On Thursday, July 25, the Šiuolaikinio Meno Centras [Contemporary Art Centre] in Vilnius, Lithuania will reopen after a three-year-long renovation project. As part of the ten-day long “Days of Re-Entry” programme, the CAC is presenting an audio exhibit entitled “Memories of the Walls,” by Antanas Dombrovskij that will include sounds from past exhibits at the Centre. I am delighted that my 2016 piece Perkūnas [Thunder] will be included.
Strategically, I should launch into an explanation of Perkūnas now, but I am a historian as well as an artist and context is important. The CAC building was originally constructed in 1968 by Vytautas Čekanauskas (1930-2010) as the Exhibition Palace, a consciously western-looking structure, inspired by Alvar Aalto’s Wolfsburg Cultural Centre. At the time of Soviet (Russian) occupation, Lithuanian architects like Čekanauskas deliberately looked westward to emphasize that this country, too, was western, not eastern.* Looking westward was a risky act that could have brought down retribution from Moscow if the winds changed, but Lithuanian modernism frequently won national awards from Soviet authorities due to its relative quality (Čekanauskas’s Lazdynai residential district, inspired by Candilis, Josic, Woods’s scheme for Toulouse-le-Mirail won the Lenin Prize in 1974) and was showcased in various forms for export to the West (this inspired my alternative history of Lithuanian art in the 1970s in my art project “On An Art Experiment in Soviet Lithuania”). During the next twenty-three years, under the aegis of the Lithuanian Museum of Art, the Exhibition Palace hosted various art exhibits including a 1988 exhibit of my father’s paintings, one of the initial firsthand encounters that Lithuanians would have had with modern postwar art from the West. With the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union—in many ways precipitated by the actions of the Lithuanian people and Sajudis movement—a period of uncertainty and experimentation took hold in the country and Kestutis Kuizinas, a young art historian, made his case to the culture ministry that the building should be a European-style Kunsthalle and, with the backing of the Ministry of Culture, established the Contemporary Art Centre. Since my first visit to post-Soviet Lithuania in 1998, when I met Kestutis, I’ve been back many times. No institution elsewhere consistently shows work as interesting to me as the CAC. Architect Valdas Ozarinkas (1961-2014) served as associate director and designer. In 2000, on the occasion of the building being used to discuss the Lithuanian accession to NATO, Ozarinskas renovated the building with a neo-brutalist approach that I wrote about in my piece on his work as a “Stalker” architect. Over the last three years, the building has been renovated extensively by architects Audrius and Marina Bučas, who once worked with Valdas as well as with Gintaras Kuginys on both the 2000 Hannover Pavilion—a building that shocked the West with its forward-looking design—and the National Art Gallery in Vilnius. The goal is to honor Čekanauskas’s original design as well as Ozarinskas’s renovation while bringing the building infrastructurally up-to-date, fitting for a new world in which Lithuania is no longer a poor country on the periphery of Europe but is one of the most economically dynamic as well as politically and technologically advanced countries on the continent (to my Lithuanian friends: yes, yes, I know, but just think of what it’s like elsewhere, like in Germany or the UK, let alone the US).
During “Days of Re-Entry,” the CAC will remain empty so that visitors can experience the newly renovated structure. An approximately hour-long soundtrack will play audio tracks and sound projects including my Perkūnas, but also Artūras Raila, Arturas Bumšteinas, Valdas Ozarinskas, Lina Lapelytė and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Liam Gillick, Monolake, Jurgis Mačiūnas, and others. So not all of Perkūnas will be on display, only the sound, or—if you will, its ghost.
But what was Perkūnas? Simply enough, it was a construction that took the form of a 16m x 16m wind tunnel made of 1m square ducts, elevated 1m in the air on metal legs. A computer (a Raspberry Pi 3, to be precise) running a program I wrote monitored the number of Wi-Fi clients in the area—smartphones, tablets, gaming platforms, etc.—and, as the number of devices increased, the volume of sound increased as well. The code I wrote was based on open-source network monitoring software that constantly “sniffed” the air for efforts by Wi-Fi clients to connect to access points. There was no gimmicky need to log into any network in the gallery, on the contrary, this software sought out the constant, animal-like pleas that our devices make to connect to networks that they have already been connected to (every minute or so, your smartphone calls out for its home network, as well as others in its list of known networks). This was linear to the number of people in the room, but it didn’t have to be, as I’ll explain.
I had free reign for my exhibit and, before I settled on the idea of sniffing for Wi-Fi clients, I wanted something responsive, originating in the architecture of the museum, both the CAC building and the large architectural projects that Ozarinskas created for it but also the architecture of art museums as a whole, but how? As I was wandering around the basement of Dia: Beacon, I realized that outsized ventilation units were ubiquitous in museums.
Originally, I planned to send a control voltage from the Raspberry Pi doing the processing to a control unit for an HVAC fan, but the fan that arrived was undersized and at full speed, did not produce enough sound, so I resorted to a backup, synthesizing the sound with a small modular synthesizer, the control voltage now producing a corresponding change in volume. Technicians cut open the ductwork and installed two 3,000-watt P/A monitors originally belonging to Ozarinskas into the structure.
