Rhonda Holberton
“My interdisciplinary art practice illuminates the politics of the corporeal body navigating through virtual space. Recent projects utilize networked VR designed to trigger subtle interactions of electrons between biological and digital systems through reiki, a speculative cosmetic company whose mission is focused on the potential of products to create distributed performative action ritualizing the Anthropocene, and collaborative image making with Neural Networks.
My work hijacks existing technologies to reveal invisible histories and make space in the ordinary for the creation of alternative narratives. The installations, videos, and sculpture I create are often results of experiments using scientific methodologies that return metaphysical hypotheses rather than empirical data. These methods have included everything from stardust harvesting to digging holes on the remediated landscapes of decommissioned military bases.
We are living through a crisis of reality. The collective reality-making produced by digital platforms support parallel but rarely overlapping realities. At the same time, the material environment and physical bodies living within it are approaching a critical moment of climate-induced destabilization that can only be mitigated by collective action. The solutions to existential problems like these must come from existential analytical frameworks.
I use materials and platforms that physically connect human bodies through technology, highlighting they ways signals of digitally engineered worlds have physical ramifications; how the extraction of materials from the environment that support technology are destabilizing the plant; and how we might write better rules for digital platforms that consider the external effects on all bodies and respect the most vulnerable ones.”
-Rhonda Holberton
NEBULA SERIES
Using techniques developed by NASA I collected the ‘stardust’ from material that fell to earth from the comet Swift-Tuttle. Every orbit brings the comet closer to the Earth. Swift Tuttle has been described as ‘the single most dangerous object known to humanity.’ I made paintings made from material I collected on microscope slides. Each painting contains cosmic & terrestrial material and is constantly evolving while in contact with Earth’s air in a process of oxidization; giving the work both a life and a kind of eventual death.
NEBULA XXIII, Stardust suspended in Acrylic Medium on Glass, 1x3 in, 2011
NEBULA XVI, Stardust suspended in Acrylic, Medium on Glass, 1x3 in, 2011
NEBULA I, Stardust suspended in Acrylic, Medium on Glass, 1x3 in, 2011
LONG EXPOSURE SERIES
The long exposure photographs were taken from a live animation using Google Earth. The choreography documents the series of scars in the earth left by nuclear detonations within The Nevada Test Site. The camera zooms and pans, tracing the temporo-geographic record beginning with ‘Abel’ in 1951 and ending with the last US nuclear test, Divider in 1992. The camera faces the computer screen while I navigate through each series of the nuclear weapons test. The number of detonations in each Series determines the length of exposure, approaching total whiteout at two minutes. The length of exposure ranges from under thirty seconds for the Ranger Series 1951 that saw five detonations to four minutes for the Storax Series 1962-1966.
BUSTER JANGLE 1951 7 DETONATIONS (2 CRATERING), Long Exposure Series, Archival, Pigment Prints, 24x32 in, 2011
PHALANX 1982-1983 19 DETONATIONS, Long Exposure Series, Archival Pigment Prints, 24x32 in, 2011
QUICKSILVER 1978-79 10 DETONATIONS, Long Exposure Series, Archival Pigment Prints, 24x32 in, 2011
DISPLACED HOLES SERIES
The Displaced Hole series consist of castings made from a series of holes I dug at sites that trace a history of nuclear weaponry research. Sites include Sandia/Lawrence Livermore Labs, Lockheed Martin, Mare Island Naval Shipyard, and the San Francisco Naval Shipyard, and the Salton Sea Military Test base.
DISPLACED HOLES, Polyurethane Foam, Plaster, Graphite, 39 x 39 x 11 in, 2012
INDEX FORMULATIONS
INDEX produces cosmetic formulations made for cyborgs living in the age of the anthropocene. The marketing copy draws from language used in radical political resistance movements, climate change science, and speculative fiction that leans into aspects of ingredients that can be read from many lenses: underground mycelial communication and transgendered algae to name a few examples. The project is a vessel for collective distributed performance intended physicalize the collapse of the biological human body into geologic time scales.
Q & A with Joshua Moreno & Rhonda Holberton
JM: Rhonda, where are you from originally, and can any connections be made to your place of origin and the ideas your exploring in your practice?
