To See a World Through a Grain of Salt brings together a series of works that form part of a complex re-examination of human history, entitled Untertage, that Troika has developed over the past 3 years.

The focus of the narrative shifts away from a human protagonist and towards a non-human actor who, here, is devised as the real hero of an aeonian drama of world domination.¹

Like a work of theatre, Untertage is envisioned as an eco-systemic fiction in several chapters. To See a World Through a Grain of Salt, its prologue, is staged at OMR and is the third solo exhibition of the London based art collective at the gallery. 

The works in the exhibition contemplate the salt crystal as a conscious entity and the driving force behind a number of inventions and technologies, without which human civilisation would not have developed as we know it, as well as what this progression might hold for the future.²

In Evolutionary Composite, the artists juxtapose humankind’s earliest tool – a lumpen bi-face made from flint – with a state-of-the-art silicon wafer. Both are made of the same material, refined over 3.3 million years, as if Salt through its own agency has forever driven human progress.

A series of paintings entitled Irma Watched Over by Machines imagines the gaze of a yet-to-be conscious machine on our contemporary world. Composed in 48 shades of red, green and blue, they depict palm trees thrashing in hurricane gales as painterly rendition of digital images that were collected from publicly accessible webcam databases, CCTVs and drones. 

Here, the saline eyes of the machine, enlivened, witness the downfall of organic life.

Emulating what is referred to as the Bayer filter – a pixel pattern that is the building stone of any raw image captured by electronic cameras – these images provide a sense of what a distributed, omni-sentient being with 250 million networked eyes may witness on first awakening.

Troika’s Solid State Fiction, an alternate future scenario, presents a new kind of Eden, depicting images of a world of beautiful inorganic chemical formations, imagined as the final consecration of Salt as a mastermind. 

A world where the mineral accomplished its ambition, finally imposing its inorganic rules over Earth – a genesis moment for whatever is to come. 

These submerged, soupy landscapes, installed as flowing silk veils, look like painterly fantasies and are the result of chemical reactions. When dissolved in sodium silicate, metal salts can be observed to grow as if they were alive or imbued with a life force.³ This phenomenon that already fascinated alchemists, provides a final twist in this alternate reading of history and points towards the final supremacy of life above the crystalline order of Salt.

To See a World Through a Grain of Salt ponders questions around the driving forces of technological advancement, the possibility of non-human and material agency, and is Troika’s investigation into the fictional origins and future of an anthropocentric world in which technological advancement and growth is the status quo.

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Quotes:

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Untertage / General

The focus of the narrative shifts away from a human protagonist and towards a non-human actor who, here, is devised as the real hero of an aeonian drama of world domination.’

- Eva Wilson

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Troika have decided not to make an exhibition about salt (the hero of the aforementioned drama), but for, with, and by the chemical compound. The crystal takes centre stage as the true agent of cultural evolution, the critical component for a number of tools without which human civilisation would not have developed as we know it.’

- Eva Wilson

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Troika’s portrayal or vision of an empire of salt is not a benign one. Steeped in dysphoric (or is it rational) anxiety about a not-too-distant future in which our home planet has become unliveable, Troika have constructed a paranoid alternate reading of an all-too-apparent reality – namely that humans have potentially orchestrated their own demise – by retro-casting their protagonist into the role of a genocidal, ecocidal, and holocidal mastermind, the creator of a new epoch of anorganic intelligence and synthetic biology after all organic life has ceased to exist.’

- Eva Wilson

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Accommodating two hundred and fifty-six shades of the colours red, green and blue as seen by a computer, a salt fountain, chemical gardens, and soft toys shaped like mineral growths, Troika’s project Untertage comes together as an ecosystemic fiction.’

- Eva Wilson

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‘What if you started thinking of salt in term of its own entity slowly using humans to get out of the earth, take shape, then acquire consciousness (AI) to finally come to dominate the planet and populate it with its own kind?'

– Troika 

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'Untertage, beneath the day. Deep inside Earth’s crust, Salt was fomenting. He couldn’t bear the sight of life above, its chaotic luxuriance, its purposeless mutability. He despised its transience and haphazardness.’

–  Troika 

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‘In common usage, salt is an uncountable noun. We only have a word for the mass, rather than the individual parts. Moreover, it is an uncountable noun that has no definitive or generally used partitive noun: a pinch, a lot, a spoon, a cup – take your pick, there is no definitive means of separating the part from the whole.’ 

- Mark Rappolt 

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‘Down the road from Hallstatt is the city of Salzburg (the salt fortress), home of the Von Trapp family in the 1965 film The Sound of Music. But before they were alive with the sound of music, the hills were alive with the sound of salt mining. An industry that, in the area around Hallstatt, dates back to prehistoric times. Salt is the reason people settled there. It was in the structure of the landscape and now the landscape has been labelled with it too. It made Hallstatt the centre of an international trade route. It was the point from which lines of exchange spread out. Not just for salt, but for salt-related products, such as speck, too. This is how culture develops. Today the hills are alive to the sound of archaeologists’ trowels.’

- Mark Rappolt 

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‘But in all this there’s a juxtaposition of truths: a story materials tell and the various stories we tell ourselves about them. Truth vs culture. Suggestions offered by what we see and the associations we make with what we see. All of which we rely on to describe or negotiate our relationship with these objects. And perhaps this is the real story of art: it’s got nothing to do with artworks and everything to do with ourselves. Our desire to make them a part of our world before we realise, with horror, that we are merely a part of theirs.’ 

- Mark Rappolt

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What makes these objects intriguing is their apparent ambivalence about the power dynamics about this relationship and the general the direction in which it flows. Like all good art they hover somewhere between a suggestion and a fact. 

- Mark Rappolt 

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Solid State Fiction

Representing a kind of new Eden, their photographic images of the beautiful ‘Solid State Fiction’ are installed as flowing silk veils, a curtain call for us maybe, but a genesis moment for whatever is to come. These submerged, soupy gardens that look like painterly fantasies are the result of chemical reactions. When dissolved in sodium silicate, metal salts can be observed to grow as if they were alive or imbued with a life force, a phenomenon that fascinated alchemists and begs the question: is growth equal to life? With organic life out of the picture, do we need to adjust our narrative focus one more time? 

- Eva Wilson

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Evolutionary Composites

‘Although at first glance it might not look it. One element sophisticated the other crude. One smooth and thin, the other angular and lumpen. One the produced by the mechanisms of a factory, the other by the mechanics of the Earth (and the mechanics of one stone hammering into another, with the aid of some sweaty human individual). One brand new, the other ancient. Opposites you might think. But, then again, most of the time appearances give little clue as to how one thing relates to the other. You need to look at the underlying structures. Both are made of materials derived from the silicate family. Two tools, separated by thousands of years in terms of their manufacture. One for computing one for stabbing, cutting and bashing. Both at the technological cutting edge of their times. Juxtaposed rather than conjoined. A rock trapped in a disco ball. A sample being transported from Mars. It looks at once museological and futuristic.’ 

- Mark Rappolt

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