by Grace Coppola. 

Although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallisation, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallised forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living — as “thought fragments,” as something “rich and strange,” and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene.

Set against the backdrop of information overload and endless technological progress, the group exhibition Once More with Feeling lodged in _____g.s. in the second half of July. While we are inundated with proposals for the future of our species, perpetually threatening the end of our current ways of life, artists Lyndon Blue, Julia Suddenly, Chloe Spiers-Atherden, and Alex Last respond by staging rituals of remembrance for our once most essential and humble human attachments.
        The Promethean dreams of tech oligarchs are being realised by the pervasive, unconsensual gleaning of our personal data, along with mining the corpuses of all knowledge producers who ever lived, in order to train their proprietary LLMs. AI companies desire most to be the first to achieve artificial general intelligence, an AI model whose learning and knowledge capabilities equal or surpass humans’ own.[2]What may be achieved regardless are AI driven information systems with near perfect knowledge of our desires, tastes, whereabouts, social and political affiliations, by their awesome powers (supplemented by underpaid data workers[3]) of surveillance, prediction, and ultimately imitation and automation. In 2024, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison claimed that “citizens will be on their best behaviour because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” The use of these models consolidates AI as panopticon, but the collected data of our lives may also be folded into select advanced models, reducing noisy diversity and marginality in translation to the terms of a centralised system. Models become company black boxes that may eventually “[rule] over us without giving us anything but nominal control over our own lives.”[4]
        Investment in AI continues, despite hundreds of billions in losses[5], by sheer faith that revolutions in productivity are forthcoming. The development of AI did not respond to any urgent need or desire conveyed by the public; the advent of AI opened a new market and investment flooded in expectation of profit, over the heads of a global populace[6]. Hapless we are and, to extend the technofeudalist metaphor, subjected to rivers of digital excrement forfeited by these systems, like medieval peasants doused in the street. Gemma Weston’s Witnessing at _____g.s. in February reckoned with the rivulets of junk converging on our online content streams, where linear sequencing does little to distemper the erratic flow of sloppy and brutal content. AI threatens, if not to outmode us, then to continue to fundamentally infiltrate our work and our lives, whether it succeeds as promised or ultimately implodes.[7]
        There are also, in a thin gravitational ring 36,000km above the equator called the geostationary orbit, global military and commercial telecommunications satellites that, insulated from orbital decay, will outlive us.[8] Yet the obsolescence which Once More with Feeling minds is much closer at hand. It takes intra- and intergenerational change as its frame of reference—the Nokia phones which Lyndon Blue arranges and Chloe Spiers-Atherden and Alex Last’s Waldemar piano, as well as a recorded conversation with its previous owners, index a rate of technological advancement which rapidly renders even the most novel and beloved inventions outmoded. In contrast, the cosmic register of Iain Dean’s exhibition Tongue against teeth[9], which ran concurrently with Once More with Feeling at the AVA Gallery, embraced a much wider extent in its meditation on human obsolescence in the long distant future. Stairs leading to an obstructive canvas of ambiguous offering; Dean’s works both divulged disillusionment and embraced it as a mode wrought by reckoning with earth’s fate, heat death in the collapse of the sun.[10]
        Instead, Once More with Feeling reckons with the effects on human life of the uncertainty and unpredictability of progress, of the perpetual slipping of the rug out from under us. The works assembled argue that human familiarity, intimacy with, or attachments to objects prevail parallel to progress, which supersedes us and renders objects unusable without our consultation. In effect, how can we tend ourselves, know ourselves, if extensions of ourselves are constantly being upgraded? Where our bonds with others are mediated by an antique, what happens to this matrix of relations when the essential object is forsaken?
        Among the found objects, keepsakes and curiosities shown in Once More with Feeling, were twenty-six Nokia phones. Dredged up from the sands of time, deep in junk drawers, like palm-sized pearls of more bulk and brick than tech today, screens still iridescent, they were first reappraised by a renewed proximity to people, by recognition. Some gallery patrons spent time finding the model they owned from the twenty-one lined end-to-end on the windowsill, marking certain periods in their lives, “I used to have this one!”
        Five phones, arranged séance-stellate on a concrete-block, were reanimated by the power of a chiptune version of “Don’t Give Up.” The song played on loop with the scratchy sonic timbre of a very old incessant birthday card, an infirm phone moaning under the surprise new stress put on its speakers. Nevertheless, Peter Gabriel’s tune played triumphantly, a bardic entreaty directed at any listener to gather persistence of will, constancy, and memory, as if the Nokia’s miraculous survival should be a testament to our own capacity to persevere. Four other phones played elegiac accompaniment to Gabriel; a pad synth track, a quietly chiming field recording, and gently humming vocal synth drone, had their moment during five-minute silences in the main track. This soundscape was idyllic, light and diaphanous, evoking retreat and regeneration as much as Elysium, the other side of triumph, where these objects will ultimately retire forever. 
        These outmoded objects carry firsthand experience of the path to obsolescence and almost appear aware of the marvel of their reanimation in the show. As much as their recontextualisation from communications devices to art objects within the gallery space gestures at possible new functions in an alternative future, the novelty of their reanimation inevitably underlines the permanence of their obsolete status. Similarly, as much as Spiers-Atherden and Last’s simulacrum of their antiquated Waldemar piano, reproducing its unique, out-of-tune keys on a MIDI keyboard, demonstrates the capacities of new technology to reanimate old mediums, the transposition of its sound anticipates the deterioration of a still-functioning object, a funeral march before the death, a bleak homage that foregrounds impending obsolescence. The decay of this object will entail, too, the decay of social bonds, the unravelling of ties to specialised piano movers, tuners, and teachers, to be superseded by something unknown.
        Once More with Feeling could be viewed as a chamber carved out from within the surge of tunnel-vision progress. We are not far from the Anglican chapel of my schooldays—a Waldemar/MIDI piano for an organ, 8-bit hymns, litany from a YOTO box, cake for Eucharist, candles, altars. Patrons are invited to light the sausage-fat candles of Suddenly’s “Sunday Service,” to smell the grease collected from Bunnings’ cultural mainstay, to heed “Don’t Give Up,” to put on headphones and become privy to conversations recorded on the YOTO, and to play the MIDI, encouraging renewed attention to materiality and sensations felt in the present moment. At the same time, consider the gallery space itself insulating against the profane vicissitudes of change and chance rampaging in the outside world; only the cool, divine light of the sun can soak the room.[11] The objects within this shelter invoke a closed system of values antithetical to the imperative for progress, resisting overdetermination by a hierarchical progress narrative. Such a conceptualisation would see, and reduce, these objects to evolutionary stages preceding an ultimate culmination of technological perfection. In Once More with Feeling, rather, the sacramental posture of these objects converges with their sentimental value and seeming capacity of these commodities to, in Benjamin’s words, “nestle” into our hands and houses,[12] and they’re wholly recast as facets and precious extensions of the human soul. Though this use of objects is rhetorical and far short of implying or positing a machine ethics, Once More with Feeling prompts contemplation on what it means to know thyself when our perimeters, our human limits and limitations, are constantly in flux and uncertain.
        Once More with Feeling is timely, and on par with fellow artists’ anxieties regarding digital mediums, obsolescence, uncertainty, and progress—about which themes further exhibitions are certain to follow. Weston at _____g.s. and Dean at AVA Gallery but also, currently showing, Bill’s PC presents Nihaal Faizal at AGWA, wherein Faizal documents the difficulties of informal, personal preservation when both memory and medium are fragile and fickle, when digital technologies fizzle, and the disposal of digital artefacts (blogs, YouTube videos) to which we are most attached can be random and capricious. It includes a durational playlist of “liked” videos, an engagement with a platform that is far in excess of Weston’s precise temporal bounds, to stand not as an extended documentary project, but a living, growing extension of the treasure-house of memory. Faizal’s playlist has a capacity for endless expansion (you can add to it yourself), conceptually rivalling Dean’s meditation on stellar annihilation—5.1 billion videos on YouTube, 6 billion years until the sun dies. Such expansion is limited only by humans’ somatic capacity to interact with the platform’s interface, and our own curatorial and media proclivities. What if his digital archive was suddenly lost? How could it be reanimated, what form could such an encore take, how futile would these efforts be?
        A final note to emphasise is that we feel the sea-changes of progress collectively, and despite any estrangement from one another that online presence produces - each man his own agora - Once More with Feeling stresses commonality and communion, ensuing from a re-attention to hardware, objects, and medium itself, against a fascination with content. As the capacities of technology continue to expand, in imitation of our minds, and as we lend more of our lives and ourselves to these machines, a re-familiarisation with these devices sleekly designed to invisibly recede from our attention may offer a pathway back into the world and towards one another.

