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Riikka Tauriainen

Die Irrelevanz die Dinge auf den Punkt zu bringen / The irrelevance of getting to the point of things

Mind map, 100 × 338 cm, 2010/2012.

Unlike the graphic arts, drawing or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversable, modifiable, and has multiple entranceways and exits and its own lines of flight. (Deleuze & Guattari)

The irrelevance of getting to the point of things by Riikka Tauriainen is a mind map cross-linking words, found images and appropriated text as print matter on a big sheet of paper. It creates not units, but rather a trans-dimensionality, directions in movement that the spectator can follow in play reinventing their own as a rhizomatic structure. The artist thus reflects on the process of memory and thinking, of retrieving information, and the dictionary structure. It is at the same time a self-reflection on patterns of research as a form of art, which has recently emerged as a specific practice in the field of arts with its own territory.

The artist seeks out discrepancies based on language and its translations and the ways meaning is betrayed and dissolves between text and image and their respective meta-levels. Playing with the inherent dichotomy of language and the tyranny of binary systems, operating with rigid formations of positivity and negativity, the artist fragments and subtracts paragraphs from their sources, and gives a chance to a change of dimensions and a multiplication and metamorphosis into new forms of meaning and non-meaning.

If on the one hand the form of hypertext finds its forerunners in the literature of James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges, who invent a new form of restructuring the links in language, in language itself or with the Lacanian subconscious constructed like language, the concept of the map as a rhizomatic structure can be seen as language as non-linguistic form, evolved from the former and crossing the border between language and things. Unlike the Web and the URI syntax and the Internet itself with its network structure that hides decisions and reinforces existing power structures as search engines like Google rule the points of connection into hypertextuality through automatic machines exploiting the inherent combinative power of language, controlling the elaboration of principles of selection of what becomes visible, through the manner in which texts and images are linked to a certain word. The decisions in the background are not transparent, remain in the depths while on the surface certain choices are generated automatically following algorithmic principles. In contrast to this the flatness of the map spread before the viewer’s eyes allows a different type of navigation between the gaze and the surface, which unfolds in the landscape of the visible rather than in a system of automatic interlinked closed boxes. The artist explores the principles of connection and heterogeneity as a non-hierarchical field, as “the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states.” (Deleuze & Guattari)

The work brings into play spatio-temporal dimensions interweaving the visible and invisible. It releases that which is hidden, not as deepness and soft algorithmic manipulation, but the ephemeral instant, that which can be grasped in-between meaning and non-meaning, that which suddenly makes an appearance so as to be discovered. This allows invention and imaginary, as well as the existence of truth in play.

Text: Dimitrina Sevova