Galleri Opdahl presents an exhibition curated by Rebecca Ackroyd. The title is taken from a film by B. S. Johnson called ‘You’re Human Like the Rest of Them’. The protagonist, a schoolteacher named Haakon, has an encounter with the frailty of his own mechanical body which triggers a sudden realisation; that aging and death are inevitable. He realises that entropy is the unbreakable law of the universe. That all organisms, and indeed all matter, must disintegrate and die; “We are all rotting!” Haakon shouts. He observes that his colleagues and students all exhibit the necessary delusion; to tolerate the truth of living, humans must distract themselves with petty humour, heroism and denial.

Children: “He’s off his squiff. Mad! Mad! Strait round the twist!”

Haakon: “Already you cover up like adults. Know that you can live only by illusion! You must choose to believe I am mad!”

Entropy was discovered in 1865. It is the law of the universe that prohibits immortality and affords randomness the authority of well laid plans. Entropy is the force that prevents light and heat from a raging fire to knit back together into freshly chopped kindling. The laws of thermodynamics are the most iron clad and irreversible features of reality. The only known example of matter that can delay the punishment and dissolution of entropy is life. Life harnesses negative entropy. It too must perish, but as Haakon points out, sensing that it is doomed, life makes itself “an awkward thing to kill”.

Life proliferates by dividing itself into trillions of parts. All organisms and indeed all species sacrifice themselves in terrifying numbers; again, and again. In its agony, life flings itself forward, escaping the total death of the system by increasing the complexity of the whole. The existential crisis of Haakon is his awareness of his individuation; he is both alone and distinct, yet inseparable from the planetary super organism, who’s survival is at the expense of individuals. His conscious awareness of an inner life is but a tool to overcome obstacles in an uncertain environment: to optimise his reproductive fitness. From the perspective of thermodynamics, the warm cocoon of everyday human life, its loves and desires are simulated abstractions that mask the underlying material reality. Art and poetry are an anaesthetic, or productivity drug, to camouflage the psychopath of nature. Human life is no different from the algae in the oceans. To avoid liquification, it has the relentless need to consume as much energy as it can, at the fastest possible rate.

‘According to Forbes, 16 Psyche, a 140-mile-wide asteroid could contain a core of iron, nickel, and gold worth $10,000 quadrillion’

Human consciousness only makes matters worse, through its ability to recognise suffering, humans have built technologies to delay death. This only destroys the niche of the species quicker, triggering an exponential cost curve of energy consumption. The energy input of fruits and animals musty be augmented; at first by firewood and then crude oil. The world burns a 100 million barrels of oil a day. Each barrel of oil is the equivalent of 2,120 days of human physical labour (assuming the days are 8 hours continuous work). Therefore, to maintaining the human niche requires 212 billion simulated human workers per day (26.4 times the entire human population on the planet). From Stavanger alone 1.7 million barrels are exported daily. This still isn’t enough. We must have more.

Occupy Mars!

What does this giant incineration machine dream of in its unconscious sleep? Through the shimmering informational networks of the planet - the internet, rainforests, power lines and coral reefs - quintillions of signals flash in and out of existence. The totality of the system is blind, but its countless parts form semantic frames, in which information can be processed, communicated and felt. Waves of this data ocean rise into the present; a miniscule fraction blinks into awareness, before dissolving into random noise and heat in the past. We should be glad of our ignorance, and the minimal processing power of our biological minds. The bit rate of suffering in the biosphere and human culture would melt our brains into a black hole if we could experience it.

‘ESCAPE’

Artworks are artifacts that soothe death anxiety. They are a phenomenon that has parasitised human culture. Utilising aesthetics, artworks imitate fitness payoffs in the ancestral biosphere. Their meanings are a mimetic illusion, simulacra channelled through neural pathways that evolved to recognise killer beasts in the undergrowth. We venerate artworks, housing them in climate-controlled galleries and museums: they survive in collections as their human keepers perish. Through art, human beings feel immortal.

“We rot and there’s nothing that can stop it!

Can’t you feel the shaking horror of that!?

You can’t just ignore these things!

You just can’t!”

Text by Sean Steadman