Rebeca Romero and Maria Joranko: Oracles and Algorithms

Copperfield, London, 10 November 2022 - 28 January 2023

The weapons, jugs, small votive statues, cushions and pieces of cloth in Oracles and Algorithms are objects that look as if they might do things, but not do them very well. The daggers on the wall from Maria Joranko’s Beloveds series, for example, would be useless in combat, being made of painted plaster with plaits of hair coming out of the handles. Rebeca Romero’s Huachuma 3000, Vilca One and Datura XL – 7 resemble pots with handles and openings at the top, but have no spouts to pour from. This impracticality is reminiscent of the kind of objects reserved for use in the context of religious or magical rituals.

They are in a ritual context already. Contemporary art is a form of modern magic, artists sharing with magicians an interest in resonances between materials and ideas, and both making claims, whether in spell books or press releases, that certain objects have been granted the power to act in ways that are imperceptible to the uninitiated. Oracles and Algorithms is refreshingly frank about this unmodern thing that we do.

Each of the two artists casts a different kind of spell. Joranko’s work looks to natural materials as if to reinvigorate our relationship with the Earth. Ante – Diosa is a 3D-printed clay figurine of a seated woman, mounted on a column of earth, stones and what appear to be small pieces of black glass. It is a version of the cross-cultural practice of erecting stelae as memorials. The use of unprocessed materials, however, does not in itself produce a sense of belonging with the natural world. On the contrary, it distances you from the work, too disengaged with the material realities of our post-industrial society to make a strong point about it, despite the use of a 3D printer to mould the clay.

The small plaque by Rebeca Romero, Early Horizon, engages the present without losing a sense of deep time. A neural network has made a drawing of circles, dashes and dots, which have been lasered onto a square of steel. It resembles a star chart, but no human is able to read it. Its durability suggests that whatever information is encoded is in need of preservation. Its illegibility but similarity to familiar sign systems draws a comparison between the artificial intelligence that designed it and the human cultures whose artefacts, now in museums, often remain a mystery to the people looking at them.

Rebeca Romero, Early Horizon, 2022

You are reminded simultaneously of the ancient Mayan calendar that predicted the end of the world in 2012 and the gold Pioneer plaques that the US sent into space hoping they’d be intelligible to aliens. This conjunction is an exhilarating compression of time. It also serves as a reminder that there are many different systems of knowledge in the world, which might now, or soon, include some invented by machines.

We cannot declare one system better than another, as the European colonisers did. They thought that their ability to summon the greatest amount of material force was a demonstration of European superiority. But it is uncertain that, in the future, any human system will be able to outcompete AI. In that case, we had better hope that the machines show more humanity than we did. Though small, by addressing these morally and temporally expansive ideas, Early Horizon is relevant to us all.