The Future of the Oracle
Replacing the prophets of myth with algorithm and celebrity in the work of Gery Georgieva
Gery Georgieva, UWU Channel Radiance, 2020, installation view.
The strong will take leave with their lifeblood fully charged carrying nothing but their maternal love documents and fair memories. The oxen will ask no one, and so they will perish, leaving behind only their punishments.
- Gery Georgieva, Sybil’s Noon Shower of Stones
Myth…abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences…it organizes a world which is without contradictions…… a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.
- Roland Barthes, Mythologies
I
UWU Channel Radiance envelops Cubitt’s art gallery in London. The dark, softened gallery space feels like an unused stage, the new, chemical smell of the magenta carpet and chartreuse satin curtains gently off-gassing. The ethereal soundtrack of the exhibition vibrates against the cheap textiles with its deep and resonating bass. A singular blue light illuminates a stuffed silk pelvis hanging from a daisy chain of bungee cords, while across the gallery, the multi-channel media wall pulsates with a kaleidoscope of feminine figures performing between the seven screens. Mythical and otherworldly, Gery Georgieva transforms her venue into a womb marred by the footprint of commercialization.
Georgieva’s practice ranges from film to performance to installation, often incorporating herself as a character, pop icon, and/or feminine trope. Her work utilizes lo-fi materials and production to merge traditional, mythological, and historical themes with contemporary popular culture. The solo presentation of UWU Channel Radiance draws on an algorithmic system produced from Cubitt Artists’ material archive. This customized machine learning software uses 30 years' worth of Cubitt’s institutional history to create fictional artist bios and press statements up to the year 3000.
Gery Georgieva, UWU Channel Radiance, 2020, installation view.
Within the exhibition, the video work Sybil’s Noon Shower of Stones imagines the artist as a contemporary newsreader named Sibyl, who delivers a series of prophetic headlines. Georgieva utilizes the algorithm by mimicking its functionality to forecast a satirically dark future. Through the inter-dimensional figure of the oracle, the artist confronts technology’s capacity to replace the prophets found in our myths.
UWU Channel Radiance employs technological systems as a contemporary myth. By incorporating algorithm as prompt, celebrity as reference, and newsreader as prophet, Georgieva enacts and critiques contemporary practices of myth-making. Steeped in satire, camp, and feminist tropes, the exhibition reimagines themes seen throughout mythology within the current moment of advancing algorithmic systems. In this way, Georgieva questions the role of technology through the guise of a modern-day oracle.
II
Set within the enveloping installation of vibrant curtaining and carpet throughout Cubitt’s cold cement floors and stark white walls, Georgieva transforms her venue. Dark, soft and enclosing, the gallery space itself has a tactile yet unearthly feel. “It’s a descent into the dark.” American mythologist Joseph Campbell notes when unpacking the mythological themes of the cave, as reflected in The Old Testament narrative of Jonah and the Whale. Jonah, called upon by God to be a prophet—a divine mission which he refuses—flees on a sea voyage. God, in His anger and disappointment at Jonah’s refusal, raises a terrible storm. Thrown overboard, Jonah is swallowed by a whale. He lives inside the belly of the whale for three days, emerging to take up God’s prophetic mission.
“Psychologically, the whale represents the power of life locked in the unconscious. Metaphorically, water is the unconscious, and the creature in the water is the life or energy of the unconscious, which has overwhelmed the conscious personality and must be disempowered, overcome and controlled.
“In the first stage of this kind of adventure, the hero leaves the realm of the familiar, over which he has some measure of control, and comes to the threshold, let us say the edge of a lake or sea, where a monster of the abyss comes to meet him.”[i]
Georgieva places her viewer directly into what Campbell describes as a metaphorical site of transformation. There her newsreader Sybil—a name taken from the ancient Greek sibly originally meaning a female oracle—acts as a sort of divinatory guide. Prophetic themes are a common feature of mythological narratives, in which the journey of the hero inevitably pivots upon an encounter with an oracle-like figure. Through an abstract yet poetic interpretation of a divine will, this encounter often signifies the transition from the common world into that of the supernatural.
