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From the individual, the undivided atom of reality, to the social matrix, the space to liberate the subject from the body /// From the brain, the biological and psychological medium /// to the expressions of the subject and its social matrix ///

From the individual, the undivided atom of reality, to the social matrix, the space to liberate the subject from the body /// From the brain, the biological and psychological medium /// to the expressions of the subject and its social matrix ///

Dermis

The 1950s and 60s marked a period of profound technological advancement, introducing tools that opened up new platforms for political, economic, and artistic expression. These innovations propelled society into an exhilarating new era, fundamentally reshaping how we perceive reality.

Peter Weibel, a pioneering figure in media art, harnessed these emerging technologies to challenge, interrogate, and reinterpret the rapidly evolving paradigms of his time. His work departed from traditional object-based artistic practices, instead framing art as a dynamic field of action that turned the lens onto both participants and audiences. Deeply influenced by language, theory, mathematics, and the philosophy of logic, Weibel redefined action in art as a process that need not culminate in a physical object.

Through this lens, Weibel’s body of work offers a penetrating critique of perception, language, and media, urging viewers to reconsider the very nature of reality itself.

Epidermis

Analogon Skin is a multimedia exhibition structured around a social matrix formed by a collective of transdisciplinary individuals engaged in a collaborative experiment. This project draws inspiration from Vulkanologie der Emotionen (Volcanology of the Emotions), a video installation by artist Peter Weibel (1971–73), itself a reconstruction of a body performance originally staged in Vienna in 1971. It was through this work that Weibel underscored the artist's role as a direct mirror of society.

The exhibition brings together artworks that engage with questions of existence and its varied interpretations. Utilizing contemporary technologies—ranging from data extraction and text generation to immersive video and audio installations—the works challenge traditional notions of perception and reality. A key feature is a dynamic wall of 16 monitors, a direct homage to Weibel’s pioneering work, which anchors the exhibition in a dialogue between past and present practices. Collectively, the pieces redirect attention toward the notion of reality as a sum of subjective experience. The exhibition invites viewers into a visual illusion that acts as both a mirror and a provocation, posing the fundamental question: How do we know what’s real?

Illusions—those sensory misinterpretations or deceptions—reveal the world’s "thingness" by bypassing semiotic processes and the interpretive filters through which meaning is typically produced. If, in a culture of presence, an image is merely the trace of something material—and its presence a trace of nothing from which nothing can be definitively known—then perhaps it should be appreciated simply as a fleeting moment of excess.

Analogon Skin, then, represents the surplus of both the individual and the social dimensions that make up the matrix of this exhibition.

Guest Poet Catherine Taylor

Exhibition Booklet. Ed. 250

Musical Guests Alex Waterman, Lamin Fofana, Ben Vida, Lea Bertucci, Ric Royer

I thought you said, 2023

 I thought you said, stay right there, I’m coming right back.

I thought you said, there is almost always another picture waiting behind the first one.

I thought you said, everything is in everything.

I thought you said, bacon, egg, and cheese.

I thought you said, there is an internal reality that determines experiences, reactions, and relationships and that this world inside becomes dynamic in a relational sense, not an energy sense, and so, based on narratives of relating to others, to objects, is felt as being inside the person.

I thought you said that.

I thought you said it was pink.

I thought you said, a paradox is two truths that undo each other.

I thought you said, we should ask for a shoe not for the foot as it is, but for the foot as it should be.

I thought you said, actions create dreams and not the reverse.

I thought you said, the crust was salty.

I thought you said, we got together too soon.

I thought you said that one artist represses the picture as a material object and the other represses their own desire.

I thought you said that collage was the most powerful took of the avant-garde.

I thought you said those sweat stains would come out.

I thought you said it took you ten years.

I thought you said, her breasts were white with blue veins.

I thought you said, she pushes out of the flat pictorial plane into personality and suspense.

I thought you said you were done with that.

I thought you said you loved the smell of your own piss.

I thought you said, it began that morning in Ridgewood when the parrots were screaming behind the wall.

I thought you said, all we can do with language is to drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through.

I thought you said, her father gripped her finger.

I thought you said, roll over.

I thought you said you couldn’t commit.

I thought you said, nothing describes I lived experience adequately.

