Machine Entanglements: welcome to the knot.
Essay by Roosje Klap & Rosa Wevers
What if we no longer wanted digital systems that know everything about us, but systems that help us to be different and to reinvent ourselves over and over again? What if those systems don't try to make everything faster or better, but rather ask questions and give space to what happens unexpectedly? What if we don't always want to go faster, but slower? And what if we learn to see places where it is abrasive or difficult not as a mistake, but rather as a valuable opportunity?
In Machine Entanglements, we don't think of technology as a tool, but as a habitat. Not as a means, but as an integral part of the landscape in which we live, breathe, and get lost. We reveal a world of entanglement between birds, algae, and data streams, as well as between people, hidden volcanoes, and mythical figures. Everything touches everything. Glass fibers crawl under our feet like roots. Satellites repeat patterns in space that were once written in seas as old cartographic traces. Bluetooth signals fill the room with invisible noise.
The artists who are part of the ecosystem of this first Noorderlicht Biennial show us places and perspectives that are inaccessible to the human eye. Using an analogue or digital camera as an eyewitness, they reveal areas where the human eye falls short. Here, noise is no longer a disturbance, but an important signal that wants to convey something to us. Glitches are made visible, not only as flaws in a system, but also as a form of counterforce to the norms that are intertwined with the digital world.[1]
Because what seems obvious is often the result of repetition, of systems that have so often projected their logic onto us that we have come to regard it as a law of nature. In the apparent self-evidence of interfaces that respond fluently, algorithms that select 'appropriately', and networks that function invisibly—lies the most incredible illusion: that technology is neutral. The works exhibited in Machine Entanglements often interrupt that automatic thinking. They are like unwanted disturbances in a seemingly flawless system. These disturbances do not require immediate interpretation, but proximity. They invite us to slow down and to learn to look again at what seems too obvious to us. A pause in the system, a breath in the code.
Friction is not a flaw in the experience. It's the experience itself. Without friction, you become contactless, wrote Luna Maurer and Roel Wouters in Designing Friction (2024).[2] Because every attempt to make humans frictionless is an attempt to reduce humanity to binary data points. Doubts, memories, and cultural contexts support every decision you make. And it is precisely this complexity that is often overlooked in our digital culture, as it does not align with the default logic of software.
That is why the work The A-Symmetrical Imperialistic Data Server, by Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide) is so meaningful within Machine Entanglements. Instead of speed and control, her hand-painted silk data server offers a slow, fragile alternative to digital precision. No lens-based media work. Not an optimized flow, but a breathing structure in which the binary system appears as a visual ritual, connected to oceanic movement and a history of female labor. Her installation distorts the image of technology as neutral or universal, and makes visible how inequality, imperialist extraction, and pace are unevenly distributed worldwide.
There, in those residual categories, something is alive. Something that cannot be reduced. Where we lose time, where something stalls, where you have to linger for a while. In those breaks, something grows that doesn't fit into the code. A space. A breath. A different way of looking.
Louis Braddock Clarke captures exactly those moments in his sonic landscapes. In Under Boom, the inaudible becomes audible: the suppressed vibrations of mine explosions, space debris, and seismic threats. Institutional censorship resonates here as interference. What is usually filtered out—because it is not aesthetic, not useful, not relevant—becomes here frontal, tangible, inevitable. That noise is no longer defective, but evidence. Every hitch is an opportunity to explore a perspective that has been underexposed. Every misjudged profile is a revelation. Every silence carries information. But only if we are willing to listen differently. If we not only use the system, but also start to influence it. Not by denying it, but by disrupting it. By treating noise not as waste, but as active material. By combining the aesthetic with the political. By reading the disturbance as poetry. The artist and researcher Trevor Paglen calls these adversarial aesthetics: sabotage as revelation. In his visual strategies, he uses confusion as a method.[3]Glitching as a form of revealing. A face that is illegible to facial recognition is not a 'failure', but an embodied protest. The data flow that gets stuck is not a failure, but a form of resistance.
The works in Machine Entanglements do not function as definitive statements, but rather as open-ended loops. They do not seek quick answers and technological 'quick fixes,' but rather long-term involvement. To keep looking, to keep stuck, and to keep hoping for a different future in which technological and organic species live together equally. They expose systemic inequalities, but also reveal the resilience that lies hidden in people and nature, as seen in the images of Sabrina Ratté, transforming e-waste into post-digital ruins. Her immersive video installations show how technological waste will survive humans. Each object, floating between data and dust, forms a nest for a future ecosystem. In this way, a resilient monument is built for the future, forever preserved in pixels.
Imagination as a system error
Now that algorithms increasingly determine what we do and do not see, the use of imagination is a necessary system error in a world of predictability. With imagination, it becomes possible to go beyond the binary thinking of code and to imbalance predictable probabilities. What becomes visible? Words that do not return a search result. Machines that dream of new natural species. Mosses reclaiming ground on abandoned mountains of waste. That is why the artists in Machine Entanglements are essential: they make systems of power visible and give shape to alternative spaces. They nestle in the pixels that are not charged. In the datasets that have been deleted. In the silence between two frames. It is precisely there that something new is growing. Not as a revolution, but as vegetation. Like Steven Maybury buds that spring from an internet cable. As the extinct plant species, which are placed back into our collective consciousness by Nina van Tuikwerd via AI.
In the video installation Matter Gone Wild by Josefa Ntjam, we awaken into a queer ecosystem in which the digital and the organic are intricately intertwined. Here, the machine is not a distant tool, but a gardener who sows stories beyond the boundaries of identity, time, and species. Plants grow from code, liquid bodies distort space, and the machine dreams us of a different past—one that is not fixed, but cultivated over and over again. There are only connections, feedback loops, and soil layers of multiple significance.
It's time to learn to look again. Not from a distance, but from entanglement. Not from control, but from involvement.
Perhaps this is the lesson of the machine: that everything you touch, also touches you. That technology, no matter how autonomous it may seem, always flows through us. And together, we form a network that is vulnerable, porous, and open to change. This entanglement means that you cannot stand outside the system: you are already connected. But instead of striving for control, this position also offers something else: here, there is room for care, reciprocity, and proximity. Don't zoom out, but zoom in. Move along and connect with the entanglement.
Because that is the lesson of the machine: that everything you touch, also touches you. That technology, no matter how autonomous it may seem, always flows through us. And that together we form a network that is vulnerable, porous, and open to change.
Welcome to the knot. You're right on time.
[1] Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism. A Manifesto. London: Verso, 2020.
[2] Maurer, Luna, Roel Wouters, en Alexandra Barancová. ‘Designing Friction: A call for friction in digital culture’. Designing Friction, 2024. https://designingfriction.com
[3] Trevor Paglen, “On Artificial Intelligence, UFOs, and Mind Control,” interview by Sarah M. Miller, Aperture, December 5, 2024, aperture.org/editorial/trevor-paglen-on-artificial-intelligence-ufos-and-mind-control/.