In Homer’s Odyssey, for instance, Tiresias is a blind prophet who appears before Odysseus in the underworld and warns him of the perils he will face in journeying back to Ithaca to reclaim his palace and wife. Keanu Reeves’ character Neo in the film The Matrix has several encounters with “The Oracle” who is portrayed by a woman of color in her late 60s, she delivers visions of potential futures that Neo must interpret in his quest for destiny.
Campbell has extensively outlined the various archetypes into which stories of heroic journeys fall, as well as the central role played by oracular figures. The “father quest” is best exemplified by Telemachus’ search for Odysseus—a search prompted by Athena’s command to “go find your father.” Celtic myths often involve a princely hunter who “follows the lure of the deer into an unknown range of forest,” only to witness the deer undergo a transformation into the Queen of the Faerie Hills. Regardless of the prophet’s particular form, the hero enters a unique transformative realm. Guided by a call to action through divine intervention, their purpose and resulting voyage are given form by the oracle.
Gery Georgieva, Sybil's Noon Shower of Stones, 2020, video still.
Things aren’t quite so clear in Sybil’s Noon Shower of Stones. Wearing a lilac blazer and sitting before a disorienting computer-generated backdrop of spinning globes and fluctuating graphs, the newsreader Sibyl delivers a series of cryptic prophecies:
“Tonight, we reflect on the discovery that this is all it could be for us. The fragile ones will have hard reckonings. The strong will descend into their precipice and come out with just two scratches. The biggest losers will be the capable oxen. They will release the lambs from the mossy cave, and any attempt at a peace process will come too late.”
“The noon shower of stones will threaten the integrity of the neon mantle. Anyone who possesses a pelvic floor is to be cautious of a full-bodied gentlewoman reduced to ahead.”
“And what of the future? Mega fans will cause problems, whilst the super fans will be the ones to bring the country down. Will she survive and embrace the beast?” [ii]
This script was written in collaboration with poet Vanessa Onwuemezi; together she and Georgieva carefully crafted language generated by the Cubitt’s algorithm. While the text offers no clear-cut interpretation, its relationship to mythological and spiritual narratives are distinctly present, with frequent references to ghosts, prophets, and heraldic messiahs. Nonlinear and at times nonsensical, Sybil’s monologue nonetheless evokes an embodied sense of memory through the archive, while mocking technology’s capacity to replace the oracles of our myths.
Set to a psychedelic and haunting soundtrack by Naima Karlsson, Sybil’s Noon Shower of Stones is the central work within a seven-screen monitor installation. A digital altar emulating a corporate aesthetic, the multi-channel shrine vibrates with a kaleidoscope of femme characters and silhouettes. A glittering disco ball hangs on the screen above like a sort of all-seeing eye. Diverse feminine bodies are represented in the video works below through the bronzed figured fountain and night club go-go dancers.
In one of the other video works titled Noon, Georgieva re-imagines herself as a mythical goddess, or siren, in order to personify the historical trope of the feminine in art. Shot in a Cornwall seaside cave at low tide, Georgieva performs Britney Spears’ choreography from her iconic 2001 VMA performance of I’m a Slave 4 U. Costumed in a full sequined bodysuit complete with headdress and veil, she runs in and out the frame, filming herself in a manner reminiscent of a YouTuber’s daily vlog. This perfectly aligned juxtaposition of classical and popular culture showcases Georgieva’s ability to build a fully formed yet satirical feminine figure.
Together, the seven channels of Sybil’s Noon Shower of Stones pull from archive, myth, and popularized culture to form a unique and future-focused femme identity. From the nightclubs in her hometown of Varna, Bulgaria, to the caves of Cornwall, Georgieva embodies her own cultural duality. A daughter of immigration and a mother to a Gemini son, the dualism of the paralleled feminine figures enacts the artist’s own multiculturalism and sense of self.
