Darkness and a deep rumbling greet the visitor upon stepping into Jose Olarte’s Gyre Dominion. As if in an underground power plant, the square space feels like its command center, with all its CRT monitors, toggles, and bare walls.
Electric hum. There is power here. Lambent three-dimensional spirals illuminate the room, slowly gyrating, drawing the viewer into a trance. Tendrils of cables creep from a large, curved mirror.
But there is more to power than circuitry. In the exhibit notes, Olarte divulges that the show is part of his research on the Angat Dam in Bulacan and the Caliraya Dam in Laguna, two of the largest hydroelectric plants in the country. Linking waterpower and control, Olarte writes: “Most communities living near dams or sites where dams will be built often use gas stoves.. instead of being forced to subscribe to electricity sold from the grids.”
Yet, these communities are practically absent in all this tech and gadgetry. What we have instead as the centerpiece are six monitors, arranged like a pyramid. Aerial footage captured by drones shows the lush forests of Bulacan and Laguna being examined by AI visual analysis software. Human structures and homes are rendered into pixels; slopes and vegetation are parsed into gradients and metadata. This pyramid juts out of the sordid landscape like an unholy shrine, metabolizing swaths of flora and fauna into barely decipherable numbers.
Indeed, the relationship between humanity and nature is necessarily that of a metabolic one. Once anything in nature is classified as a “resource,” its days are already numbered. This is on display in the piece “Warmth of the Machine,” featuring a mechanical box that charges the exhibition space with light and warmth. Behind the box is a schematic chart that diagrams the links between engineering and whirlpools, violence and foreign interests, and, finally, the artist himself and his work. Thus, what generates the “warmth of the machine” is not just the harnessing of kinetic energy into cozy heat, but the proficient combustion of all combustible materials (human and non-human lives and communities) and the anabolic synthesis of power and control.
And what’s a more efficient way to mobilize all these elements into use than absolute authority? Democracy has no place in the engine compartment - a machine simply does what it was designed to do. The question of who determines what is needed and what is not needed finds its answer at the center of the room - two monitors placed side by side, showing two familiar eyes, watching over the whole operation.
Despite this grim portrait, Olarte manages to sneak in a response. In a corner of the room, Olarte de-metabolizes remnants and images of the power-generating machine, rearranging salvaged parts and photos into an art piece, an object of privileged inutility. In the Art Nouveau-esque work titled “Tertiary Growth (in a future with no trees),” we see the refashioned mechanical components shoot out like weeds from the prison-like grid: the gears are petals, knobs and switches are nodes, pistons are buds ripe for flowering. There is nothing to use here, as the artist’s whole enterprise is to reduce the machine into an object of sinuous contemplation.
Industry is the muse in Olarte’s dystopian vision, and its clockwork modus operandi is the central metaphor. Gears, bearings, chains, and all the nuts and bolts of a well-oiled machine sync with the precision of computers and streamlined bureaucracies. Olarte’s Gyre Dominion is a testament to this fascination and fear of obstinate efficiency, may it be in the form of a drill, a data-farming drone, or a despot.
As our mountains and rivers lay hostage to more and more hosts of burrowing machines, backhoes, and surveillance drones assembled for destruction in the name of progress, Olarte’s frightening picture of a world dominated by machinic logic allows us to meditate and ask ourselves: to what extent shall we let utility shape the world?
Upon leaving the unsettling darkness of Jose Olarte’s gyre dominion, one might bring oneself to ask: what’s the use of all these? The lack of a ready answer, we propose, is already a step in the right direction.
