As many continue to practice social distancing around the world, we hear from bani haykal, artist included in Seeing Sound curated by Barbara London. Based in Singapore, haykal thinks through notions of intimacy during isolation.
NO FUTURE SHOULD BE VOID OF INTIMACY By bani haykal
Dear friends,
I hope this text finds you well and in best of health.
How are you doing amidst the current lockdowns occurring?
The past year has been a rather tumultuous one, when all things seasonal kicks in and refuses to leave, it gets paralyzing and on my best days, I strive to pull it together and hide the darkness.
If we have not spoken for sometime, I want to share some things I’ve been thinking through and working with as a means of resolving some of the most destabilizing anxieties relating to the future. One of my ongoing works has been to look at what encryption / encrypting means in relation to care and intimacy.
Encryption is a process and spirit that is pretty much all around us these days. From our daily messages via applications like WhatsApp or Telegram to bank records, we understand and know of encryption as a mechanism of security. I suppose what I’ve been obsessing over is to push this to one radical conclusion, which is to suggest encryption as a form of care. Encryption as a process of intimacy.
I’ve been thinking about and diving deeper into human-machine intimacy. I’ve recently resolved what intimacy is or how I’m reconfiguring the notion of intimacy. In Malay / Bahasa Melayu, intimacy can be transliterated to the word “intim,” which means pretty much what you’d understand of the English word, intimacy. But there is also another word that’s used to describe intimacy as we currently understand it, the word is mesra.
Mesra represents joyousness or closeness between two people, a state of happiness / shared relations, but in the culinary arts, mesra represents a state of absorption or blending. When addressing how different ingredients mix together, much like making pancake batter, mesra is used to suggest a new state of consistency, “..gaul sampai mesra..” is often used to say to mix ingredients until you get a particular or specific consistency.
The poetics of the Malay language teaches me that intimacy, joyousness, closeness and a state of being together, is an act of transformation. It is a process of absorbing and changing the state of two bodies into a new one.
Our intimacy with machine is precisely that. We’ve reacted, absorbed, transformed and altered parts of ourselves and our machines to reach a new state / body altogether.
In the wake of our current pandemic, our machine-selves have become increasingly busy, parsing and ploughing through volumes of data, networks, servers and profiles at the interest of sustaining our physical, mental and emotional selves in this potentially claustrophobic and confining times. If it’s any consolation, our machine-selves are spared of this virus, but not our physical-selves. For some of us and in some instances, parts of our machine-selves are already automated, either responding or reacting to other cues and prompts virtually, almost as if a part of us are spared from the pandemic.
But for most of us, self-automation isn’t a reality we’ve had access to. Many of my closest friends and family are artists / musicians, and almost everyone has lost jobs since. But lost opportunities aside, the current survival guide and strategy for me at least, has more to do with how we can further become mesra with one another, sustaining bodies through shared resources and developing new ecologies for our cyborgian futures. How can our machine-selves resuscitate our wetware, almost as if it were an overriding prompt to protect us, to care for us?
In one of my most recent performances, I did a live streamed event from National Gallery Singapore, where I reflected on the kind of isolation and distance most of us are experiencing, and how our machine-selves are taking over more diligently, if I’m being optimistic, to allow us a moment to hibernate. As always, I suppose my question is never about where we go from here, but how else can we move away from where we are to conceive and build new fluid futures and normalcy to care for one another, between and across (machine-physical) selves?
