Ronnie Karfiol on Exposing the Double-Edge Sword of Technology
Credit: Ronnie Karfiol, “Internet of Refugees,” still from video, 2016
Focusing primarily on the obscured borders of technology and humanity, artist Ronnie Karfiol raises ethical and existentialist notions in her work. Karfiol questions how political, theological, and social structures form and thrive in these new portals of being.
Karfiol's studio is within the digital realm, where she renders her thoughts and reflects on the blurring, hidden frontlines between humanity and technology in the Anthropocene. Dedicated to delve into the allegory of control behind every seemingly innocent interface, she aims to reach the viewer at a pace more fit for this era and turn the passive viewer into an active participant.
Her research focuses on the very essence of a contemporary hybrid interface culture, where she allows herself to explore genres that are still in the process of self-defining—using new media to further explore topics of different social and political sea-changes through various interfaces and technological semi-revolutions. That way, the philosophical, artistic exploration is in alignment with practical means.
My first encounter with Ronnie Karfiol's work was with "Sebil 21" (2017). A web-based installation, specially commissioned for "Captive Portal," a digital wall at the Center of Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv (CCA), that can be accessed by visitors on their mobile wireless devices.
Initiated and curated by Yoav Lifshitz, Tal Messing, and CCA's former curator, Chen Tamir, "Captive Portal" was conceived to captivate audiences into viewing a temporary, site-specific work of art before continuing to surf the net or use their mobile device. When the audience logged on to the gallery's Wi-Fi network, they were alerted about a refugee boat close to the Tel Aviv shores as part of “Sebil 21.”
The work encouraged visitors to donate part of their phone's bandwidth to the nearby refugees and, by doing so, help them survive their journey. The story behind “Sebil 21” is fictional, but the public's reactions were real. Almost half of the visitors did not want to donate their bandwidth and simply gave up on the idea of using the gallery's Wi-Fi altogether.
We spoke with Karfiol about her practice, her views on new media, and how she utilizes both.
Credit: Ronnie Karfiol, “Internet of Refugees,” still from video, 2016
gggaaallleeerrryyy: As an artist who uses new media, are you affected by social media?
Ronnie Karfiol: Yes, absolutely. For me, the real studio is the internet. Like many others, I consume a lot of information from social media rather than from traditional media channels. However, as an artist, I also actively research images and the different narratives attached to them, and as someone who's fascinated by the relationship between technology and society, this is a captivating medium because of its nature and tendency to expose the loose ends behind each narrative and each image that is usually hidden from us.
Whether these stories are disruptive in nature, ones that usually do not reach traditional news channels [and if they do, it’s usually communicated very superficially], and that more often do not contain extreme images that will not appear everywhere. Sometimes it's just a combination of the two.
There is a great deal of playfulness done in changing our roles today from passive readers to content creators, and with all the manipulativeness involved, it drives me in my work. I see and am influenced by all those roles and group narratives that also stem from the design of certain platforms and the experiences embedded within them, which are inherently manipulative. Again, this is reflected in the fact that I start most of my research online and go into all sorts of rabbit holes in social media to understand what is really going on.
Credit: Ronnie Karfiol, “IN VIVO, HAND,” ABS plastics 3D Print, part of “Abracadabra,” installation view, 2019
ggg: How does that transcend in your work?
RK: For example, in my work “Internet of Refugees,” I entered secret groups of fleeing Syrian refugees. The content I was exposed to was added to the work in both the visual and the spatial sense. The subversive use of technology adopted to survival, as displayed in these groups, including phenomena such as semi-improvised gadgets, WhatsApp selfies, and SOS communication, and GPS navigation to find secure, unmonitored routes into Europe, was also added to the work. Moreover, selfies of refugees are an integral part of the video “The Virtual Guide to the Aegean Sea”, and the speculative objects of survival that I modelled in 3D are based on real hardships that those refugees had.
In the narrative sense, the voice narrators in the works were combined from two people. One, a Syrian survival instructor, the other, a narrator's processed voice, both spoke about this networked narrative. Similarly, in “War Assistant," I exhibited at the Petah Tikva Museum in the exhibition "Deep Feeling" curated by Nohar Ben-Asher, there is also a narrator’s voice, and a very manipulative one. In this work, I modeled a drone, and a kite fighting each other according to the exact fighting objects participating in the drone/kites fights in between Southern Israel and the Gaza Strip. I saw a lot of video footage of the fighting online, especially on social media - some of which aren’t even aired on television. And the video narrator exposes the manipulative and contemporary narrative in my eyes. This narrator is a female A.I. voice, akin to a ‘virtual assistant,’ only that she wants to assist humanity as a whole, not with some groceries shopping, but rather, with fighting wars.