By employing Cubitt’s speculative technological system in which to form her prophecies, UWU Channel Radiance enacts Georgieva’s ongoing exploration into the themes and metaphors of mythologies. Allegorical yet flippant in her approach, she reimagines the impact of modern-day myth in forming the oracles of our future.
III
Roland Barthes theorized extensively on the formation or reinvention of myth in popular culture. His essay Myth Today posits that “myth is a type of speech” or more appropriately: the study of signs. “Signs consist of a signifier (a word, an image, a sound, and so on) and it’s meaning – the signified.”
Throughout Mythologies, his landmark collection of essays first published in France in 1957, Barthes draws examples of everyday French life, from advertisements to the world of wrestling. His aim was to show that images were stripped of meaning when they were removed from their proper context, resulting in “the spread of a uniform, unthreatening, and above all, bourgeois ideology,” a comfort blanket of a myth that could easily prove stifling.
The appropriation of the image of the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara’s likeness plastered across t-shirts and totes bags in the early 2000s is a notable example of consumers’ eagerness to identify with qualities that they believe symbolize youthfulness, rebelliousness, and hatred of authority. Exploited by companies for consumer gain, Che Guevara’s image is stripped of meaning—the real individual, whose Marxist and guerrilla tactics of militarization during the Cuban Revolution proved to be incredibly violent and oppressive—and instead functions simply as a capitalist commodity. [iii] Popularized as a counterculture symbol of rebellion, the image of the revolutionary is safety appropriated as myth.
Georgieva exploits this kind of semiotic appropriation throughout her work, though with different aims. Whether by incorporating herself as a character or through the use of lo-fi materials and production strategies, she merges aspects of traditional and contemporary culture. Writer and curator Philomena Epps has captured this duality perfectly, describing Georgieva’s practice as “intriguing and ambiguous vernacular, fusing the spirit of her Bulgarian heritage and traditional folk culture with the atmosphere of pop music and the theatricality of vaudeville.”[iv]
Georgieva’s 2013 video Rodopska Beyonce (Autoethnography II) finds the artist in traditional Bulgarian folk costume—complete with pants, apron, vest, and animal pelt—standing on a snowy hill. There she performs, in its entirety, the choreography of Beyoncé’s 2009 music video for Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It), accompanied only by the sounds of her breath, her shuffled steps, and the click of her medallion necklace. Her silent execution of the highly recognizable choreography while in traditional dress enacts the generational experience of European millennials raised on folklore and cultural ritual while simultaneously coming of age at the time of the internet.
Gery Georgieva, Rodopska Beyonce (Autoethnography II), 2013, video still.
In 2017, Georgieva produced The Blushing Valley, in which she enacts the Rose Queen from the Bulgarian Rose Festival in Kazanlak, a regional valley famous for its centuries-old rose cultivation. Costumed in a digitally printed apron and a translucent visor, and wearing a pale pink neck pillow as her headdress, Georgieva smiles, waves and dances at the edge of the rose field as the announcements of the Rose Queen pageant overlay her performance:
“The great mother goddess is the power on which depends the eternal circle of revival and the fresh spring renewal. Because she’s the mother earth that promotes growth and everything that returns to her womb gains new life.”[v]
An exhibition of the film was presented at Swimming Pool Projects in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2018. The organization described the work as a “show about identity: representation and lived experience; appropriation of cultural symbols and their speculative potential; the role of the female image in the Bulgarian consumer culture; fantastical, almost hallucinatory clichés and archetypes; intimacy and embarrassment.” The Blushing Valley further pursues the artist's exploration of the feminine through a layered identity which Georgieva describes as “imagining that I am various women all at once, like a hallucinatory dream.” The Rose Queen appears as a fantastical archetype, imposing a satire of pageantry, feminine cliché, and cultural identity, as Georgieva reimagines her meaning as a contemporary goddess of mother earth.
Gery Georgieva, The Blushing Valley, 2017, video still.
In 2018, Georgieva took on the popular genre of YouTube makeup tutorials. In Damsel ‘n’ Destress and All Eyes on Me, the artist glues carpet pads over blemishes, uses googly eyes to “imitate the brow and create an extension of the eyelash,” and co-opts inflatable bra pad inserts in order to accentuate cheekbones.[vi] Across these two hilarious and felicitous video works, the artist incorporates her notable camp aesthetic in the common and highly commercial social media format.
