as it captures the notion that a body is never the same through time,

nor does it have a moment of emergence from which it can be defined as such

thing thereon: “phenomena are ontologically primitive relations—relations

without pre-existing relata”46. This is the same point Haraway makes when she

claims that “objects are boundary projects” in which the boundaries only

materialise through social relations, and that “what boundaries provisionally

contain remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies”47 intra-action

cares not for such boundaries for everything, even the boundary itself, is an intra-

active project in a perpetual state of becoming.

By making the viewer acutely aware that as much as they are a viewer, they

are being observed, and observing themselves being observed, Holder

complicates the relationship between subject and object. Both positions are

multiple and reciprocal, there are many observers and many observed that

construct each other within the (illusory and physical) bodies of the viewer. A

deep-sea cave such as the one in Abyssal Seeker is a particularly appropriate site

for the configuration of such an immanent subject48, between (within, around)

whose bodies there is water, precisely because “the substance of the water itself

insists on submersion, not separation”. Not only is visibility never a guarantee,

46 Ibid.
47 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”: 595.
48 Holder’s viewer constitutes an immanent subject because it is entangled with itself in its

multiplicity and with its environs, which it can only ever perceive partially, and because it
confuses itself with the other creatures around it.
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“nor does distance grant optimal vision”49, but the ‘space’ in which ‘bodies’ are

immersed is tangible and dense50, and the surrounding element exists also within

the body itself.

Indeed, in their elaboration of an “aqueous posthumanism”51 Alaimo calls

attention to theories of the Hypersea. Evolving into terrestrial dwellers, these

entities (dare I say ‘phenomena’?) did not leave salt water behind, but “‘folded’”

it into their beings and brought it to land, pulsing through us in the “‘saltiness of

[our] blood’”52. Thus, we could imagine Holder returning our increasingly liquid

bodies to the ocean, putting water back to water, as our perceived separation

from it grows fainter each passing second after one enters the illusory body

Abyssal Seeker crafts for the viewer.

Haraway, Barad, and Alaimo all develop ontologies in which the

boundaries of objects (including the demarcated object of the self) get eroded to

reveal a turbid, voluminous scene; growth and transformation are entangled,

collective affairs53. What ‘things’ are in this three-dimensional netting cannot be

explained through fixed definitions or differentiated containments, “matter is

49 Stacy Alaimo, “Your Shell on Acid: Material Immersion, Anthropocene Dissolves”: 161.
50 Denser than air, at least. It is easier to think of air as empty space, which it is not, than water.
51 Stacy Alaimo, “Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea”: 124.

52 Mark McMenamin and Dianna McMenamin quoted in Stacy Alaimo, “Your Shell on Acid”:

123.
53 There are many differences in their approaches, for example that Barad and Haraway do not

call for the ‘dissolution of the self’, but rather focus on critiquing the epistemologies that led us
to think that the ‘self’ and the ‘human’ are cohesive, unchanging concepts, but I will not elaborate
on these issues here.
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substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of

agency.”54 Alaimo looks at Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman, in which the latter

suggests, much like Yaeger and her feminine sublime, that what humans “truly

yearn for” is to merge into this sublime flux that the “generative flow of

becoming” is. 55 56 For the boundary project that is the self, then, Alaimo urges us

to picture it dissolving as we “contemplate our shell on acid”57, alluding to the

“encounters with immanence” that can transpire during psychedelic experiences.

However, with the call for the dissolution of the self, we are left with a

critique that looks at the sublime thing with exteriority in order to conceive the

upcoming merge, as we once again stand before the abyss (in this case also tem-

porally) instead of within it. In its abstraction, it risks leaving behind some of the

emphasis on material embodiment that these thinkers fight to uphold. Yes, map-

ping (the world, the self as part of it) as we know it necessarily entails a reduction

that distances and occludes our understanding of the world, but rushing to ‘dis-

solve’ all of it would implicate the loss of critical thinking in the first place. Fic-

tioning realities, and dealing with knowledge in terms of partial, locatable, spec-

ulative fictions (as I would argue Abyssal Seeker does), could provide us with

powerful tools to imaginatively re-envision bodies, selves, as phenomena.

