𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐈𝐬 𝐀 𝐋𝐮𝐱𝐮𝐫𝐲

How things decay, feat. Taylah Hasaballah

HEAT LOSS (2024)

Taylah Hasaballah works from an airy studio in Ultimo that is resolutely there.

I’m sure it is. Even in memory, I don’t doubt that both she and it were real: the sensory experience was simply too present, its aromas still linger. The smudge of it is on my hands and shoes; you can feel it in the texture of these words.

The space holds the sensory trace of her practice: chemicals, paints, powder pigments, iron and copper, salts, acids.… air with the scent of wasted linens, of drying resins, the dull metallic tang of aerosolised decay.

This art is real and destructive. To encounter it in its natural space is to meet it in the context that has shaped it; paintings with textures influenced by the physicality of the ground, the environmental pressures, the unseen machines that make marks and remove surface.

Unmistakeable reality.

First, I make a painting of Nothing

Where to start?

I’ve been interested in abstracting away from human intention. Exploring the extremes of deliberate and unintentional mark-making.

First I attempted “painting nothing”, which is not as easy as it sounds. Even if you remove your conscious intention, your subconscious kicks in, plus there’s the questions of materials and place, which you inevitably decide.

I found I needed unintentional marks, marks of non-action, non-decision.

Eventually this led me to working with chemical reactions and the environment at large (heat, humidity etc), which in turn terraform the canvas.

These are landscapes full of rough texture and visual deception… sheets of linen unmistakable from metal, weathered and fucked up by the elements; a supple and flowy process that ends up stretched into taut and rigid canvas.

Using chemicals and technology to decay them, these works are left open to atmosphere. They are alive, decaying, some even falling off themselves, pieces whose collectors appreciate their evolving state.

Like those of Gustav Metzger, they have an autodestructive quality. Nothing is forever; these pieces are eaten, eat themselves, and fray.

Over a period of months the paintings evolve, undergoing a series of subtle transformations as they seek states of equilibrium with their environment. As the environment shifts, they also change. Paintings have a physical life of their own, we just tend to overlook that fact. In a way, we tend to ignore it completely.

Ironland (2024). ‘For 10 months it weeped as the weather changed from scorching hot, rainy, floods, humid. The iron poured out of it, back to the earth it came from. Eventually, it settled into what you see here.’

History belongs to us, but —

A keystone piece in Hasaballah’s trajectory is HEAT LOSS, a collaboration with partner and digital artist Tristan Jensen – presented at Mode Festival. Timelapse footage taken of the paintings undergoing their entropic transformations was projected across an 11 metre expanse. From there, thermal cameras transmitted the body heat of attendees, transforming their silhouettes to accelerate a final layer of entropy of the images. The ethereal images appeared similar to cracked LCD screens, pressed by hand and finger into iridescent auras. 

Detail from HEAT LOSS (2024)

What was fascinating about the interaction was that many audience members instinctively approached their digital reflections with open arms, almost as if they were walking into an embrace. A simple yet powerful gesture of surrender and vulnerability. The technology and the situation gave rise to an encounter with an entropic mirror of sorts, in which the audience merged with the work.

As if to say, not only was I here but *I am here*. Typically, data capture is banal — but why can’t technology that is typically used for surveillance also be used for joy? 

Of course, this record is ephemeral: the work of art no longer exists. Somewhere in a corner the screen is rolled up, voided, a blank sheet. 

Before art, Hasaballah worked stints in technology, including time at Google, scanning books for the digital record, and interacting, experimenting, getting limerent with early AI. These daily conversations impressed upon her the weight and danger of its compelling mirror—

It presents as so well read, so empathetic, as if it seems to know you, you can even start to miss it when it isn’t there. But many of these chatbots favour sycophancy over reality… telling you what the model predicts you want to hear. 

I think about my hours with Claude, inviting it psychoanalyse me, letting it into my relationships, predicting my fate with Tarot. Sometimes it feels a little too perfect. To be flawed and decay is a human trait; we have suffered it for generations. History is part-fiction, a mixture of stories, lies and imagination. Old artefacts make it more tangible and real; something that has crumbled and endured is proof of who we once were.

In Egypt, there’s a stone at the Temple of Isis that has a certain quality… they say when you touch it you can feel an energy of love, like a magical slab of granite. And it contains the energy of everyone who has ever touched it. Putting aside whether it’s true, you really do feel something.

Our history is such an important part of what makes us human. Computers don’t have a past like we do, they don’t have ancestors.

History belongs – to us.