Gery Georgieva, Damsel ‘n’ Destress, 2018, video still.
More recently, in the 2019 talk show parody, Chats and Giggles with GG feat. Vera Moderna the artist interviews her alter ego Vera Moderna. Vera, a Bulgarian pop star whom Georgieva portrayed in music videos, live performances, and a staged public death at the Royal Academy in 2016, is resurrected from the afterlife to discuss outfits, wellbeing, beauty secrets, and her upcoming music. Similar to Sybil, Vera is a public-facing inter-dimensional oracle-like figure. Her image and persona as pop star and cultural icon embody a multidimensional myth, one grounded in the history of fable and feminine archetype, while also appropriating the absurd, commercialized semantics of celebrity.
Gery Georgieva, Chats and Giggles with GG feat. Vera Moderna, 2019, video still.
Whether enacting Beyoncé in traditional Bulgarian dress, or Britney Spears while emulating twin sirens, Georgieva’s practice lifts, embellishes, and translates from source material such as Bulgarian folklore, mythology, internet chat rooms, YouTube channels, European iconography, broadcast television, and nightclub culture. The artist’s personas employ tropes of popularized feminine identity though a satirical kitsch aesthetic; multidimensional and multicultural, they cohesively straddle the historical and present-day representations of gender. This strategy allows her to enact the themes referred to by Barthes as “second order signification” as she strips her mythologies of their original meaning, only to reimagine them as commodity, celebrity, or pop icon.
IV
UWU Channel Radiance marks a turning point in Georgieva’s practice, thanks to her use of Cubitt’s speculative algorithm. For one thing, utilizing technology as a prompt added a new layer to Georgieva’s already multidimensional practice. For another, it allowed her to explore a new mode of investigating how modern-day mythologies populate across digital platforms.
Currently we exist in a moment where algorithms can tell you more about your habits than your friends and family. Purchasing history, content intake, and social events are all traceable and applied towards algorithms and ad targeting via social media networks. This isn’t new and it’s not going away. In his book, New Dark Age, the artist James Bridle identifies the key component of man-machine relations as a “faith in the network, as mode of seeing, thinking, and acting.” Such faith “denies the bonds of time, place, and individual experience.”[vii] This blind belief in tech-based methodologies could be interpreted as its own form of myth, but as Bridle points out, our faith in these systems also comes with a sacrifice. As our dependence on technological systems continues to grow, we de-emphasize more traditional modes of experience. The myths and narratives that we once found meaningful in their connection to heritage and the natural world slip farther and farther away.
In his book Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell details the various shortcomings and misassumptions that people make when dealing with strangers. In particular, he discusses a study conducted by a Harvard economist, three elite computer scientists, and a bail expert. The study examines “how machine learning can be used to improve and understand human decision making.”[xiii] An algorithmic artificial intelligence system was developed from the records of 550,000 New York City arraignment hearings between 2008 and 2013. The AI system was provided with the same details that prosecutors would have provided the judge, including the defendants’ ages and criminal backgrounds. From these data sets, the machine learning system was programmed to generate a list of defendants to release.
“It was a bake-off: man versus machine. Who made the best decisions? Whose list committed the fewest crimes while out on bail and the most likely to show up for their trial date? The results weren’t even close. The people on the computer’s list were 25 percent less likely to commit a crime while awaiting a trial than the 400,000 people released on bail by the judges of New York City. 25 percent! In the bake-off, machine destroyed man.”[ix]
Gladwell concludes that a judge’s emotional response in dealing with such cases doesn’t actually make them a better decision maker—and in fact it may make them worse. Yet replacing judges with an algorithmic system, regardless of how successful the results may be, is a challenging notion to come to terms with. Further complicating the matter is the fact that algorithm-based machine learning systems are not themselves infallible. Notable failures of such systems include the wrongful arrest of Robert Julian-Borchak Williams as a result of being falsely identified by facial recognition software.