54 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity”: 828.

55 Rosi Braidotti quoted in Stacy Alaimo, “Your Shell on Acid”: 167.
56 On a different occasion, I would like to formulate a hypothesis around how understanding the

ever-mutating mesh of relations between phenomena in the world as sublime might hold
potential for the avoidance of oversimplification and flattening in mapping projects.
57 Alaimo: 123.

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Chapter III. Fictioning.

Productive fiction.

The world of Abyssal Seeker is brought to us in the form of a wallpaper

installation and a film, both flat mediums that a priori denote a certain separation

between the fiction that is the artwork and the viewer themselves. As seen in the

previous chapter, this distance is breached by the artwork’s address to the

viewer: the characters in the work look back, in turn fabricating the position of the

viewer into a remodelled, more speculative sense of self (or lack thereof, as

Alaimo suggested).

‘Fictioning’, the verb, is defined by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan

as “the writing, imaging, performing or other material instantiation of worlds or

social bodies that mark out trajectories different to those engendered by the

dominant organisations of life currently in existence”58. They insist on a

productive notion of fictioning that understands that mythopoiesis can engender

reality, quoting John Russell quoting Foucault in that it is possible for a “true

discourse” to manufacture new material into existence, meaning, to “fiction it” 59.

In this sense, it is important to note how Foucault directly uses the verb ‘to fiction’

58 David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, “Introduction”: 1.

59 Ibid. 5.
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as contiguous to ‘to manufacture.’60 Fictioning, then, is a way of being in the

world, a “technology of immanence”61.

If it is hard to tell whether what Holder shows in her work is a direct

representation of a ‘real thing’ or completely made up, it is probably because the

answer is never one or the other. The relationship between fact and fiction here

is convoluted and knotty, and not in a way that can be carefully unravelled and

neatly reorganised into a fact/fiction gradient, going from one thing to the other.

“Things just exist and most exist in contradiction as well”, Holder says in an

interview62. ‘What is real?’that was never the question. The model she creates

is from the real, but not of the real, nor does it display any pretension of scientific

or philosophical truth. None of its components are new, but the resulting

compound is, not so much addressing reality as deriving from it to suggest a

different view. In this sense, Abyssal Seeker seems to encompass the notion

O’Sullivan and Burrows present, that fictioning is “a kind of weaponization of

fiction per se”63, in this case against the ‘transcendental mappings’ Alaimo warned

us about.

60 Other works by Holder (see Selachimorpha (2017), or Adcredo (2018)) have acknowledged the
power certain fictions rooted in reality, namely, conspiracy theories, hold over our everyday lives,
how they move masses.
61 Ibid. 2.

62 Joey Holder, Interview with Joey Holder. Pg. 44 on the appendix.

63 David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, “Against Control: Nothing Is True, Everything Is

Permitted”: 35.
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Burrows and O’Sullivan repeatedly use William Burroughs’ work to show

how a different path of thought can be crafted. Burroughs saw control as

operating through order, that is, particular sequencings of things that produce a

specific reality. In this sense, syllabic language is the foremost exponent of

control, and he considers it a “virus and a parasite that has invaded its human

hosts”64. In order to subvert this order, Burroughs develops the cut-up technique,

which consists of chopping up texts and recordings that are then spliced and

rearranged, resulting in disarrayed orchestrations that do not derive from the

words’ direct associations to meaning. In a way, this is what Holder does in the

transition from the [Littoral Zone] to the [Demersal Zone].

The [Littoral Zone] of the exhibition acts as a collage of archival material

that informs the view Holder is putting forward. The characters here come with

the Latin names of the beings they depict, but their presence is accompanied by

several structures that cast the shadow of classification and control over them.

There is a disjunction between the Latin name provided by the title of each print

and the animal that appears in said print, furthered by the visitor’s perplexity at

both the strangeness of the creatures and detachment of the name. Whilst the

creatures are colourful and vivacious, the panopticon comes associated through

bland greyness with the scientific drawings, the distorted diagrams, and the

Mayan scriptures. Control and classification are displayed hand in hand.