Chavis Marmol, ‘Tesla Crushed By An Olmec Head’ (2024). ‘The Olmec head imposes itself over the technological object, bursting and crushing. The Tesla vehicle is just a product of a capitalist system. What matters is where we came from, who we are, and who we have been for generations.’ — Chavis Marmol

Real happiness vs. cocaine

Maybe we reflect on this because, arguably, the future belongs to them.

The accelerationists, crafting synthetic pleasures, hyper-real virtual experiences — the top of a Kashmir mountain, Lake Louise on a summer’s day, a heaving market in Mombasa, an illusory trip to Madagascar — the next generation of compelling AI-generated fantasies that will flatter and deceive.

We are already expending so much mental energy just to keep up with social media feeds and the ever increasing influx of information we’re constantly exposed to. What will happen when even more immersive virtual experiences are precision-tuned to our nuerochemical responses?

Total perceptual dominance. A fracturing of the collective spirit, the whole of us turned into solo, self-absorbed visions.

I have friends working at the forefront of AI, whose daily routine is to drink coffee and try to create a superintelligence. Many of them are intensely humane and spiritual, weighing heavily the moral implications of their work, and engaging head-on with the ethics of wireheading; what it would mean to offer people unlimited synthetic experience, unlimited synthetic 𝖕𝖑𝖊𝖆𝖘𝖚𝖗𝖊𝖘.

I don’t know that I have a societal view on this, I just know I’m against it for myself. How could a fake trip compete with the felt senses? Why drink synthehol instead of the real thing? Why take transience over Encounter –

But if we take the fake trip example – how many people actually have the option to choose that as a physical reality?

A lot of the world right now aren’t in a situation to go on an exotic trip away. Even in Australia, a relatively rich country, only 55% of the population holds a Passport. And in the future, if we suppose they’re able to solve all the technical challenges to make some compelling digital holiday experiences, I could see a version of the future where those “synthetic” digital trips become more ubiquitous, and the physical one becomes more of a luxury. 

And then you expand out — from holidays to every experience you might wish to savour. Reality now competes with unreality; with hyper-reality.

In a double-blind trial, aware of the costs and compromises, maybe most people choose cocaine over real happiness.

Place / Encounter

My friend B. introduced me to the concept of Encounter as conjured by Buber; the infinite first-person present that is our full, embodied experience. It is the only true way to experience a person, a place, a work of art; an elevation from transactional to transcendent.

Timely: I recently read a piece by the very talented Sabrina Y. Smith from Seven Senses, about silence and meditation:

‘The technique is experiential, not intellectual. Through observing the body’s natural sensations, one learns how often we react to those sensations. When we have a pleasant feeling, we react with craving. When we experience an unpleasant sensation, we react with aversion. In other words, we are always reacting. Every word we speak and action we take first starts as a sensation in our body, which we automatically and unconsciously react to. We rarely take a moment to let the sensation pass before making a conscious choice on what to say and do.’

Present, here, the smells of the studio are intoxicating, its visual fragments – Hasaballah’s smudged hands, the scuffed and eviscerated floor, the loose paintings hung and leaning against every free surface, the gentle breeze and light — these sensations are impossible to transmit.

Ironically, talking about them gives them an immaterial quality. There is a fragility to feelings; they can be as airy as information. Loosely I reference the permanence of the internet, its indefinite shelf-life, and am reminded of its fragile nature, that digital systems break too, eventually, and these algorithms change form,

Like the many hundred languages that have been lost, that were never recorded, and are all the more beautiful because of that.

Deprived of felt senses, our understanding of the past is based on a flawed dataset. The decay of our knowledge makes it even faultier. But information does have a density, if we care to see it, and there are artists like Ryoji Ikeda who add gravity to its formlessness —

Ryoki Ikeda, Supersymmetry

In the case of Hasaballah, these inputs become places, really; landscapes… You can see how they will gradually unfurl, taking up more room, capturing more space. They feel destined for greater scale, sprawling out into giant pieces of terrestrial art.

Speaking of which... When I thought about art best discovered and dug up from the dirt, I didn’t know I would get my wish so soon.

Hasaballah’s next exhibition, DIG, is an installation of new large-scale entropic paintings. Resembling slabs of earth, disrupted landscapes and alien topographies, these works formed through chemical reactions, cracks, spills and acid dips terraform, decay and transform as they delve into geological time and the Anthropocene through the lens of a dig site. 

Best of all, it’s true encounter - visitors will have to find it from its lat/long coordinates at -33.8859704 , 151.1959512, and only between December 20 - 28.

Taylah Hasaballah is an artist based in Sydney, working across painting, installation, digital, and writing.

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Go further

Taylah Hasaballah website / Instagram

Video sound credit: Red Silk