Frankenstein Reanimated: An Interview With Marc Garrett | Part 1
The Monster is awake
“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel…”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
In 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley began writing the gothic novel “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus” during a summer spent at Lake Geneva, in Switzerland, in the company of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and his young physician, John William Polidori. Born from a competition between friends who wanted to write the best horror story, the book was published anonymously in London at the beginning of 1818 when Shelley was just 20 years old.
“Frankenstein” is an epistolary novel that belongs to the period of Romanticism, an artistic and intellectual movement that was preceded by Sturm und Drang at the end of the 18th century. In Shelley’s book, themes common to Romanticism, such as the focus on human feelings or the exploration of irrationality and psychological states, are entangled with each other. Although, the tension towards infinity, as well as the search for self-realization and the delusion of omnipotence, become radical and make her work one of the first examples of science fiction literature.
The psychological complexity of the story and the conflicting relationship with scientific development have made “Frankenstein” a great source of inspiration for researchers, thinkers and artists who have investigated the book in a modern key. Frankenstein and the myth of Prometheus have inspired not only three major art exhibitions, but also an anthology that contains more than 20 written contributions (including those of Zach Blas, Régine Debatty, Mary Flanagan, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Eryk Salvaggio, Carla Gannis, etc.) and more than 100 artworks.
Entitled “Frankenstein Reanimated”, the book has been co-edited by Marc Garrett and Yiannis Colakides and explores our modern condition along with the influence that art exercises on society and vice versa. Our times are studded with many monstrosities that go hand in hand with what we call “technological progress”. From the threat of nuclear war to the reality of mass surveillance, from the collapse of democracy to health and social inequalities, from biohacking to climate emergency, are we victims or perpetrators?
The reinterpretation of Frankenstein raises questions, including the main one: who is the real monster in our daily life? Will we inevitably be victims of our delusion of omnipotence? Can art uphold ethical values and guide social progress?
I spoke to Dr. Marc Garrett who is a curator and writer of critical essays, interviews and books on technology, art and social change, as well as the co-founder of the art collective Furtherfield in London with artist-theorist and curator Ruth Catlow.
Beth Jochim (B): I would like to start from the beginning and talk about the fact that the research on Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” was the source of inspiration for three exhibitions that preceded the writing of “Frankenstein Reanimated”. Can you briefly guide us through these shows and present the concepts that have served as their pillars?
Marc Garrett (MG): It started out as an exhibition called “Monsters of the Machine: Frankenstein in the 21st Century” at LABoral in Spain, then as “Children of Prometheus” at Furtherfield in the UK, and finally at NeMe Arts Centre in Cyprus. The book, like the three exhibitions before, is a contemporary exploration of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, reconsidering her warning that scientific imagining and all technologies have unintended and dramatic consequences for the world. Shelley’s classic, gothic horror and science fiction novel, has inspired millions since it was written 200 years ago in 1816, and then published anonymously in London in 1818. It offers a lens through which to look at the practices of arts and sciences today and how they shape society’s relationship with technology.
From an early age I have always found myself in a kind of alliance with Mary Shelley, even though she was writing over two hundred years ago. A bit like when you choose rock stars to influence your ideas and dreams, for me, it was mainly punk and post-punk culture. Around this time it was also imaginative women who inspired me to see the world differently such as Kathy Acker, Kate Bush, The Slits, Grace Jones, and Simone de Beauvoir. They were all exploring beyond patriarchal defaults and the associated assumptions that came with such a limited and prescribed world view. One of the challenges was to build on this spirit of inspiration in a way that transcended media art culture, and also the art world, so others outside of these fields could also enjoy the questions and contexts being examined by Colakides and I, and contributors in the book.
Through the years, I’ve been frustrated that most of the movies and documentaries about Shelley’s brilliant and insightful works, especially Frankenstein, lacked social, political, and historical contextual knowledge. Sure, there have been critical texts reflecting on the novel, but nothing shown on television or in films. I wanted to see informative documentaries to educate myself and others in a way that was emancipatory, liberating and challenging, rather than just sensationalist and non-historical. I wanted to know more about the politics at the time, the technology explored then, her psychology and social contexts.