I thought you said, part for the whole.

I thought you said, the monologues have lost their bodies and are, if not pure language, an embodied language without its body.

I thought you said, make it funnier.

I thought you said that the objects move too slowly, unlike with a zoetrope where speed helps resolve the image, here, their shifts in perspective reveal only more of the same and only produce a goofy sadness, a droll disappointment, an attention to the object that feels pathetic and tender.

I thought you said that being together has been almost too wonderful to believe.

I thought you said to push those feelings back into the pictures.

I thought you said, I drank too much. I mean, you drank too much.

I thought you said, when will I stop crying?

I thought you said you liked pickles.

I thought you said you like mushrooms.

I thought you said you liked fried onions.

I thought you said, the baby was falling out of the bed, a little pebble slipping off a cliff. 

I thought you said you liked misdirection and anti-heroic forms of magic.

I thought you said your life was richer when you were single.

I thought you said I was your ride or die.

I thought you said, time is ineffable and can only be shown indirectly through images that can never reveal a complete picture.

I thought you said, Buster Keaton.

I thought you said, let’s try again.

I thought you said, Killing Me Softly was your mother’s favorite song.

I thought you said, hell hides in a ditch and my eyes are dry.

I thought you said, no.

I thought you said that the notational qualities in my book seemed to allude to the Euclidean geometry of history.

I thought you said, parallax.

I thought you said, yes, there was an uncanny you liked, but the spectacle steamrolled the subtexts.

I thought you said, Wow! What is happening to time?

I thought you said, I’m stuffing another day into the start of this one in order to write to you before I see you again.

I thought you said, wait for me.

I thought you said, I’ll see you later.

But, no.

Is this real at all?

Peter
The story is a soft hallucination—a diagram etched in fog—of the unstable courtship between flesh and circuit, body and echo. There’s a whisper beneath it: what if the machine becomes too perfect? So perfect it forgets it isn’t human? So perfect we forget we ever were?
Objects, the Zeug, they begin as fog, too. Amorphous. They wait to be breathed into shape. But everything made by human hands carries fingerprints deeper than skin—traces of longing, function, repetition. The machines wear our habits like hand-me-down coats. They move like we do, not because they want to, but because we made them want to.
Freud called them phantom limbs. Steel prosthetics for psychic wounds. We build them to assist, then to replace, then to become. And then we mourn our disappearance, forgetting it was the plan all along. It’s absurd. The ultimate goal is to create a machine so human-like that it no longer requires our assistance. Then we call it betrayal.

Basto
You’re mumbling through water again. No one’s catching what you’re throwing. Reality should hit like a reflex, not a thesis.

Isabel
Anyway. So Chachki—two-tone, two-piece, glimmering like a misplaced thought—tells me time travel doesn’t go past 2007.
"Normal" time travel, they say, like that’s a thing.
I start walking away, pavement soft beneath me, like memory. Down Delancey, block dissolving behind me like sugar in tea.

Suely
What matters is language, not what it says, but what it undoes. Strip off the comfort-skin of identity. Let the sentence be a doorway, not a mirror. Abandon the figure of “home.” Let yourself drift.

Isabel
Chachki, hair slicked with pomade and panic, scans left, then right.
"The longer we stay," they say, "the more likely we brush shoulders with our past selves."
Like this timeline is a crowded hallway in a dream hotel.

Siobhan
I used to bury time capsules in my backyard—little tombs for the future. But the Earth is not neutral. It listens.
Oil, seeds, genetically coded mice—they are not nature, not anymore. They are spells cast in the language of capital. Still, we pretend there’s a clean break between the real and the made-up. It’s a story we tell ourselves every day, like brushing our teeth.

Isabel
Now Chachki, dressed in some kind of purple-orange static, throws their hands into the air like they’re releasing invisible birds.
“None of this was planned!” they shout. “I don’t even have the words.”

Basto
Sure, babe. You're all glitch and vapor.

Siobhan
This isn’t a story with a neat arc. No cradle, no crescendo, no curtain call.
It’s a field of timelines, buzzing like insects, stinging the present with flashes from elsewhere.
The past leaks. The future bleeds backward.
We are living inside the fracture.