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Footnotes:

1. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times. 1970: 205–206.

2. ChatGPT’s newest model, GPT-6 Astra, was released to the general public on September 4th to mixed reception. ChatGPT president Greg Brockman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang claimed the release as an inaugural moment for AGI, others have used the term “proto-AGI.” Gary Marcus, while accepting that the model is an advance, reproves the view that it represents AGI. See Gary Marcus, "Sad to See Jensen Huang Claim That AGI Has Arrived, with No Evidence and No Definitions," Marcus on AI (blog), 7 September 2026, https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/sad-to-see-jensen-huang-claim-that.

3. Antonio Casilli, "Behind Every Algorithm: The Unseen Workers Powering AI," Polytechnique Insights, June 17, 2026, https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/digital/ai-the-invisible-yet-very-real-work-of-data-workers/.

4. Mikael Brunila, "Taking AI into the Tunnels," e-flux journal, February 2025, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/151/652643/taking-ai-into-the-tunnels.

5. See "Is AI Profitable?" https://isaiprofitable.com/.

6. Dylan Riley, "Blind Guesses," New Left Review, September 4, 2026, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/blind-guesses.

7. Cédric Durand, "After AI," New Left Review, January 15, 2026, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/after-ai.

8. Trevor Paglen, "Some Sketches on Vertical Geographies," e-flux journal, October 2016, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/68726/some-sketches-on-vertical-geographies.

9. See Iain Dean, Tongue against Teeth, exhibition floorsheet (A–V–A Gallery, 2026), https://a-v-a.gallery/media/pages/program/iain-dean2/0e07e0fcd1-1784691847/2026-roomsheets-id-digital.pdf.

10. Research published earlier this year from the University of Leuven suggests Earth may not in fact be engulfed by the sun. (Hooray!) See M. Esseldeurs, S. Mathis, and L. Decin, "The Fate of Earth during the Sun's Giant Phases: New Constraints from Ab Initio Tidal Modelling and AGB Mass Loss," Astronomy & Astrophysics 710 (June 2026): L26, https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202660576.

11. Brian O'Doherty, "Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space, Part I," Artforum 14, no. 7 (March 1976), https://www.artforum.com/features/inside-the-white-cube-notes-on-the-gallery-space-part-i-214843/.

12. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn, 55.

Images courtesy of _____g.s. Photography by Wayne Lim, @waaaaayne_