Portal2 (still)

This series encompasses a video installation designed for the multi-faceted LED screen at SODA in Manchester (UK) and an NFT. The piece comprises a frame-by-frame digital hand drawing based on an AI-generated image, thus fully integrating digital and analogue elements and highlighting the absurdity of the notion of a digital/physical dichotomy in this post-internet age.

This approach, fusing old and new technologies, is indicative of Louw’s practice, which typically utilises notionally ‘opposite’ strategies of algorithmic and digital processes on the one hand and a range of traditional textile, embroidery, and painting techniques on the other. Thus unifying art, craft, and tech methodologies, Louw’s work examines the overlapping impacts of technologies on society, culture, and environments.

Portal2 comes out of Louw’s latest body of work, incorporating embroidered paintings, drawings, digital and moving image works. The work explores the passage of time and how our experience of it can be disrupted or dislocated by sudden, profound transformations in technological, political, or environmental landscapes. In Louw’s thinking, portals exist around us at any given time, representing radical shifts in the material fabric of the lived experience. Functional wormholes, they transport us from one reality, or one state of being or understanding, to another.

Portals are antithetical to any notions of a chronological, objective idea of ‘progress’ along specific dimensions. Rather, they are connections between moments of possibility and alternate, parallel paths that are networked together in a quantum formation. They are interfaces between the past/present and the future; they are intersections that shunt us from one pathway to another, disrupting our sense of continuous, chronological momentum.

In this sense, Louw’s portals also contradict 21st-century futurist, accelerationist modes of thinking that view time and ‘development’ as inexorably speeding up towards some theoretical asymptote — or singularity. Accelerationism builds in powerlessness because it assumes that the path is pre-defined and the speed of travel always increasing, whereas portals represent myriad possible deviations from the current course; a decision tree of interdependent and infinitely layered speculative futures.

There is a relationship here to the idea of protopias or prototopias. Not a utopian perfection, an end-point or destination, but rather a continual improvement, a gradual movement towards something better (more wholesome, sustaining).

Using a portal, or even recognising one, requires us to let go of the dominant thought technologies from the 20th century, specific ideas of linear logic and categorisable hierarchies of knowledge. Portals require us to relearn thinking in a way that is both futuristic (quantum) and ancient (cosmological). On another plane, portals can show us the throughlines between vast, complex, seemingly disparate systems; the entanglements between nature, culture, and technology. This is a form of tentacular thinking, both in the way that it expands, connects, and grasps, but also in the sense that it embodies thinking in a multifaceted/multi-limbed manner; a gestalt; something more than the tyranny of centralised (Cartesian) intelligence.