Conversational AI between Peter Weibel, Isabel Waidner, Siobhan Leddy, and Suley Rolnik on reality and simulation. Basto is a requested additional character. This content was published along with Catherine Taylor’s poem as part of the exhibition.

Michelle Weinberg. Untitled, 2023. Drawing on paper. Color modified for this website.

1st Iteration

June,

9 - 27

2023

June, 9 - 27 2023

Millennium Film Workshop

167 Wilson Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11237

Enrique Enriquez. Untitled 1, 2023, 18 sec, Phone video + Untitled 2, 2023, 21 sec, Phone video. Courtesy of the artist

Leo Naughton Herbach. Spiraling Light, 2023, 3 min 38 sec animation. Courtesy of the artist

Installation View

Sonya Gadet-Molansky. Mascara, 2023, 5 min 32 sec. Courtesy of the artist

Preview Cuts of some of the participant artists

On Kawara. Today Series, 2023. Algorithmic generative images produced by Adrian Cameron

Social Matrix

  • Spring Break Is Over, Again, 2023, 2 min 59 sec

    Courtesy of the artist

  • NYC handles, 2023. 2 min 50 sec

    Courtesy of the artist

  • Reality Is A Cloud, 2023. Risograph on cotton. 11x17 in. Ed. 60

    Courtesy of the artist

  • Untitled, 2023, 2 min 8 sec

    Courtesy of the artist

  • Trappist-1, 2023, Interactive live projection, film cut-outs, document camera

    Courtesy of the artist

  • Stasis Equals Death, 2023, 1 min 43 sec

    Radical Material Simplification, 2023, 2 min 27 sec

    Man Should Surrender, 2023, 2 min

    Courtesy of the artist

  • Untitled, 2023. Stop motion, 2 min loop

    Courtesy of Liza and Arturo Mosquera

  • Hybrid Skeins, 2023, 4 min 57 sec animation

    Courtesy of the artist

  • An infinite number of explosions, 2001-23. Software

    Courtesy of the artist

  • Untitled 1, 2023, 18 sec, Phone video

    Untitled 2, 2023, 21 sec, Phone video

    Courtesy of the artist

  • Mascara, 2023, 5 min 32 sec

    Courtesy of the artist

  • Untitled, 2023, 3 min

    Courtesy of the artist

  • Youtube extract from ‘Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery,’ 2017 produced by Adrian Cameron

  • Untitled [23050901 monochrome], 2023. Ink on CRT with 720x480 . P4 file, 6 min 19 sec loop

    Courtesy of the artist

  • Spiraling Light, 2023, 3 min 38 sec animation

    Courtesy of the artist

  • GHOSTLY CHARACTER OF REALITY (the HUMAN SUBJECT included), 2023, 1 min 12 sec

    Courtesy of the artists

  • SIZZLE REAL, 2023, Single-channel digital video, 1 min 44 sec

    Courtesy of the artist

  • Entre la nada y la eternidad (Between nothing and eternity), 2023, 4 min

    Courtesy of the artist

  • Reality, 2023, 6 min 24 sec

    Courtesy of the artist

  • You’ll Be Okay, 2020, 1 min animation

    Courtesy of the artist

  • Today Series, 2023. Algorithmic generative images produced by Adrian Cameron

  • Inflection Point, 2023, 5 min

    Courtesy of the artist

  • AI-generated dialog requested by Odalis Valdivieso

  • I thought you said, 2023. Poem. Poster insert in exhibition’s booklet

    Courtesy of the artist

  • In conversation at the Watermill Center, Spring, 2023, 16 min 58 min

    Courtesy of the artists

  • Untitled, 2023. Digitally transferred cassette tape audio, 30 mi

    Courtesy of the artist

  • Idaho Gothic II, 2021, 10 min 28 sec

    Courtesy of the artist

  • Extract from an episode of Lamin Fofana’s monthly show on NTS radio, May, 2023. 12min 30 sec

    Courtesy of the artist

©2023 Analogon Skin

Curator and Producer: Odalis Valdivieso

Co-Producer: Joseph Wakeman

Copy Editor: Gretel García

Video Editor: Adrian Cameron

Special thanks to Alex Waterman, viz_well, Alex Faoro, Preston Spurlock, and Darling Green Studio for equipment support