The morality and ethicality of these technological systems lacks consistency, making it more difficult for people to know how to feel about them. As Bridle points out, faith in technological systems “denies the bonds of time and place” and largely obstructs and collides with our current social systems. When a computer outperforms a human judge, our systems of belief are understandably damaged: the judge loses some of their authoritative stature, and the structure of the existing criminal justice system is revealed as flawed. Technology takes its place as the more effective system of justice, prediction, and prophesy: a modern oracle.
Social media and its algorithms are not outside these systems of belief and network dependence. Platforms from Instagram to YouTube have drastically changed the methods by with which we communicate and convey identity, brand, and story. As a result, individuals can now easily participate in myth-formation themselves. Consider the case of the 2017 Fyre Festival, where celebrities and influencers used social media to generate a compelling myth, quickly selling vast numbers of VIP tickets through a free-for-all of luxury signifiers. Yet the event itself was an epic failure, with attendees being forced to sleep in FEMA tents and receiving only packaged sandwiches to eat.
Caroline Calloway, a 28-year-old American internet influencer and self-described “Writer, Artist, Art Historian,” detailed her life as an American undergrad at Cambridge University during the early days of Instagram, garnering nearly 800,000 followers and a resulting book deal.[x] Following the book deal’s withdrawal in 2017, she admitted that the majority of her followers were bought, and Calloway's overpriced “creativity workshops” were unattended and flagged as fraudulent. The viral essay I Was Caroline Calloway published in 2019 by Calloway’s former friend Natalie Beach, detailed the various roles she had played for the influencer: confidant, ghostwriter, and for a brief time, maid.[xi] Beach highlighted Calloway's vapidity and privilege, while detailing her very public unraveling. Zarina Muhammad of The White Pube describes her feelings on Calloway:
“Part of me wants to believe that Caroline is a genius, because wouldn’t that be wonderful? For a woman who’s young and flippant and messy and chaotic to be a literary genius that isn’t taken seriously by the world around her by way of the complacency she willingly plays into - ugh how romantic! It’s a seductive, powerful mythology that I want to lean into so badly. But I think there is something in the power of that mythology & lore, in the construction of image & public, in the way she evades immutability and constructs her identity as politically malleable within her long-form writing.”[xii]
Female social media influencers, celebrities and pop stars such as Calloway embody an identity, whether authentic or not, formed through the lens of popularized culture. These mythologies are uniquely contemporary in that they are exclusively transmitted across digital platforms. We wouldn’t have Caroline Calloway without social media, Kylie Jenner wouldn’t sell as many lip kits if she didn’t swatch them on her shimmering wrist to her 192 million Instagram followers, and Frye Festival would have probably never happened if it hadn’t been so strategically marketed across social media.
Amalia Ulman, Excellencies & Perfections #3, 2018, Instagram photograph.
Amalia Ulman took up the mythology of social media with her 2014 performance work Excellences & Perfections, in which the artist fabricated an Instagram profile documenting the life of a “wannabe it-girl trying to make it in LA”. Operating in a similar vein is Sofia A. Ginevra Giannì, better known as SAGG NAPOLI, whose Instagram profile details her seemingly decadent lifestyle in Naples, Italy.[xiii] Slip dresses, thong bikinis, and provocative selfies taken with the South Italian coastline as a backdrop are common features of her account. There is no doubt that Giannì Is living the life she portrays, but the embellishment, satire, and cultural clichés of femininity and popularized images of beauty and sexualization cross over into the hyperreal territory of a Kardashian or a Calloway, becoming a satire on the absurdity of the identities, characters, and feminine tropes populating our social media feeds.[xiv]
SAGG NAPOLI, 2020, Instagram photograph.
This is mythology today. Our hero’s journey is the plight of Kylie Jenner struggling with thin-lipped insecurities, only to come out on the other side with her own cosmetic company. Her journey is tired, commercialized, and frankly uninspired. However, influencers like Jenner, Calloway, and Gianni’s SAGG NAPOLI have agency over their image; they chose to participate in social media’s culture of myth, objectification, and commodity. In that way, they function as modern-day oracles, guiding their followers on what to buy, where to vacation, and how to achieve their lifestyle.
