ROBERT ALICE: Ornament and Crisis (1837, PANIC) #1/2

//////// ARTWORK SITE //////// https://wqe7u4ntmp5zr2y2c2ynplexb4lirxf6yhpyrgjvzcy2fjagi72a.arweave.net/tAn6cbNj-5jrGhaw16yXDxaI3L7B34iZNcixoqQGR_Q/

//////// ABOUT Ornament and Crisis (1837, PANIC) ////////

ORNAMENT AND CRISIS presents an alternative and provactive history of financial crises at one of the world’s oldest monetary institutions, the Monnaie de Paris. Influenced directly by the 2023 contemporary moment, the work takes its starting point from the recent 24/7 media coverage of the 2023 global banking panic to bring in a museological style this challenging “hidden” history of monetary crises to the French national museum.

Using specially made LiDAR scans of the building, the works’ hijack the architecture of the Monnaie de Paris to recast the neo-classical solidity of the building as one that is instead see-through and unstable. Playing with ideas surrounding the facade, the labyrinth and the parable of Narcissus, the institutional architecture of the Monnaie de Paris is seen through a lens of Adolf Loo’s ‘Ornament and Crime’; a seminal modernist rallying cry against ornament in architecture in favour for the clean function of modernism. This commentary on the nature of centralized value production and its use of both ornament and facade is set philosophically against the open-source minimalism of new crypto networks, reliant not on ornament but the simplicity of mathematics. Alice takes the 3D scans of the building, before remaking them into speculative stages for this alternative history to be played out. Elements of the architecture are spotlight, isolated and remade into ghostly and unsettling stage sets.

Crises are reduced down to just their date and their emotional typology. From ‘PANIC’ to ‘DEPRESSION’ to ‘BLACK’ and across a variety of languages from Egyptian hieroglyphs to Gujarati, keywords are isolated to create heightened sense of the human and emotional psychology of crises. Together the 200 crises and their varying terms creates a kind etymological fingerprint that focuses on the poetic nature of repetition and rhythm through our global history.

Each work is pairing between a generative NFT seen here, a 3D environment, explorable in VR and a physical, museological artefact. Researched in collaboration with AI systems, the history of financial crises from 323 BC to 2023 that sits at the heart of this porject creates an unreliable narrator where post-truth narratives are blurred in a typically Borgesian style. Without reference, we are a left to ask what is fact, and what is an AI hallucination and in turn further unsettling the viewer.

This work was first exhibited at the French national museum, the Monnaie de Paris, 29 June to 22 October 2023.

ABOUT BABEL

Taking its title from Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 short story ‘Library of Babel’ (1941), this new exhibition by Robert Alice investigates blockchains through the lens of Borges’ infinite library. Centred around an infinite library made of discrete rooms filled with every possible text - meaningful and nonsense combined, Borges’ Library of Babel is both a premonition of blockchain structures and post-truth landscapes in the age of AI. The project is a collaboration with LaCollection and marks the first time NFTs were exhibited France's oldest institution (f.864AD).