The Gravity of Collapse

We’re becoming fully
quantified subjects, not just
bodily, but mentally as well.
This gives rise to unprecedented,
data-driven modes of biopower
that we’ve never encountered before.

Pakui Hardware

Defne Ayas: What might a revised framework for cybernetics – one that has shaped not only engineering but also the arts and humanities – look like today? How could it help reorient contemporary thought? In your view, how can cybernetics be detoxified to support more grounded, ecologically and ethically attuned perspectives? And how might it support us now, as we navigate the overlapping collapses and regenerations of ecological, political, and bodily systems?

Pakui Hardware: It’s interesting that your question made us realise how little we’ve used the term ‘cybernetics’ when exploring contemporary issues or thinking about our own practice. Perhaps that’s because cybernetics still feels associated (to us, at least) with certain retrofuturistic experiments, visions and even utopias. Whereas now, as you mention, we’re witnessing a hyper-collapse of all systems before our eyes. There seems to be no country for utopias at all. Or we’re small ‘subjectivities’ in the world of Big Data, ‘peasants’ in the regime of techno-feudalism, living out Tiqqun’s prophecy of cybernetics as a new technology of government.

Pakui Hardware (Neringa Černiauskaitė, Ugnius Gelguda) and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Inflammation, 2024. Lithuanian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. Installation view at Chiesa di Sant’Antonino, Venice. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda. Image courtesy of the artists and Lithuanian National Museum of Art.

However, perhaps this is precisely the right moment to revisit cybernetics and its key principles: moving from objects to systems, being ready for radical openness and feedback. The focus on systems and their interactions allows us to grasp, examine and challenge power and systemic injustice, rather than attributing the social or economic failure to atomised individuals. This systemic approach and feedback analysis also help us see how various actions and factors impact ecological (im)balance. However, what is obviously missing from how cybernetics has developed is the role of the humanities, of critical theory, not merely reflecting on what techno scientists and corporations are building, but actively participating in the creative process, shaping it from within. A more interdisciplinary approach is crucial, not just in reflection, but in the making. We need more embodiment in a world of ones and zeros.

DA: How does cybernetics inform your conception of the body, as something endlessly modifiable, programmable, or even extractable? How do you understand this in relation to your artistic and philosophical inquiry? As systems like AI, synthetic biology, and bioengineering evolve, how are they transforming our understanding of the body? What role can art play in critically engaging with these shifts?

PH: On the one hand, rapidly developing technologies – including synthetic biology, AI or, let’s say, regenerative medicine – are opening uncharted territories for new forms of life, radical plasticity and unpredictability. All of this is extremely interesting for us, both from a theoretical perspective and a plainly formal and material one – we are talking about designing life itself! Think of xenofeminism or Prometheanism: if nature is unjust, change nature. On the other hand, these same technologies always drag darker shadows behind them: they penetrate, monitor, control and shape not only our bodies and things around us, but increasingly intervene in our emotional lives and mental health. We’re becoming fully quantified subjects, not just bodily, but mentally as well. This gives rise to unprecedented, data-driven modes of biopower that we’ve never encountered before.

There’s often an expectation that art will offer some big reveal about something like ‘We’re all governed by algorithms’ and that this will somehow make a difference. Most people, actually, are fully aware they’re being surveilled, they willingly share their most intimate data with corporations, and their decisions and desires are shaped by invisible but very real powers. And they’re fine with that, sadly. There’s so much resignation and nihilism around that, it’s kind of fascinating in the most horrific sense. However, what art can do (or at least what we’re trying to do in our practice) is invite viewers to meet the unknown, the other; to create a crack in the smooth understanding of reality, create certain ‘hiccups’ in the seamless flow between technology, capital and bodies.

 Job Piston: What I find remarkable about Pakui Hardware’s work is that it doesn’t attempt to offer a definitive ethical stance or resolve the question of right and wrong in the face of cybernetic systems. Instead, it approaches these systems from a deeply human perspective – asking not only how they function, but how they feel, and what emotional and psychological effects they have on our perception and behaviour. Their sculptural installations don’t present conclusions; they create conditions of ambiguity and unease that invite the viewer to pause and reflect. Rather than exposing some hidden truth, the work probes the paradoxes we live with, the coexistence of conflicting realities shaped by technology, capital, and the body. That tension, I think, is profoundly human, and it’s precisely where their art gains its critical force.

