Loop Sequence (2023) / Adelina Allberg
Loop Sequence is a material story of the bodily impacts of living in and being affected by digitality. Through the body of the Stag beetle, the work examines the possible disorientation and dissolution of bodies, habits, and identities in digital spheres. The work is constructed of an oak/metal tentacle that is looping into the air space in search of information. Mounted along the tentacle are the put-apart and rearranged body parts of the Stag beetle. Its characteristic claws are open and reaching for a grip. The loop emerges from an electric wire, providing its play with current and energizing its twists. This looping can be seen as a symbol of entanglement with an acceleration hard to escape. It is also a gesture of reaching out and returning home with somewhat changed knowing, and so being a structure for awareness and of seeing and staying with information.
Timothy Morton writes about the surrounding intimacy of ecological awareness and the looping format it reveals itself by being a twisted, weird state. Digital reality provides a similar kind of strangeness in its familiarity. It is a world inhabited by extended or remade versions of oneself and where there’s always another update to move forward with. The loop is a state of ongoingness. Yet, it’s a shape of unknowing; the twist it moves in leaves a part unexposed. To some point, we are always estranged; maybe a body part is positioned wrong, and it is not for us to know. The structure in the “Loop Sequence” ends in openness, the tip of the tentacle is reaching out of the loop. Browsing for whatsoever. On it is the head of the Stag beetle with eyes and mouth open for the unthinkable in the future to come. The scene can be seen as a suggestion of the formations we bend into in digital reality, of the pathways we change, and what endless possibilities and functions do to one’s habitual mode. It is a back-and-forth loop about locating reality.
Adelina Allberg (SE) is an artist based in Trondheim, currently receiving a bachelor’s degree from the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art. Her work evolves around found objects and a rearrangement of them materially. This is done through highlighting certain characteristics or by twisting them in unexpected turns, and so in search for new identities. It is a play of material narration proceeding from the possibilities in the object itself, aiming to affect format as well as interpretation. Following an ecological stream of thought where the interconnectedness of entities is crucial, the studio practice is based on nonhuman interaction and co-creation. The works carry forward the, at times, irrational logic of insects, body structures of objects, and leftover material through subtle storytelling where categorization is of fluidity.