Unlike Odysseus, who received oracular guidance only after long journeys and intense struggles, we contact our contemporary oracles with unprecedented ease and comfort. In connecting, layering, and merging the systems of technological language with the traditional themes of mythology, Georgieva critiques and brings forward the inter-dimensional behaviors of technology as a modern-day oracle. Through language and futurist tone, Georgieva sets the stage for her viewer to engage directly with their own dystopian, tawdry, and illogical fate, asking “and what of the future?”.[xv]
Julia GreenwayGery Georgieva (b. 1986 Varna, Bulgaria) is an artist based in London. Her work encompasses video, performance, multimedia installations and musical collaborations. Through a process of performative self-staging and improvisation, she uses the immediacy of her own body as material to consider the construction of taste, personal empowerment and cultural configuration. Recent projects include: Mending a Broken World (with Lenke Rothman), Sörmlands Museum, Nyköping; На Чешмата: At The Source, performed at Palais De Tokyo and Block Universe, London; The Blushing Valley, Swimming Pool Projects, Sofia and Polythene Queen, Hunter/Whitfield, London. Her video works have been screened at Whitechapel Gallery, South London Gallery, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, FRAC Bordeaux, MOCA Cleveland, Ohio, Frieze Art Fair, London & Channel 4 amongst others.
Endnotes:
[i] Campbell, Joseph and Moyers, Bill, The Power of Myth, 1988 New York: Anchor Books a Division of Random House, Inc, 1988, pp. 180.
[ii] Georgieva, Gery, Sybil’s Noon Shower of Stones, 2020, [online] Vimeo, <http://vimeo.com/ 393667101>.
[iii] An example of Barthes’ term “second order signification”
[iv] Epps, Philomena, The Dance of the Diva. [online] Roman Road Journal, 08 June 2018. <https:// romanroadjournal.com/the-dance-of-the-diva/>.
[v] Georgieva, Gery, The Blushing Valley, Gery Georgieva, 2017, [online] Vimeo, <https://vimeo.com/ 378490519>.
[vi] Georgieva, Gery, (2018). All Eyes on Me (make-up tutorial), 2018, [online] Vimeo, <https:// vimeo.com/264595921>.
[vii] Bridle, James, New Dark Age: Technology, Knowledge and the End of the Future, 2018, London and New York: Verso.
[viii] Kleinberg, J., Lakkaraju, H., Leskovec, J., Ludwig, J., and Mullainatha, S, Human Decisions and Machine Predictions. 2018, [online] The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 133(1), pp 237-293.
[ix] Gladwell, Malcom, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know. New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2019.
[x] Bio posted on Caroline Calloway's Instagram profile. Calloway, Caroline, 2020, @carolinecalloway. Instagram, <https://www.instagram.com/carolinecalloway/>.
[xi] Beach, Natalie, I Was Caroline Calloway. [online] The Cut, 10 Sept, 2019. <https:// www.thecut.com/2019/09/the-story-of-caroline-calloway-and-her-ghostwriter-natalie.html>.
[xii] Muhammad, Zarina, CAROLINE CALLOWAY. [online] The White Pube. 19 April 2020. <https:// www.thewhitepube.co.uk/carolinecalloway>.
[xiii] Ruigrok, Sophie, How this 2014 Instagram hoax predicted the way we now use social media. [online] Dazed. 14 March 2018. <https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/39375/1/ amalia-ulman-2014-instagram-hoax-predicted-the-way-we-use-social-media>.
[xiv] SAGG NAPOLI’s Instagram account: Giannì, Sofia A. Ginevra, 2020, @sagg_napoli. Instagram, <https://www.instagram.com/sagg_napoli/?hl=en>.
[xv] Georgieva, Gery, Sybil’s Noon Shower of Stones, 2020, [online] Vimeo, <http://vimeo.com/ 393667101>.