64 David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, “Overcoming the Fiction of the Self”: 59.
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It is worth mentioning that Burroughs was very interested in two main

contrasting aspects of the Mayan civilisation: their use of calendars as a form of

control, and their hieroglyphic language system, in which he found potential to

combat modern control structures. The presence of Mayan scriptures in Abyssal

Seeker points to both aspects. On one hand, Holder is also fascinated by this

knowledge system that is so different to the one we are familiarised with in the

contemporary West. On the other hand, the association provided by Burroughs

guides the question of locating Abyssal Seeker in a specific time frame. When is

this fiction? It is not necessarily past, nor present, nor future. The Mayan

scriptures are layered over representations produced by modern science. In the

cave, time seems to move differently. In the cold, dark, and heavy depths,

creatures live at a slower pace. Abyssal Seeker composes a narrative that sits

outside of “specific temporal sequencings”65.

The fiction of the self.

In the same way Haraway criticises the pretensions to universality of the

dominant scientific and philosophical knowledge fields, Fronçois Laruelle’s

notion of non-philosophy (as retold in Fictioning) finds that the auto-positioning

carried in these philosophical projects ties them with ideology, therefore, not

‘objective’ nor a God’s-eye-view. These knowledges, despite their lack of a body

to trace them back to, still carry an ideology with them, but it is unlocatable

65 David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, “Against Control”: 37.

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because it thinks itself ‘real’, that is, factual. Philosophy’s auto-positioning

“produces a particular subject and world and then offers a perspective (the only

one) from which to think of both”66. Thus, the world of philosophy that pretends

to be ‘real’ is “itself revealed as a ‘fiction’”67. Non-philosophy performs a similar

motion as Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges”, a kind of ‘dropping down’ to the

ground, the space of locatable complementary “philo-fictions”, instead of the

absolute ‘view from above’. A non-philosophical take on the construction of the

self, then, unbinds it from its auto-positioning, “from its own enthronement”68,

revealing it as a fiction for which many other fictions can be crafted.

Entering the [Demersal Zone], the viewer is plunged a cave in which beings

and positions have been cut up and rearranged. The side of the creatures that is

visible to the viewer is mostly dark (due to the oncoming light source, as we saw

in the previous chapter). This obscurity derives in further misrecognition of the

already confusing shapes of tentacles, feelers, undulating bodies, fins, and

pulsing lights. Regarding the repositioning, the viewer is ’cut’ from their place as

human observer and relocated to the position of creature-amongst-creatures.

Holder fictions the spectator into an unidentifiable marine being, one that is being

observed by whatever is manning the source of light, and presumably wishes to

hide from it; but also a body who is a stranger amongst the creatures, as it is

66 David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, ‘Non-Philosophy and Science Fiction as Method’: 317.
67 Ibid. 320.
68 Ibid. 323.

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unable to follow them into the brine lake; but also one which might feel a

connection with the light-source because it recognises human technology.

Creating multiple illusory bodies for the visitor, as well as an alternative world

for these remixed creatures, Holder’s production of many doubles “destabilises

[our] perceived reality (and selfhood)”69.

In “Overcoming the Fiction of the Self”, the authors, the word ‘self’ is

described as “the consciousness we invariably have of ourselves as a single

coherent and cohesive entity”70. The exhibition Abyssal Seeker [Demersal Zone] as

a whole, and particularly the film, put the viewer in a specific, multiple-

embodied position through which such a notion of ‘self’ comes into question,

finding playfulness in the abyss that the limit between the conceived self and the

conceived wholly other is. Alaimo suggests that we “dissolve our shell”71 and

erode the semiotic boundaries of the self and the human, acknowledging that

there is no truly wholly other in the sympoietic72 affair that is becoming. Derrida,

however, declares that it is not a question of trying to “efface the limit”, but to

“transform [it] by thickening”73:

69 Ibid. 55.
70 Ibid. 49.
71 Stacy Alaimo, “Your Shell on Acid”: 167.

72 ‘Sympoiesis’ is a term coined by Donna Haraway as a substitute for ‘autopoiesis’ (see Francisco