Pakui Hardware (Neringa Černiauskaitė, Ugnius Gelguda) and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Inflammation, 2024. Lithuanian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. Installation view at Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, Venice. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda. Image courtesy of the artists and Lithuanian National Museum of Art

DA: How do you navigate the tension between technological enhancement and the deep fragility of lived experience? What roles do intimacy, illness, and maintenance play in the worlds you build?

PH: Paradoxically, technological enhancement often creates that same vulnerability. We’re hyperconnected, yet we’ve never been lonelier or more anxious. Gigantic warehouses of goods are dominated by robots, yet human bodies literally break under the inhumane speed and hours of labour. Big Pharma invents and approves new medicines daily, yet pollution, cancer, stress and poverty kill us more than ever. It’s a vicious cycle of improvement and destruction. That’s why we try to emphasise the importance of embodiment in relation to technologies – and by embodiment we mean not only physical bodies, but also the context, histories, and communities they encompass within and beyond themselves. In the neoliberal era of efficiency, such embodiment – ailing, vulnerable, troublesome bodies – isn’t good for business. Atomisation is key to executing biopower, which is why it’s crucial to continually remind, speak of, and (re)build interconnectivity: to show how transcorporeal relations shape us and everything around us. Vulnerability makes us seek help, seek each other.

Such an approach invites a more intimate, sensitive relationship with what surrounds us and with what may be far from us, but affects us all the same.

JP: I would add that your recent installation in the seventeenth-century Sant’Antonin church in Venice creates a powerful temporal tension – one that resists the forward push of a neoliberal, tech-driven future by grounding it not only in the weight of historical memory, but also in the embodied rituals of the physical world. The installation invites a reflection on the concerns of techno-sceptics – not only those grounded in spiritual belief, but also those wary of the fragile trust we place in systems that increasingly abstract us from material and communal life. The friction is further underscored by the material contrasts within the installation – soft, organic forms suspended from rigid, industrial structures – highlighting the strain between human vulnerability and mechanised efficiency.

DA: What are the dangers of the cybernetic pursuit of infinite progress, and what forms of interruption or resistance do you find compelling?

PH: It is already clear how the technocratic worldview – which prioritises reason, calculation and utilitarianism – tends to ignore the devastating ecological, social and political consequences of so-called ‘progress’. By claiming there is a technological solution to any problem, regardless of scale, the technocrats want us to forget the laws of entropy – how systems are bound to become chaotic, how deterioration follows any development. To embrace such chaos, unpredictability, failure, fog, ambiguity, and plurality – these are the forms of interruption in the slick vision of technocratic progress. Progress that strives for hairless, tireless, quantified bodies is a white, Western-male fantasy. Any other non-Western cosmology that focuses not on the separation of things and spheres, but on an endless web of life, is a good enough example of how there isn’t one solution to any problem as long as we place humans at the centre of the universe. Solutions should be collective, and by collective, we mean not only human beings, but all forms of life.

DA: When we first met in 2022, we spoke about philosopher Catherine Malabou’s book What Should We Do With Our Brain? How do you approach the concept of plasticity, not just as a material property, but as a philosophical and political condition of the body?

PH: Catherine Malabou herself has expanded the concept of plasticity from neuroscience to anarchism and accidents. For us too, plasticity is about the dynamic relationship between receiving form and giving it. Such formative interactions can be explored on a variety of levels – ecological, political, philosophical, bodily. It’s very much about testing undiscovered territories of possible becomings, of new forms of being (both as identity and as physical body). These unknown forms of being might emerge through some sort of rift (an accident), an explosion or through something less violent but equally transformative. So it’s about openness – being impressed upon by other forces, other bodies, while also transforming others in return. It’s about transgressing the current state, whether that’s a state of mind, body, or nature. It’s also about loss, as one cannot gain new form(s) without sacrificing the existing one.