Perkūnas was part of a Network Architecture Lab show entitled “Detachment” (perhaps in retrospect, Disconnection might have been a better term) in which I asked how the mobile devices that had recently become ubiquitous were changing our relationship with both each other and the world around us. At the time, it was shocking to me that we underwent this change with barely any philosophical reflection of note. Eight years later, little has changed. If anything, our continued blithe ignorance of the massive change in human experience is even more shocking.
After centuries of increasing focus on materialism, we have fully re-entered the medieval world of spirits. We gesture into the air, communicating with unseen ghosts. One of my earliest memories is seeing a man talking to himself on a street and asking my mother, a social worker, what he was doing. She explained that he was mentally ill. Today, I live on a street that middle-aged women like to walk on for exercise. Their constitutionals are typically solitary, but half the time, these women are yelling into the air about some personal slight, some minor issue, or another. They don’t live in my world as much as in a Borgeseque city in which nobody communicates in person, only via signals in Ether, even as, perhaps, they unwittingly walk past each other. Perhaps, some of them are indeed insane, perhaps there is no one on the other end, but it hardly matters. Who would know? Perhaps I should print catherine leigh schmidt and Max Fowler’s brilliant, therapeutic Disconnection Practices pamphlet to distribute in a kiosk to improve their mental health.
Perkūnas was made in Lithuania, but it was constructed in 2016, during the Brexit vote and the U.S. election. Like cigarette smokers in the 1960s, we knew that social media was killing us, but we were already addicted to it. The spread of social media to smartphones increased our addiction, literally changing our brains by accustoming us to constant dopamine hits. Psychological warfare groups swiftly took advantage of this, notably, Cambridge Analytica and the Russian Internet Research Agency, spreading targeted political posts and disinformation to further extreme Right wing positions that would, notably, aid Russian interests.
Unlike the didactic (self-proclaimed and pseudo) “political” art common in the last decade, Perkūnas was apolitical. There was no commentary one way or another, but what was remarkable was that in the three months during which the project ran, individuals studiously ignored the wall text that if Wi-Fi on such devices was turned off, the project would not register their presence.
On opening night, the sound was deafening as the masses of people led to an equivalent number of devices and the movement of air by the P/A system caused the ductwork of Perkūnas to vibrate at infrasonic frequencies, overlaying a sound much like a passing freight train onto the now-hurricane-like sound of rushing air. Individuals nevertheless were unwilling to turn off their Wi-Fi, even though, likely as not, they were not connected to any network, even as they held their fingers in their ears.
The reactions to the sound of Perkūnas were interesting. Usually, the sound was a relatively low-decibel brown noise. Some security guards were upset about the sound and asked to be relieved from their duties. Others asked to be assigned to Perkūnas because they found the sound meditative. For those who haven’t been to Vilnius, it is a remarkably quiet city, much quieter than Montclair, New Jersey, let alone New York or most other European cities.
Translating Perkūnas as thunder is accurate but reductive: in Lithuania, Perkūnas is the sky god, second in the pantheon of the Gods after Dievas, the creator. Lithuania is the last country in Europe to have been Christianized (1387) and the area that my family hails from, Samogitia, was the last area of the country to be Christianized (1413), although in truth, that process wasn’t completed for centuries. My father (born 1917) was of the same generation as famed Samogitian anthropologist Marija Gimbutas and both recalled encountering pagan rituals such as setting plates at the table for ancestors and leaving saucers of milk for snakes. For our purposes, it is worth noting that Perkūnas, in Lithuanian mythology, was known for his battles with Velnias, the devil god of the underworld, who would deceive people with promises of wealth, success, and beauty, much as the social media devil does to us today.
Perkūnas came at a particular point in my life, soon after a show at the Museum of Modern Art and after the research program at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning was shuttered due to financial stresses at the school. I was exiting academia after twenty-five years. My last years of teaching felt increasingly futile. Addicted to their mobile devices, students were unable to read even the shortest texts and expected praise for work that only five years earlier would have been considered unpassable, something I repeatedly confirmed with other faculty from disciplines as varied as law and physics. Bureaucracy was on the rise. I watched as the number of academic “support” staff doubled every decade as conditions for faculty degraded. Having had success in the museal, I sought to bring Perkūnas to the US and Western Europe.
But, I underestimated the obsession with pseudo-politics that took over institutions at that point as well as the depression I fell into—no doubt created in large part by my own addiction to social media—during the Trumpenjahre. Like Diocletian with his cabbages, I started gardening, but this turned into my work with native plants, a project that has required me to completely retrain myself, the very sort of thing that artists, historians, and synthesists live for.
I don’t know if I would make Perkūnas again today. My commitment is to real ecological change, as opposed to the sort of academic lip service such as roof gardens, the ubiquitous bricks grown from mushrooms, or native plants put in pots to die on gallery walls. I know that the ductwork from this project was recycled, but even then, the amount of energy embedded in the process seems like a problem to me today.
Today, at the CAC, you can hear a ghost of a piece, haunted by the optimism that art could make a difference in our relationship with technology. We have now had another eight years with mobile networked computers. It seems that we haven’t learned anything yet.
* In the mid-2010s there were revisionist suggestions that this wasn’t resistance but rather projection and academicist anachronism. But these academics generally have little connection to the actual situation, which was hardly academic.