Varela and Humberto Maturana, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. 1980),
claiming that no system produces itself. ‘Sympoiesis’, then, refers to complex, active, collectively
producing systems. It is a notion of systems that is closely related to intra-activity.
73 Jacques Derrida and Marie-Louise Mallet, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”:

29.
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“Limitrophy is therefore my subject. Not just because it will concern what

sprouts or grows at the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also

what feeds the limit, generates it, raises it, and complicates it. Whatever I will say

is designed, certainly not to efface the limit, but to multiply its figures, to

complicate, thicken, delinearize, fold, and divide the line precisely by making it

increase and multiply.”74

Burrows and O’Sullivan look at schizoanalysis, a term coined by Deleuze

and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, to describe practices such as Holder’s, explaining

that it is the “name for experiments that dissemble and dissolve the self …, but

also propose that an individual is composed of a diversity of different

individuations … both organic and inorganic”75. Here we find a useful mediation

between the dissolution and the multiplication of the self, which might, at the

end of the day, not be so different.

My final hypothesis, then, is that Abyssal Seeker positions the viewer in a

place where they can dwell in the dissolve, but also multiply, divide, and

transform the limit between themselves as human (gallery visitor), the other as

creature (animated critters), themselves as creature (illusory body), and the other

as human (light-source), until we go mad, until “it can no longer be traced,

objectified, or counted as single and indivisible.”76 In this way, the show plays at

74 Ibid.
75 David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, “Overcoming the Fiction of the Self”: 60.
76 Ibid.

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fictioning the limit, creating many possibilities for it, cutting it up, rearranging it,

making it unlocatable, uncontrollable. The abyss is chaos, its limits should also

be broiling chaos.

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CONCLUSION.

Abyssal Seeker is a plural exhibition. It has travelled to three locations so far

and appeared differently each time. The world it creates also exists as an

interactive website where the viewer can look around the animation77. I have

focused on the first of these various existences, thinking-with some of the many

axes the artwork poses. This paper has reflected upon how naming and other

‘boundary projects’ are transformed into strange panoptic enterprises, as we who

walk into the gallery find comfort amid chthonic friends, in the hidden crevices

of their aquatic and rocky home.

Language, along with the cognitive mappings that are born from it, are

seen as forms of control by some of the thinkers considered here. However, rather

than entirely shunning human knowledge systems, Abyssal Seeker is

simultaneously fascinated with them. Whereas Verne’s excitement toward the

‘charming’ names science has bestowed upon different beings was idiosyncratic

to 19th century colonial exploration, Holder’s is a nuanced and critical view,

concerned with the way these reductive representational classifications reveal

connections with power and sense of ownership or domination; but the artist is

also filled with curiosity for what can be done when these systems are not taken

too seriously, nor to be universal fact.

77 http://www.theabyssalseeker.life/unity/
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Posthumanist ideas around entanglement and intra-activity help decentre

the subject from its fixity, but I hesitate to so quickly dismiss the idea of selfa

mucilaginous, multiple, mutating self that acknowledges the same complexity in

all other matter. Or, “a holding of it in a lighter, contingent manneras,

precisely, a fiction”, as this “raises the possibility of producing other fictions of

the self (or other fictions of the non-self) and, with that, the exploration of other

ways of being in the world”78. Others have also been cautious before dismissing

selfhood, strategically flexibilizing the notion instead, even using it in order to

fight for the legal rights of nonhuman agents. For example, many of the

participants in the 2022 Sydney Biennale, where Abyssal Seeker will perform its

next iteration, are rivers that have been awarded personhood. This, too, is a kind

of fictioning.

By cutting up, rearranging, dissolving ‘things’, their shape

changesthis is the ongoing process in which all matter is involved. It seems that

the real playground here are the boundaries between creatures (beings,

phenomena): what can grow in the gap (which is not a gap as much as chaotic

abyssal waters) between. The game is all in the edges.