Frankenstein has been helpful to unpack many of the most important issues of our age by linking us to her time while shining a light on today’s overwhelming and scary problems. Issues featured in this book are all big such as: climate collapse, digital surveillance, colonialism, neoliberalism, accelerationism, the pandemic, war, and corruption.
B: Co-editor Yiannis Colakides and you started working on the reader before the Covid-19 pandemic. Originally the work was supposed to be published in 2020, but then the publication was postponed to the following year. Were there any events, during this time, that influenced the final version of “Frankenstein Reanimated”?
MG: Many reading this will have also suffered trauma due to Covid-19 and other painful situations, so I don’t mind sharing my own here. I lost my mother in hospital during the pandemic and then her boyfriend of over 30 years two weeks later. It was a very alarming, visceral and depressing experience. My mum and I both struggled in poverty with the rest of our family during the 70s and were like comrades against misogyny and right-wing scum bags whilst living on the council estate. I then caught cancer due to the grief and overwork. I was actually in hospital when the book came out, which I’m sure helped me get better. Having neck cancer isn’t much fun. Now I am slowly recovering and am so happy to be alive and have made great changes to how I live now and in the future.
The pandemic influenced us so much to make the decision to include Ruben Verwaal’s fascinating article “Contagious! Visiting an Exhibition on Epidemic Diseases”. He explores objects from a bygone age that inform us about epidemics today, giving examples of groundbreaking medical research about those who lived in times of plague, cholera and the 1918 influenza pandemic. He also discusses the work of Anna Dumitriu who exhibited in two of the “Children of Prometheus’’ exhibitions at NeMe and Furtherfield. He highlights one of her pieces, a dress made from raw silk, inspired by seventeenth century designs where she “went as far as impregnating the embroidery with the DNA of the Yersinia pestis bacterium, commonly known as the plague”. [1]
B: “Frankenstein Reanimated” is an anthology that brings together more than 20 writings including interviews and essays and about 100 artworks. How were the contributors chosen?
MG: They were chosen by asking anyone in the three exhibitions if they wished to be interviewed or contribute to the book. For example, the multidisciplinary artist and curator Gretta Louw had worked in the first exhibition at LaBoral and Neme, but had also written an excellent interview with Guido Segni who showed in two exhibitions “A quiet desert failure” (2015), a work they discussed together.
B: What were the difficulties encountered in writing “Frankenstein Reanimated”?
MG: One difficult thing was staying positive when dealing with deeply critical questions. The profundity can be transformative, but it can also make one feel overwhelmed by it all. My passion for connecting to Mary Shelley and unearthing the novel’s rebellious spirit and its various complexities, was not going to be halted. Luckily, not even cancer stopped me and everyone involved helped me a lot.
B: What are the recurring themes that artists and thinkers have highlighted in their contributions and that find a stronger relationship with Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”?
MG: AI technology appears regularly in the book. Through “The Virtual Watchers” (2016) developed in collaboration with French anthropologist Cédric Parizot, Spanish artist Joana Moll’s artwork reflects how disturbing this can be when certain groups take surveillance into their own hands. It reveals an online, clandestine right-wing group of American nationalists who set up a project page on Facebook in 2010, consisting of 203,633 volunteers surveilling the US-Mexico border for immigrants. The platform displayed live screenings of CCTV cameras, where American citizens collectively participated in reducing border crime by actively blocking illegal immigration from the Mexican border into the US.
The mass surveillance of Internet users by corporations, the NSA, the military, and other state agencies, are an intrusive formation of technology affecting individuals’ lives globally. In Devon Schiller’s essay “On the Basis of Face: The Politics and Practices of Biometric Art”, he writes about face studies and recognition technology and biometric art and how these are accelerated and entwined into our lives, discussing also how artists are subverting and celebrating the technology.
