Transdisciplinary Research ● Strategy ● Project Management
"Cultural diplomacy is one of the most potent weapons in the United States' armory, yet its importance has been consistently downplayed in favor of dramatic displays of military might." — Helena Kane Finn
Two artists from opposite sides of American military interventions in the Middle East are put in conversation through an exhibition and roudtable discussion at Cyber-Alchemy 2.0. Gerald Sheffield served as a soldier in the US Army in Iraq; Hangama Atiqullo fled hostilities in her native Afghanistan and took Canadian citizenship. Both Gerald and Hangama’s work explore the material conditions of the armed conflict and investigate relevant forms of reconstruction. Together, they question whether the narratives and metrics operating through the territorial and material circumstances of the war create value for the cross-cultural collectivity.
To support this effort, the millenary discipline of alchemy provides a lens of analysis. Before being eclipsed by modern science, alchemy sought to create value by strategically guiding the combining of the world’s substances through narratives and metrics. Alchemy’s open and entrepreneurial framework serves to imagine innovative artistic and architectural interventions that embrace the complexity of war and develop a large-scale vision of reconstruction. Today in America, the flow of materials is increasingly orchestrated through technologies issued from American defense research. The internet and SIRI were funded by the Defense and Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the US Department of Defense; GPS by the US Navy; and touchscreen display by the CIA. For better or worst, the military-industrial complex has produced an amalgamation of techniques that together constitute cybernetics, the science of communication between machines, humans and the environment. Together, cybernetics and alchemy reveal the material motivations driving foreign affairs and provide the deliberate imagination with a framework for envisioning reconstruction.
Reception and round table with:
Gerald Sheffield, US Army Veteran, Yale MFA’17
Hangama Atiqullo, Afghan & Canadian citizen, Yale MFA’20
Vere van Gool, Independent Curator and Associate Director of IdeasCity, New Museum
Valerie Lechene, GSAPP Incubator, Columbia MArch’17, organizer of Cybernetic Alchemy — Foreign (Material) Affairs
'Le chêne,' pronounced [leuh-sheh-n' means oak tree in French, my native language.