78 David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, “Non-Philosophy and Science Fiction as Method”: 323.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Stacy Alaimo. “Violet-Black”. In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green.
University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Stacy Alaimo. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Karen Barad. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How
Matter Comes to Matter”. Signs, Gender and Science: New Issues, 28, no. 3 (Spring
2003): 801–31.
Scott Bukatman. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th
Century. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.
David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan. Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of
Contemporary Art and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
Jacques Derrida and Marie-Louise Mallet. The Animal That Therefore I Am.
Translated by David Wills. Fordham University Press, 2008.
Bob Dylan. “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” 8. Slow Train Coming.
Columbia Records, 1979.
Donna Haraway. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and
the Privilege of Partial Perspective”. Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1988):
575–99.
Joey Holder, interview by author, Nottingham, 13 November 2021. (See appendix
for full transcript)
Carol Lalli and Timothy Parsons. Biological Oceanography: An Introduction. 2nd ed.
Elsevier Science & Technology, 1997.
Jules Verne. Veinte Mil Leguas de Viaje Submarino (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under
the Sea). Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2010. [1870]. Author’s own translation.
Patricia Yaeger. “Toward a Female Sublime.” In Gender & Theory: Dialogues on
Feminist Criticism, Ed. Linda Kauffman, 191–212. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. 2019. “Chaos”. In Encyclopaedia Britan-
nica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chaos-ancient-Greek-religion

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. 2020. “Nun”. In Encyclopaedia Britannica.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nun-Egyptian-god

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. 2020. “Re”. In Encyclopaedia Britannica.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Re

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APPENDIX. Interview with Joey Holder

(Conducted and edited by the author. Nottingham, November 2021).
MARIA: I've seen that this is what you get asked about really often, but there's a really
ambiguous relationship between fact and fiction in your work.

A lot of the elements in your work are speculative, but also what we consider speculative
eventually becomes part of science. When you think about what is, and what could be,
how do you navigate between those in your artwork?

JOEY: Okay. That's quite a big question. The first thing that you mentioned is fact
and fiction. And I think that throws up a problem immediately because I don’t think
about things as opposites or in binaries. I think there's just this kind of continuum or
a gradient. But any gradient suggests that it's going from one thing to the other, and I
don't think that that's a very good description either. Things just exist and most exist
in contradiction as well.

So maybe you can have a fact and a fiction, at the same time, and it's not necessarily a
binary separation. Within my practice, within my work, I'm very interested in
particularly looking at the zones of where things live that we don't really understand
as human beings.

Using the abyss, it's kind of using it as a metaphor, because we think of these things
like outer space or the deep sea as being beyond our understanding and being very
far away. But then even things that are very close to home, we don't understand very
well either. So, I guess I'm interested in where the limits of our understanding as
human beings lie, and how we have these limited systems of knowledge, whether that
be language or the sciences. The way we receive and describe the world is obviously
limited by our own human bodies and the way that we see the world as well, our own
perceptions and our biases.

I'm really interested in looking at creatures and stuff that seems to be outside of our
frames of reference, if that makes sense. Relating that to speculation, a lot of the times
if we can't understand something, we have to make a kind of approximation or an
estimation to make an educated guess or something; or we make myths and stories
about things. Maybe we do understand, maybe we don't understand them that well,
but I guess those kinds of stories or knowledge systems might become “fact”in
quotation marks for us because they get passed down and repeated, and that
becomes frame of reference for our living, we live by that. And that might not be a
fact, like I don't even know what a fact is really.

M: I get a feeling in your work so often that you’re dealing with things that you both like
and don't like, but you can't necessarily tell them apart a lot of the time. For example, in
“Abyssal Seeker” there's a clear a critique of taxonomy, but then those creatures are all
being represented, and visual representation is a taxonomy in itself. So, you know,
there's a bit of everything.

J: I think that that's true. I am attracted to, or fetichise or something, certain

taxonomies as well, even though, yeah, there is this kind of critique there that they

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are part of this limiting taking apart of the natural world, and that diagrams are
limited. But it's just one system amongst many and it can be obviously very useful as
well.

