Springerin, Wien, June 2024, Nr: 2, page: 8-9, Hefte für Gegenwartskunst

(English translation) Notes on the installation Terminal Beach by Troika at MAK Vienna.

At the ends of time, at the edges just before the leap, one finds oneself at the Terminal Beach. A place without us and without you. Sometime after extinction. After: game over. Too late, after the end-game. There stands a tree, worlds without origin, only contours, traces, and outlines. A tree and a robot are confronted here in a kind of finale; the virtual and the material world united in an image, in a relation.

It is a default tree, the “standard tree” among trees in the virtual tree libraries used for spatial planning. The sound accompanying the performative act is based on recordings of radio waves from the British Antarctic Survey, generated by lightning and geomagnetic storms. In Terminal Beach, this geophony resembles “Nature ASMR” on YouTube more than its actual origin. One trains the other here. The use of the default tree recalls in motif another work by Troika titled Third Nature, installed as a living sculpture at the University of Cambridge. That work examines the use of digital tools and ecological simulacra in landscape planning and virtual material archives: fifteen native and non-native trees were planted in the typical grid pattern usually associated with virtual landscape software — an adaptation of the language of digital tree libraries and its translation into physical space.

The last tree will never fall — a process that can be followed from multiple perspectives in Terminal Beach: those of a drone, a camera, the perpetrator, and the victim. In alternation and cross-cut. Each perspective sees differently what happens here. From above, from within. The images shift between hyperreal and distorted. Four minutes in a loop: no beginning, no end, no exit. The outlines of an impossible landscape slowly assemble. The place emerges from reflections and fusions. This animation is about harming without consequences, about stasis, about the in-between: between “everything lost” and “starting again.” This landscape cannot act. In this version it has no history. A second nature, a side-landscape, without temptation and without consequences.

The last of its kind. Biblical. Artificial. Perpetrator and victim trapped — in-between. At the Terminal Beach, time, too, has died. It has remained standing in the interval. It no longer presses, no longer passes, no longer runs out. Frozen time. The landscape has become a ruin without visible decay. A tree grows from the final remnant. A robot arm is covered with fur; with an axe it strikes the tree, again and again. The attempt to bring down the last tree. The fur, archaic in appearance, covers the smooth surfaces of the perpetrator. Its movements are reminiscent of industrial assembly-line machines. All around one finds oneself in emptylands. A place where neither history nor future will exist, without any trace of what might have happened here. Hints of something that once existed. Ruins without ghosts. Land—

Terminal Beach (2020) is a spatial installation conceived by the collective Troika for the MAK within the framework of the Vienna Climate Biennale and is Troika’s first solo exhibition in Austria. Troika was founded in 2003 by Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer, and Sebastien Noel and is based in London. Their work moves across media and deals with the collapse and interaction of new technologies and their interplay with nature and culture. Terminal Beach is about the adaptation of living beings to climate change and its new landscapes; at the same time, it concerns the digital afterlife of myths and stories. The title Terminal Beach alludes to J. G. Ballard’s 1964 collection of science-fiction short stories, which shares thematic parallels.

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“Ghosts remind us that we live in an impossible present — a time of rapture, a world haunted with the threat of extinction. Deep histories tumble in unruly graves that are bulldozed into gardens of progress.”

— Anna Tsing et al. (eds.), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2017.

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At the center of the MAK installation is an LED wall on which a scene repeats until you can no longer get it out of your head. The blows burn themselves into the retina. Across the floor stretches a water basin. The surface is calm; later it will begin to move in places. The landscape surrounding this image is barren, the ground bears no more fruit, the earth is exposed, laid bare like a wound. The back of the LED screen is also exposed and can be walked around. Beneath the skin and the hallucinations, what lies hidden is above all plastic. This tree will never fall. The violence of repetition forms itself into a rhythm, like a ticking that structures spacetime. It is a play between a non-human intelligence and an ostensibly natural entity.

 

At the Terminal Beach the origins, however, have been reversed. The figure of the tree comes from a digital archive, while the robot arm was trained through motion capture and constructed by Troika.

The image of the video sequence is caught and mirrored in the surface of the water. Heaven and earth, heaven and hell, flooded landscapes. The video spills over into the exhibition space, overstepping its own threshold. Here too, natural life has passed; a place that might be permeated with hauntings and ghosts — the very thing missing at the Terminal Beach. On the smooth surface new species have formed. Border-crossers. They are guardians of thresholds and gates. Mythical figures that recall what has been forgotten. Their gazes are averted. Together they look back at the empty lands on the screen. Digitalized objects from museum collections serve as the origin of these sculptural hybrids: traces or residues that allow fragments to become new bodies. Through 3D printing the guardians emerge, such as the Heron Sphinx, as three-dimensional collages. It is based on a combination of a wax model of a sphinx and a Japanese bronze casting of a “heron with rhinoceros beetle.” The digital twins of archival objects thus become a pattern of living and dying. They embody, on one hand, the possibility of digitized memory, and on the other, the ghosts of cultural myths in the form of recombinations.

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“The winds of the Anthropocene carry ghosts — the vestiges and signs of past ways of life still charged in the present.”²

² ibid

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The wind blows here in another direction. The landscape of the Terminal Beach is lost in the in-between, and yet a path leads outward. The border-crossers are arranged along a spatial vanishing line, such that one can recognize a direction. Outward. In the room the colors change to the rhythm of injury. Sometimes the water begins to move, sometimes the light goes out — a brief blackout follows. In the dark the lines of escape can be traced even more clearly, and here too one searches for the exit from it all.

Troika — Terminal Beach, MAK Vienna, May 1 to August 11, 2024.

 

’Terminal Beach’, MAK Exhibition View, 2024
Photo: MAK Contemporary, kunst-dokumentation.com