It’s quite interesting that the writer Estelle Hoy, in her essay for the catalogue of the Pavilion of Lithuania at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 coined the term ‘aesthetic plasticity’ to describe our work. According to Hoy, ‘The concept of aesthetic plasticity is crucial from two points of view: it illuminates the social condition that subsumes our bodies while offering an understanding of how the neural substratum can adapt and go beyond… and it inaugurates the potential of envisaging, through conscious action, trans- formation of the sociopolitical mind.’ So plasticity is still very much embedded in our practice, even if we don’t always articulate it openly.

DA: You’ve long been invested in the future of prosthetic organs, synthetic nervous systems, and techno-biological hybrids. How do you imagine the future of these entities, whether through prosthetics, gene editing, or neural interfaces? What ethical or philosophical challenges do they raise?

PH: A closer integration of technology and biology, as well as further hybridisation, is unavoidable. However, we’re not talking about a single arrow of ‘progress’ moving forward. Rather, there are countless such arrows pointing in different directions – an uncountable number of parallel temporalities. While those who can afford it may consciously seek biotechnological integration to gain longevity, efficiency, beauty, or invulnerability, others will be ‘hybridised’ involuntarily, as an ecological or socioeconomic consequence of the technological progress. Factory workers wearing exoskeletons to lift heavy loads, office workers surveilled and tracked by their own computers at and outside of work, rocks growing layers of plastic, and animals adapting to new environment and nourishment fused between natural and humanmade materials – these are just a few examples of involuntary hybrids. In most cases, enhancement is a luxury, and we all know from dystopian sci-fi scenarios where the deepening divide between the ‘enhanced’ and the ‘natural’ tends to lead…

As for the ethical and philosophical challenges of near and far-future hybrid beings, such questions are already widely discussed – both in open and behind-closed-doors forums. What do we consider a subject? When does such a subject gain rights and protection? Gain personhood? What is intelligence, and how is it measured? For now, we hold an extremely anthropocentric view of what counts as intelligence and what we consider ‘life’, but the rapid development of AI towards possible AGI presses us to accept the emergence and existence of completely unfamiliar, even unintelligible, forms of intelligence. Can technology simulate empathy and intimacy? Perhaps such empathy wouldn’t be ‘real’, but rather unique in its own beautiful or uncanny way. New scientific and technological developments also compel us to reconsider our relationship to the ‘other’, to reconsider intimacy, responsibility, and maintenance. Will we continue to follow the established Western approach to ‘self ’ and ‘other’, as something that needs to be subjugated for one’s needs, or is this a unique opportunity to radically rethink our colonising and utilitarian worldview?

DA: Job, you’ve commissioned Pakui Hardware for this edition of Performa. How might performance offer new ways of exploring the techno-mediated body? Its vulnerability, transformation, and resilience?

JP: Part of Performa’s invitation is to encourage artists to explore their ideas through new forms – in this case, we began with the prompt of sound and music. We asked: How can sound embody the hybrid of technology and the body in a way that remains legible and emotionally resonant for an audience? That line of inquiry led us to work with both an electronic music composer and a community choir, two contrasting modes of music-making: machine and human.

The performance also navigates the emotional landscape of a progressively isolated world, where technology simultaneously enhances well-being and mediates, even distorts, our relationships to each other, to our communities, and to the natural world. These tensions are animated through live video and AI, where each performance unfolds in real time with unpredictable results. Nothing is pre-programmed; the protagonist’s input shapes each unique outcome.

This embrace of liveness is what sets performance apart from theatre or scripted programmes, it leaves space for variations, for plural readings, for unexpected ruptures. The audience is invited into a space where anything might happen, each performance becomes a singular, unrepeatable encounter.

DA: Do you feel that live encounters offer something distinct, particularly when addressing clinical, speculative, or intimate bodies?

 JP: Performance offers a uniquely open dreamstate, one where an individual can construct their own world outside of conventional frameworks like the stage, four walls, or even fixed logic. It resists containment. Time in performance isn’t linear; it can feel immediate or simultaneous, unfolding all at once. In this space, we witness the body and mind in real-time dialogue, shifting, responding, revealing new ideas and portals as they surface. This space creates an especially potent context for engaging with bodies: bodies as ideas in flux, under pressure, or on the edge of transformation.