I remember talking to one of the scientists that I've worked with, a marine biologist
who was based in Cambridge. She was based at the British Antarctic Survey, and she
was showing me all these graphs and charts, and everything was in order, and there
were certain numbers of each of the animals that were living in these different parts
of the ocean. All that for her was really important obviously, to try to understand what
was going on. And then actually another scientist that was talking to me more recently
was saying that they were more involved with systems of biology, I guess, and
mapping large groups of creatures in relation to each other over a number of years.
And all of a sudden, one population of the species just didn't appear this year or for a
couple of years. They had mapped all of these patterns and behaviours then suddenly
it was like, okay, we can't explain this at all. But I find it really interesting when I hear
that because I'm like, well, yeah surely there’s things you can’t explain. Sometimes
that’s the problem of particularly the Western modern world, thinking of this project
of mapping and thinking that we can turn everything into data or something, and
therefore control it. I think that's where the problem lies, that life is too complicated.

M: Talking of things we can’t explain, well, this is a bit of a jump, but I was briefly
reading about the iron-sulphur world theory which was mentioned in the press release
for “Abyssal Seeker [Benthic Zone]” at Futura Gallery in Prague. It talks about the deep-
sea vents and an early form of metabolism that happened there between the minerals
that preceded genetics.

J: They think that the chemical mix in the black smokers, the volcanic vents at the
bottom of the ocean, is probably the same chemical mix as when life started. But they
still don't know everything, because I mean, you know, DNA is in everything living,
but how did that start… aliens!

Everything is alien. We’re aliens! What is an alien, as well? Something from

somewhere else? I don't know. But I think they've proved that there are these micro-
organisms or bacteria and certain things that they recognize from, well, not this
planet, as well. I've read a story recently with some species of penguins they thought
must have come from elsewhere because of their genetics! But I don't know how they
figure this out or whether it's true.

M: I wanted to ask you about the Anunnaki thing from your exhibition Tetragrammaton
with John Russellwas it a real event?

J: There is a lot of stories on the internet about this stuff actually. I mean, is it real? I
don't know.

M: (Does it matter?)

J: I just thought it was a really amazing story. I'm interested in those stories because
they go against our idea of the human as the centre of everything. Why couldn't we
have come from something else? Why can't we be controlled by something else? We
think that we're the kings of the universe. So why can't there be something bigger? I

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mean, the obvious one to that is God or aliens, they're the popular beliefs, but again,
it's kind of like a metaphor. It could be anything, I'm sure that there's something
bigger, but potentially we've got no way of expressing or understanding that.

M: (So, we do it through stories.)

J: Stories, yeah, of certain belief systems, which are fine! I think that they should all
have their place. I mean, that's a whole other conversation. There's this website
actually that is a kind of index, it's almost like Wikipedia of loads of conspiracy
theories, loads of aliens, religious stuff, hippie stuff, cosmic stuff, pages and pages of
it.

And I think that's one of my go-to places for just finding different strange texts and
belief systems.

M: I wanted to ask you as well. What’s this?

J: These are kind of hard to explain. They’re

sigils, which is kind of related to the last
question. It’s related to chaos magic. If you
look up chaos magic and sigils, sigils are
symbols that have some kind of intention.
Sometimes when I'm making work, I use
them, and I don't know what that symbolizes
or what the intention was.

In chaos magic, there was a guy called the

Austin Osman Spare, he's kind of the
godfather of chaos magic. He wrote down in
a very simple way, to teach people, how to
use magic and transform their lives. You had Figure 1. Screenshot taken from the publication that
was produced along Abyssal Seeker [Demersal Zone]
to write down something that you want to be at Seventeen.
in the world or that you want to happen (if
you look it up online, you you'll see a YouTube video for how to do it), and then you
take out all the vowels of that sentence. You’re left with all the consonants, then you
take out all the repeats, then you try to join those letters together in an abstract shape.
And then you keep abstracting from that, and then you get a symbol from it. And then
I usually just draw a circle around it. You meditate on the symbol and then you're
supposed to burn it or bury it, sort of put it back into the universe. And then that thing
is meant to come true. You're meant to forget though, when you burn it. So, why I
don't know what that means is because you forget what your intention was, and I've
done so many of them. So for it to work, apparently it's meant to be like… you know,
it's gone.