RH: I grew up in a suburb of DC. At the time, the area of Northern Virginia called the Dulles Corridor was rapidly developing; something like the Silicon Valley of the east coast. When I left in 2000, tech companies were populating newly built corporate campuses along the freeway between DC and the US Intelligence Agency offices near Dulles Airport. These offices were filled with government contractors working for tech companies building military defence systems and providing massive data analytics for government intelligence. My dad worked as a computer programmer for one of these companies after working for the Pentagon. While he couldn’t tell the family what he did, we had satellite images in our house and he once told me in the early 90s that there were cameras on satellites in space that could read license plates. A fact that now seems pedestrian, but at the time it made a radical impression on me. Today, massive rectangular buildings stretch for miles along what I remember as farmlands. These windowless buildings make up the largest data center market in the United States. I originally moved to San Francisco for the counterculture and the easy access to diverse wilderness. As my practice has developed it’s focused on the way technology shapes the material world & the intersection of capital interests & computation. Many of my projects utilize technology as medium to reconcile the individual biological body with geologic time; something I attribute to my early exposure to computation and witnessing a radically changing landscape from an early age
JM: When looking at earlier examples of your work, there seems to be a fascination with relationships between microcosms and macrocosms that exists within our universe. What interests you about these relationships to scale?
RH: I’ve always been fascinated by changes in scale and the way it impacts observable phenomena. At the root of our knowledge systems is the biological body; it determines how far we can see and how small we can see. This human scaled sensory system coupled with a drive to make sense of the world resulted in beautiful creativity across cultures; thousands of cosmologies trying to make sense of what we could perceive. Advancements in data storage (paper records) and optics expanded the perimeter of the single biological body; paper increased recorded observations across time and lens technologies reached out across the visible universe of the heavens and down into cellular phenomena inside our bodies. As I’m writing this I can’t help but think of the Eames Powers of 10 film:
Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only as a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward- into the hand of the sleeping picnicker- with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0)
This cinematic exercise mirrors a trajectory outlined by media theorist, Paul Virillio, in the book War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. In it,
Virilio traces a co-production of military and cinematic techniques and technologies, from the mass production of aerial photography and cinematic propaganda to modern flight simulators and weapons that “open their eyes” (e.g. laser guided missiles). All of this falls under the logistics of perception – more than just prosthetic or removed from the body, vision is the result of a detailed coordination of complex operations, a technological exercise that requires planning, material support, engineering, and so on. (http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/blog/2008/03/10/notes-on-paul-virilios-war-and-cinema/)
These two perspectives cut across my research interests in scale, power, technology, material transformation and the body. In a recent performance, Dust to Dust, I pan for gold in the California landscape and raise a generation of mosquitos in my studio. Both exercises are an attempt to physically insert myself into what eco-philosopher Timothy Morton would call hyperobjects (objects too large or distributed in time to be fully perceived by a single human). In the extraction of gold I engage the capitalocene by way of California's history with ruses and bubbles. In raising mosquitos I’m engaging an index of the anthropocene in a performance with the mosquito; a species that becomes a new threat with expanded territory due to climate change. Both performances engaged in extraction at a very small scale as a way to engage a much larger system.
JM: How, if at all, has your approach to artmaking shifted during COVID? Can any of the things we are facing as a society in result of COVID be connected to ideas you’re pursuing in your practice?
RH: It has, very much so. Since the viral outbreak; I’ve been thinking deeply about the kind of practice I want. One of the ways I’ve thought through this is through a new graduate course I’m developing/teaching focused on alternative exhibitions. We’ve looked at everything from the artist run spaces in 70s SOHO, to online/virtual platforms, to contemporary collectives like San Francisco based Heavy Breathing who utilize the body as a site for speculative curation. The conversations I’ve have with curators of alternative exhibitions and with my students about the relationship between arts intuitions and extractive/hyper accumulated capital have been extraordinarily grounding.
Before the shutdown I started engaging in larger interdisciplinary collaborative works. I wanted to pursue collaborative public-engagement projects that use my skills to amplify other voices; (1) a critical mapping project illuminating stories from San Jose’s underrepresented residents, (2) a project that reimagines congress replaced by AI and extends voting rights to non-human entities (plants, air, etc), and (3) a project with the Japanese American Museum using Augmented Reality to highlight hidden histories.
My personal practice is quite speculative, making it hard to find direct institutional support (university grant committees understandably don’t know what to do with my proposals for things like VR Reiki). My public-facing collaborative proposals have been easier to fund and allow me to translate the abstract concepts from my studio into language that engages broader publics in the critical discourses and actions that I see as necessary for a habitable future on earth.