- Emily Nola
Opening Reception, Saturday, April 4, 1pm - 4pm
Limited free seating is available on a roundtrip chartered bus from New York City for the April 4th opening. Reservations are required and can be made on this by calling +1 845-758-7598 or emailing Mary Rozell at mrozell@bard.edu.
Artist/Participants: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Lendl Barcelos, Oneohtrix Point Never, 0rphan Drift, Sadie Plant
The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was a para-academic group formed within the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick in England. Initiated by faculty member and prominent cyberfeminist Sadie Plant in 1995, the CCRU produced hybrid writings that straddled theory and fiction informed by philosophy, sci-fi, and jungle music. Over its less than a decade of existence, the CCRU developed a body of essays, zines, conferences, and events that attempted to expand the limits of theoretical production. Operating on the fringes of academia, its members theorized both their own historical moment as well as what was to come––turning to the speculative in the face of a highly uncertain future.
A wide range of figures emerge from the CCRU’s annals: from prominent musicians, philosophers, and theorists, to the group’s former leader Nick Land, who would go on to become a voice in the ear of prominent far-right figures. Today their legacy is scattered throughout the internet, where their ideas and aesthetics have been co-opted by obscure online political sects and Silicon Valley accelerationists.
Assume Form attempts to reconstruct what alchemized within the CCRU. Via the artworks, music, magazines, and essays produced by the CCRU and its collaborators, the exhibition reimagines this distinct moment at the advent of the World Wide Web—and all the promises and threats carried within it. Rather than attempting a faithful recreation, it takes cues from the same sources as the group—the landscapes, sounds, and events that informed them—to create the imagined space in which the ongoing resonances of their ideas begin assuming form.
Assume Form frames the CCRU as the crystallization of its historical moment, just before the turn of the millennium: a time marked by the democratization of new technologies, the disorientation caused by this emerging landscape, and a drive to interpret these new terrains. Assume Form attempts to reassemble the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in all its fullness: not just for the theories it is known for, but for the full range of feminist, queer, and Afrofuturist thinking that animated it.