So, for Chaos Magic [the project space], the symbol that we have (I have a tattoo of it
on my arm), we wrote as a group. We all set our intentions for what we wanted the
space to be and what we wanted it to do, and for other people as well, how we wanted
them to support us. And I can't remember what that particular sentence was either,
but we made a symbol from it, and that's still the logo of the space.

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A lot of the time people even talk about brands and stuff like that having these
powerful sigils, you could think of them like that, or they have this power and
meaning.

M: There are so many symbols on the wallpaper in Abyssal Seeker at Seventeen and some
are much more recognisable than others, like the DNA or the stone engravings.

J: I’m interested in the complex systems that these symbols are within, like languages.
I just kind of mix this stuff together, sometimes I don't necessarily know what it
means.

M: But again, it is the lack of knowing that generates curiosity, and curiosity acts as a
creative force itself.

J: Yeah. I did a project quite a long time ago now with some genetic scientists and the
one thing that sticks in my mind about DNA is that apparently, we only know 3% or
less of what the code actually is in DNA.

And the other 97% we don't know what it does. I find that so interesting, that it feels
like in science they make out that they know so much, you know, and that there's all
these genetic and big pharma and stuff that make these massive claims that they can
do so much, and, you know, obviously there has been massive breakthroughs, but
then at the same time, there's so much complexity that we don't understand. I mean,
even the nature of DNA, the molecule itself, is constantly transforming and folding
and mutating. This code that we now think of as computer language, it's not a fixed
thing. Our understanding is only a kind of snapshot.

M: I wanted to ask you about sound. In most of your work, sound is usually some sort
of tech music, like Gabber Modus Operandi in Semelparous (2019/20). And 33EMYBW’s
in Abyssal Seeker is quite mysterious, aquatic, alien, but I wanted to know how you
choose the sound for your works and why you’re interested in techno.

J: I spent a lot of my, I mean, I still do, I still go to raves and stuff like that. So I think
it's just the electronic music that, if I go out, then that's probably the kind of music I
would go out to. Simply, I'm drawn to that because I'm drawn to all the different facets
of rave culture. Again, that's probably a whole other conversation. But rave culture is
this very uniting cultural form where lots of different people come together to get
hypnotized by electronic beats. I don't really know how I choose it, I guess I am just
drawn to certain artists. In Semelparous, the work that I did last year about eels, I used
this track by Gabber Modus Operandi, which were this record label based in
Shanghai. It works differently every time. Sometimes I just find the music that will
help me to have a structure and edit the film, so I edit it to the sounds in the track.

But then sometimes I'll do more of a collaborative process with different music artists.
So, after I'd done that one, I asked the record label whether I could use that track and
they were like, ‘Yeah, please, use it’. And then they approached me after that, and they
said one of their artists, a different one, would really like to work with me on
something. I've done music videos and stuff in the past, as well, so I was like, ‘yeah,
that would be great, I'm also doing this other piece of work at the moment. It would
be great if they wanted to also work with me on that.’ So that was much more of them

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actually seeing the film when it was already made and then they made the soundscape
for it. I really liked that process as well.

You try to set something up and you have an idea, of how that's all gonna come
together, but I don't want to control that too much if I'm collaborating with people. I
think the first time that I heard the soundtrack to that, I wasn't completely convinced,
but I didn’t want to go back to them and tell them I thought it should have been more
like ‘this’, because I just want let them do their creative process. And then that can
add something to the story, that it has those different voices. It can really teach you
something else and take the work in a different direction. The animated parts to that
film [Abyssal Seeker] were done by somebody called Yuma, because my skills at 3D
stuff are limited, so it was also working with somebody else that could build and
animate those creatures.

M: I want to go back to what you were saying about rave, how it brings people together
into this sort of trance

J: it's almost like a religious experience

M: and it goes back to the gnosis thing of being in a state that bypasses the conscious.
Your video, with its soundscape, has a similar effect in this sense.

J: Yeah. Hopefully it can create an experience… maybe that's all I hope to do with like
the artwork. I think, going back to magic, when you create a piece of work… obviously
I've done like shitload of exhibitions and stuff over the time, but it doesn't matter how
many times you do it, as long as you keep on taking risks and doing different stuff, I
don't think you can ever how it's going to come together. I think that that is not in my
hands. And I know this sounds like woo-woo shit, but I think either the magic
happens or it doesn’t, and that's not always something you can control.

