Reciprocating ETHBerlin04’s theme of identity crisis, 'Necking the Night,' part of ARIAN’s forthcoming Teilkunstwerk, Mithraion, continues where the artist’s previous works, FISKs: Integral Sprawl (Miami Art Week 2022) and Wraithportrait (Sein Porträt) (CADAF NYC 2022), left off. The point of departure for all three works is the seemingly endless ‘sprawl’ initiated by the artist ever since leaving Germany, after completion of his time as artist-in-residence at the Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, which has rendered his whereabouts a subject of perpetual study. Fragments from the work are spread throughout the Internet, from Ars Electronica’s Gardens and Artsy’s Viewing Rooms to Deca, the Open Metaverse, abandoned Discord groups and smart contracts, in tandem with land-art modules equally disseminated across continents, starting with the founding fragments in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), where the work was originally conceived as site-specific, next to Stefan Sous’ Flunki Kiel (Dekonstruktionen, 1995-99), with 30 corresponding fragments minted to Ethereum (2020-21).

Identity and space go hand in hand in all works in the continuum. The absent artist’s gesture, made part of a performance during the work’s regional premiere, immediately taken to act as an homage to NRW icon Joseph Beuys during #Beuys2021, was quickly turned on its head, when a social sculpture of contagion traversed far-apart fields such as theology, mythography and urban studies, to pose a curious rhetoric—What is society but structured space? The works proclaim the identity crisis as strictly tied to the nation-state crisis, and Necking the Night, an ‘Infinite Edition’ NFT testament to the towering sizelessness of human societies, refuses dimensions as conventionally understood in computer art.

Specific to ETHBerlin04 and 'co-create,' the piece inverts the event's Bring-Your-Own-Beamer (BYOB) premise, with the artist's absence forming an inseparable part of the work, while italicizing decentralization and collaboration. Authored sous rature (under erasure) and with it, utilizing a mythographic approach to identity, which far from being anonymous, is taken to dramaturgical zenith, Necking the Night combines the artist's signature artistic commons 0 (AC0), which distinguishes between creative and artistic use, prohibiting the former while necessitating the latter, with the literary multiplex in which characters overlap and impact real life events, influencing them in ways reminiscent of (classical) antiquity, and thereby bringing to fore questions around free will and human agency in the wake of rapid advancement in artificial intelligence (AI). From the doppelgänger in Wraithportrait to Mithraion's book-length cast of characters, the approach highlights how concepts as profound as decentralization and community have been heavily underexplored, e.g., in Loot, pointing at the myriad formal possibilities beyond nominal decentralization.

The importance of Berlin for the premiere is, likewise, twofold; first, in bridging the piece to the artist's original point of departure in Germany, and second; in hiding a key point of reference for Mithraion (cue: armed with a torch). Completing FISKs' Gothic hermeneutic cycle, the piece aptly uses Berl (swamp in Polabian), hinting at the function of swamps as transition zones between water and land, mirroring the transition from FISKs to Mithraion.

Thin yet without a human form, the piece serves as an antiphon to the preceding story’s ‘Mensch’, whose synesthetic monotheism is a far cry from yet formally reminiscent of the existential contours of Giacometti’s thin man. Indeed, Necking the Night invites the viewers into spatial oblivion—into the night of dimensions. For the sun remains in Mithraion, per the Pythagorean astronomical system, if not entirely absent, a point of recurring contention.

The Art of ARIAN—Arian Bagheri Pour Fallah ©️ 2024. All rights reserved.