“It has proliferated to the point of being omnipresent. Eye-in-the-sky surveillance systems equipped with facial recognition using active and passive artificial intelligence, ambient intelligence (AmI), or distributed artificial intelligence (DAI), have become integrated on building-wide, citywide, nationwide, and even worldwide levels.” [2] (Schiller 2022)
Virtual surveillance is also one of the themes examined in Régine Debatty’s interview with Karolina Sobecka. Sobecka’s game “Medusa FPS” (2017) evokes parallels between the coronavirus pandemic and Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests.
Mary Flanagan’s [Grace: Feminist AI] (2019) uses a Deep Convolutional General Adversarial Network (DCGAN). It is software that, once trained, produces new images that form a dataset starting from scraped web resources of women’s artworks. This dataset, then, compares with results of Frankenstein image dataset, producing mutations of the original monster image (the “father figure”).
Gretta Louw reveals how her work “They Learn Like Small Children” (2019), was informed by how Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and deep neural net architectures compete with each other as if in a game. Her work questions how (AI) specialists claim that artificial intelligence technologies in their infancy are like children and that they learn by trial and error. Louw deconstructs this common myth.
With the non-stop production of techno-scientific transformations, Frankenstein’s monster has become a tangible reality. We live and breathe its accelerated progression into our lives in a world where a hyper-networked version of Frankenstein’s monster is now alive. We’re all feeding its expansion as it feeds us.
B: As non-experts, we are often led to think that scientific and technological progress goes hand in hand with a greater and more democratic improvement in the quality of life of people. In reality, things are different because technology is not neutral, but can create socio-political imbalances, gaps and injustices. In an age where artificial intelligence (AI) is creeping into our existence in ever more subtle ways, what strategies can be put in place to mitigate their impact?
MG: In 2017, Ruth Catlow and I co-edited a book called “Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain”. A lot of research went into it and we worked hard to get our heads around what the technology was. We knew it was going to have profound implications in the arts as well as in society. It wasn’t just about our own ideas, but we examined the contexts with a diverse array of artists and researchers engaged in the blockchain, unpacking, critiquing and marking the arrival of it on the cultural landscape. Also “Frankenstein Reanimated” consists of various voices presenting us with their experiences and critiques about artificial intelligence (AI), across the board. The subject of AI comes up a lot. For instance, Eryk Salvaggio’s essay “Nothing to See Here” looks at the poetics around image classification tools describing the coronavirus, especially stock photography on the Internet and how the algorithms and images used to represent Covid-19 and the automated references influence our narratives about the virus. With respect to the impact that these technologies have on society on the whole, there are common links whatever the technology is. It’s as much about who controls it and what their agendas are. Who are they really making it for?
B: Using Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” as a filter to analyze the complexity of modern life, many artists, researchers and thinkers gathered and offered their own vision and perception. Why do we struggle to do good?
MG: From my position, what is doing good is reflecting on my knowledge of what it means to be working class and connecting with those who have also been othered in society. Thus, build collaborations with a diverse range of individuals and groups who are left-wing, liberal and anarchist.
I see doing good and creating positive change in society as a constant battle. The struggle with trying to exist within massive systems and structures designed by elite patriarchs is a never-ending journey. However, it’s also a journey of self-discovery that brings rewards such as meeting great people and inspiring friendships. It is a web of confusing and complex experiences and emerging pieces of knowledge that always requires constant attention.
In Part 2, which will be published next week, we will continue the examination of our technological world and the role that art and thinkers can play, through the lens of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”.
References
[1] Ruben Verwaal, Contagious! Visiting an Exhibition on Epidemic Diseases. Frankenstein Reanimated: Creation & Technology in the 21st Century. Torque Editions, 1 July 2022. P. 233.
[2] Devon Schiller. On the Basis of Face: The Politics and Practices of Biometric Art. Frankenstein in the 21st Century. Frankenstein Reanimated: Creation & Technology in the 21st Century. Torque Editions, 1 July 2022. P. 67.