You try set up all this stuff together, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't,
and that's magic. And that's like when sometimes you go to a rave, or any sort of
experience, and you have the best time ever, you cannot really put your finger on why
it happens. But sometimes the universe aligns.

M: On a different note, the demersal zone is the bit of water just above the sediment, and
the benthic zone is the sediment itself, right?

J: The benthic zone is whatever's at the bottom, which, again, this kind of
classification of where things are, it's quite funny because it’s, well, the bottom of the
sea, and the sea could have very different depths. But that's how they classify it, it's
the bottom of a body of water. In this piece of work, I kind of thought maybe I could
divide the work into zones and have these different creatures appear in the different
settings, but I don't know. It doesn't seem like it's that clear-cut anyway. So, there's a
categorization there, but then it doesn't really categorize if that makes sense.

M: It’s interesting, because you use these categories, but then you blur them out, you
don't even rely on them yourself, whilst you're using them.

J: They’re there as labels, but then they don't actually…

M: They’re just playful.

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J: Yeah.

M: And how do all these projects kind of come together and where is it going to go? So
far Abyssal Seeker has been at Seventeen London, Futura Gallery Prague, the Ljubljana
Biennale… Are there going to be more permutations of the project?

J: I'm just about to launch the website, I think next week. There's a part of that site
that is a 3D landscape, same build as the film, and you can look around in real time.
So that will launch in the next couple of weeks. And then, the next iteration of Abyssal
Seeker will be at the Sydney Biennale, which will be in spring next year.

M: Is this accompanied by a different kind of set?

J: I haven't really decided yet. I like it to respond to the site and transform each time
it travels. When it was at Seventeen it had this curved screen, but in Sydney they're
actually building a curved screen, which is huge, I think it's like 22 meters long, which
is amazing, but at the same time I'm going to have to render the film again, because it
won't be high enough resolution.

It renders frame by frame, so it takes a lot to render something that big. So, the
practicalities are trying to work that out and I probably have to redo the film again.

M: Are you going to edit the content?

J: I think, to make it more interesting for me, I'll probably try and edit it. But I'll have
to see how far I get, because I'll have to be working with people to make that. If there's
time, I would like to change it. And the scenography will be part of the same room.
It's this huge circular room. The curve screen will be one half of it, and then the prints
and the rocks will probably be the other side of it going into this screen. So, I'll
probably do new prints for this other side.

I mean, I’d love there to be new creatures and stuff in there, but I don't know whether
I can do any because I've got to rely on other people to help me make them.

M: A few years ago, in Lament of Ur, your exhibition with Viktor Timofeev, there was an
interactive game in the space, I don’t know if it was you or him that did it.

J: I love that show actually. the basis for that was actually the Anunnaki conspiracy
theory. There's lots of gold in the wall prints because the conspiracy theory says that
aliens made human beings mine gold for them. I think that was a great show because
it is one of the really amazing examples of what I think about collaboration. We just
created this whole bonkers environment. I guess in group shows sometimes you'll
have on artist’s work here and someone else’s over there, which is fine, but I'm much
more interested in how works can come together and then become something bigger
than their separate parts. It felt like we made this installation together and it all
became part of one world. I'm really interested in the concept of world-building and
how you can bring lots of different elements together to build things rather than them
being separate.

M: In that sense, I was wondering, would you put the 3D model from the website in an
exhibition space ever? Or do you just want it to be in the computer?

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J: I think there are no rules really, I approach each project differently. I mean,
obviously, I do use certain things in works now a lot, like I’ve used wallpaper God
knows how many times, but I wouldn't say no to using anything in particular.
Usually, my process now is to think of a kind of like idea or concept, and then the
form that's going to take comes afterwards. So, it depends on whatever the work
requires, but of course, as an artist you do get used to using the same stuff that you
repeat some of the time, like the prints. But, you know, I want to keep myself open to
trying out new things. That's what keeps you going.

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