Credit: Ronnie Karfiol, War Assistant, stills from video, 2019
ggg: You are often dealing with pressing global issues to an existentialist extent presenting ethical questions to the viewer. Tell us more about that.
RK: You could say there is some air of Weltschmerz, the sorrow of the world, that accompanies my works quite often. I feel like I am almost always drawn to more weighty and dark issues or to the dark side of things. It also seems to be related to the fact that I originally come from a Jewish-orthodox home. Having studied in an Ulpana school for girls, I was studying the bible, and some of that still resonates with me. The book of prophets, for example, was my first venture into an existentialist domain.
In that sense, something of the existential heaviness that results from much preoccupation with the world's essence, the nature of human relations, and even the issue of laws and how do we keep, or lose, or transform, our human morals in different interactive domains, such as video games or a social networking websites or even autonomous vehicles, has remained with me to this day. Even if it is expressed a little differently, I find it hard to create works that do not stem from this basic question. To be truthful, sometimes I try to amuse myself just a little, but then I find mostly just black humor at the end.
Credit: Ronnie Karfiol, Abracadabra, stills from video, 2019
ggg: What are you working on these days, and what topics are you currently researching?
RK: It’s quite difficult to answer this question because the work in the studio comes from all sorts of points that sometimes merge and re-shape together and sometimes exist separately, or even remain archived for the time being.
I can say that I am currently working on a new body of work that deals with the topic of the new ventures of humanity into the battlefield. I began to explore this area of interest already in my work, “War Assistant,” which was exhibited in the Petach Tikva museum and in the ZKM Museum.
Besides that, I also create more specific moves in the studio: a small research of the non-domestic and hybrid space between the physical and the virtual that has become more familiar to us in recent months with the state of this "new normal." I started this research in a residency at Cripta747 gallery in Turin, Italy, when I modeled an abandoned FIAT car factory during a time when the city was mapped and photographed for Google researches.
Other than that, I recently finished a project that Tamir Erlich and Noy Haimovich curated at Beit Hansen and online called “Bidud.” in which I modeled a present-day avatar of a Black Death mask-wearing figurine, taking inspiration from the ‘dance mcabare’ movement and our movement (be it yoga, dance or meditation) inside our houses during quarantine. This work also continues my interest in masks in general (Yes, I was into that before it was trendy). In short, I do not limit my work to a particular space.
Credit: Ronnie Karfiol, “MADIF (HOST),” Part of “Survival Gadgets”, ABS plastics 3D Print.
ggg: There's a futuristic sense in your works partially because of the medium and technique you use. What do you think will be the place and the role of art in the future?
RK: It is difficult for me to say what will be the role of art in the future; I feel I have more to say about the role of art in the here and now. I try to stay true to what I identify as the ‘now’ and include in my works what really is at stake in my eyes, even if sometimes these are less common themes, or the narrative I bring is more disruptive and obscure than it is familiar.
If these are refugees who migrate and survive through technology, which brings to light the issue of technology as a double-edged sword. If it's a semi-autonomous and almost invisible war because it's comfortable and distant, and if it's a virtual death that becomes a banal affair with completely transparent rituals that all take place within sterile [social] platforms, but also cling deeply to our traditional emotional world as human beings.
If the feeling that this communicates is rather futuristic, I attribute that mainly to our human flaw - we often live within old frames of thoughts, paradigms from decades ago, in which ‘mourning’ is a specific thing: it means going to a funeral, for example, or to spontaneously remember a close person - compared to many people today, but rather through Facebook profile pages of people who are not framed as a tombstone or through memories that the Facebook algorithm arbitrarily floods them with.
Similarly, we have become accustomed to war being something that takes place between two skilled armies, even though today, wars are continuously flowing into civilian space. It’s anything from Fortnite to the culture of AI and semi-autonomous flying entities, which are becoming more and more mainstream. 3D printing weapons or adaptations of weapons at home is entirely possible today, and it is done. In practice, we do not always notice how the reality around us changes, and how the inner mechanics of the world change as well.
In other words, even if my works are sometimes seen as futuristic, for me, they mostly express and reflect a time that can be called a present progressive -- or the ongoing present -- which can sometimes seem delusional and unbelievable. Still, my art must address it, mainly because it is already very much a reality in our world.
