Nancy Baker Cahill - Digital Argonaut
the quivering and lively nerve of the now, 2023
Video. 00:05:12 ©NancyBakerCahill
Nancy Baker Cahill is a new media artist who examines power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness through drawing and shared immersive space.
Lab Mag writer Elissa Middleton got together with artist Baker Cahill to discuss her work. This is an excerpt from their conversation, the full interview can be read in the published edition of FUTURO.
Baker Cahill created the 4th Wall App, a free, augmented reality (AR) public art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression. Her intention was to challenge traditional conventions of public art and introduce a participatory, immersive art experience.
Elissa Middleton Is 4th Wall still as central to your practice?
Nancy Baker Cahill Oh yeah, absolutely. I work with an incredible team at Shaking Earth Digital. It allows me to site my own work, which I see as kind of subverting and complicating the lineage of land art. I make a lot of monumental earth-related works. It's also been an incredible tool of collaboration. I've had the privilege of collaborating with dozens of artists.
It was really important to me that it be free from the beginning. I originally developed it with Drive Studios and it featured a lot of my VR drawings, which had been translated into AR. They were dimensional and you could put them anywhere in the world.
My friend Tanya Aguiñiga, an incredible artist who was using the app down at the border wall, actually pulled one of my drawings from the United States into Tijuana, where she was. That really was an inception moment for the geolocated feature of the app, Coordinates. Since then, almost everything we do is through Coordinates. So whether I'm collaborating with Tanya or any number of artists, or using my own work, it uses the GPS coordinates to locate a work at a specific site, with its own cultural, or historical, or political resonance for the work. This piece I just made, State Property, an exploding uterus in AR, hovers over the Supreme Court. I also put it over a number of state capitals, in places with the most extremist and barbaric laws.
State Property, 2023
©NancyBakerCahill
EM Of course most of this technology was initially developed for defence.
NBC Yes. Most of these technologies were initially developed for the military. I'm happy you brought that up, because I don't think it's possible to work with this much technology, or these types of technologies, without a stiff dose of criticality and an awareness of surveillance capitalism and the inequities, asymmetries, and biases that are built-in. How does one, with eyes wide open, use them intentionally and thoughtfully? To what end, and for which audiences?
EM How do you feel about land artists such as Michael Heizer?
NBC He obviously comes out of a tradition that was defined by a certain approach to the land which involves a lot of disruption, digging, moving, and in many cases, violation of sacred lands and ongoing colonisation. It isn't limited to history. Augmented reality, on the other hand, is both there and not there. It occupies uncontainable in-between space. You can't see it with the naked eye. It doesn't do immediate harm to the ground underneath your feet, it is impermanent. Which doesn’t mean it does no harm - the precious metals mined to create our mobile devices do enormous damage to the earth’s ecosystems. Nothing is uncomplicated.
EM Yet you kind of have to already be in the choir to be using your phone.
NBC This is something we talk a lot about in the experiential art community, and particularly in the XR community. How do you get outside of that choir that you're used to preaching to, and who's already fluent in your language? How do you share this with the broader public? It's an uphill battle.
EM How do you see the future of privacy, the future of information?
NBC I'm not very optimistic. If and when quantum computing becomes the default, there will be NO encryption. It's totalizing. Until that moment, I'm hoping to sleep. In the meantime, I don't think we have anything close to the kinds of protections we need. We don’t have a functional Congress, one that understands even the basics of social media. How are they going to understand what we're facing in terms of cyberterrorism? Biometric surveillance is already built into some of these headsets. There is so little consent. There's a great book about this called The Costs of Connection. We've all been mined, we have all been extracted.
the quivering and lively nerve of the now, 2023
Still from Video ©NancyBakerCahill
EM Your work seems an antidote to exploitation, in how it salvages sensuality from the virtual.
NBC I'm glad you brought up that word specifically. I made an experimental five minute film, The Quivering And Lively Nerve Of The Now, based on Clarice Lispector’s book called Água Viva. I read it in 2016 and was absolutely electrified by it. It defies genre. In it she grapples with her own sensuality, animal desire, embodied desire, and nature. A lot of digital artists love her. I think it's because she traffics in the fourth dimension, with an emphasis on consciousness and the corporeal dwelling so firmly in it. All the language in this short film is taken from Lispector’s work too; a pastiche, a collage of her language, a cento. I don't think I've ever had as much fun creating a work. I did it for a digital residency at Gazell.io in London. The challenge I set for myself was, how do I materialise the way her words resonate in my heart and in my body? Not just a kind of love song and conversation with someone across time, but also a repudiation of what's happening now in the US in terms of body sovereignty. That is a major problem for me. This was a celebration, from a non cis-male perspective, of sensuality, of carnality, of lust.
Installation view of Nancy Baker Cahill: CENTO, Whitney Museum of American Art, September 27, 2023
very laboratory