10 Questions with Negentrop

Negentrop is a transnational collective of artists started by three sisters in Cornwall, UK, in 2022. Their aim is to visually respond to Cybernetic and Eschatological themes emerging in Science, Philosophy, and Art and, through this, develop new unknown ways of working visually & collectively. Negentrop believes individual creation is an 'obsolete' and 'manipulated' ideal and that we have entered a creative era that is unknown, unbound, and unhuman.

Negentrop wants to challenge the idea of 'the individual' and 'the human' in creativity throughout modern history. Collectively merging to identify a new intelligence and spirit in the pursuit of a negentropic eschatology.

The name Negentrop is taken from the concept of 'Negative Entropy' first coined by Erwin Schrodinger in the 1944 book "What is Life?"
This concept put into question the second law of thermodynamics (namely, that entropy must increase).

For Negentrop, 'Negative Entropy' is used to develop a mode of practice that uses 'Negative Entropy' as the driving metaphor. Negentrop then applies this method to conceptual projects designed to question the individual/human in art creation.

Our first project, Cybernetic Eros, was a set of automated responses to readings on cybernetics. The process was designed to mimic the accelerated pace of image creation specific to social media platforms. In this case, all images were delivered to specifications in resolution and size for optimised platform dissemination under creative commons 4.0 licence.

Negentrop is currently working on an A.I. collaboration, "The Library of Ylem", due for release in mid-2023.
Negentrop is open to collaborations that investigate links between philosophy and visual experimentation.

www.negentrop.cargo.site | @negentr0p

INTERVIEW

First of all, tell our readers a little bit about you. How did the Negentrop project start? 

Negentrop is the project of three sisters, Levan, Blaise, and Ursula, who were born in Penzance, Cornwall, in 1996. Inspired by the French philosophical journal 'Tiqqun' they were arrested in 2017 while attempting to cut the Transatlantic Telegraph Cable (carrying the majority of UK internet traffic). The sisters were released on bail later that year.
Negentrop started properly during the winter of 2019, when the sisters reflected on their attempt to intervene in what appeared to be a growing society of control (see Deleuze) and began thinking more intensely about the possible effects of a networked society, social media, and the concept of 'Art' in a world where we are increasingly 'alone together'.
Rather than making further attempts to attack the communication infrastructures of the growing hyper-reality, the sisters decided to join the cybernetization of reality - the gradual but implacable translation of all nature/culture into information or code (Baudrillard). Hoping that through the Negentrop project, they can change the code from the inside.

As a collective, how many people are part of the project? And how did you start working together? 

The core of Negentrop are the sisters Levan, Blaise, and Ursula. We are now split between Italy, Berlin, and Cornwall. For each new project, we aim to work with other artists from different cultures and continents, taking inspiration from Nicholaus Bourriaud's concept of the "Radicant". Transplanting ideas and exchanging our modernist origins rather than imposing them. The most interesting ideas now are coming from minority and alienated cultures alongside developments in machine learning. Here we see a convergence between two types of experience, developing a new unequaled concept of the human. What we call the unhuman (see theorists like Rosi Braodotti and Sadie Plant).  

How do you collaborate on a project? What is your creative process, and what are the roles inside your collective? 

We all have our own practice but jointly bend and mimic each other until another type of aesthetic emerges then it's released under one name. We discuss the concept of each piece as a collective, and then everyone works on the same piece asynchronously. Levan, for instance, developed the initial art for 'Cybernetic Eros', then Blaise and Ursula simply copied until you couldn't tell who made which piece. We see this process as a way to watch the dissolution of the ego over time. 

What philosophy guides your work and collaboration? What would you like to demonstrate with your work?

The aim of the Negentrop project is to redefine the history of the individual in art through the lens of cybernetic theory and developments in machine learning. It seems obvious to us that the real question of art praxis now is one of creative desire and locating where this 'desire' originates. 
Through our work as Negentrop, we want to draw attention to these lines of desire showing the manipulation of individual creativity for better or worse. Machine learning is helping us re-learn our own desires but only within a planetary-wide computational framework that runs on an advertising model, powered by algorithms that seek homogenisation and equilibrium. Our contention is that this is a category error.

What themes do you pursue? And what aspect of your work do you pay particular attention to?

We pursue one theme "what is the future of the human soul and human race" Our art is an attempt to develop an eschatological hypothesis, and to do this, we pay particular attention to the validity and utility of 'individuality' in Art and its manipulation by large economic power structures. Economics can be shown to dictate what is produced in Art unconsciously, whether it is the influence of the technical drawing skills that were taught to Duchamp and Picabia or the clumsy bold images of silicon valley's "corporate memphis" style that dominates social media. Negentrop aims to limn this unconscious manipulation.  

Where do you find your inspiration for your work? 

Negative Entropy is the inspiration for all our work. 'Negative Entropy' was first coined by Erwin Schrodinger in the 1944 book "What is Life?" This new neologism put into question the second law of thermodynamics (namely that entropy must increase); we associate it with negative spaces, borderlands, territory, patterns in lichen, nature, road repairs, and liminal spaces through to the schizophrenic untethered imagery of cyberspace. It is the reordering of chaotic information and the image overload of our' extreme present' reconfiguring it to discover new potentials; similar to Paolozzi's infamous 'Bunk' lecture in the '60s or Walter Benjamin's own 'Arcades Project' in the '30s.
For our current project, we are aesthetically inspired by the 'Comic Abstraction' movement.

Is there anything else you would like to experiment with, in terms of your art career or collective project?

At the moment, we are experimenting with Machine Learning and the potential for artificial morphology. After this, we hope to increase our size and collective potential for globally coordinated projects or 'happenings' that involve surveillance and facial recognition software.

What are you working on now, and what are your plans for the future? Anything exciting you can tell us about?

We are just finishing the last few images for our next project, 'The Library of Ylem' inspired by Jorge Louis Borges' Library Babel' and Louis-Auguste Blanque's 'Eternity by The Stars', due for release in summer 2023. The Ylem is a foundational substance of our universe. The point of this artwork is to conflate this idea of the 'Ylem' with the foundational substance of our networked universe, the birth of hyperreality and cognitive capture. 

What do you think of the art community? And how do you engage with fellow artists and art lovers? 

Art now is a way to sustain the attention of the makers themselves while they have little awareness or relevance to the very systemic or philosophical problems they seek to highlight. Sadly that includes us as well.
We see communities building up in the web 3.0 space and often reach out more often than not through Discord. There is a lot happening, especially in South America, regarding digital art because the global south has more to gain from the NFT market and blockchain art in general; so obviously, that's where the most interesting digital work is appearing. Look at magma collective, for instance. 2023 will be an interesting year for the continuing battle between artistic IP and platform capitalism.

Finally, share something you would like the world to know about you?

We have a brother who is not in Negentrop.