Ghostly energies, primitive spears and electric gardens at iMAL

iMAL, Brussels’ centre for new media and digital arts, is marking its 25th birthday with an exhibition that manages to celebrate its long history while never feeling old, nostalgic nor self-indulgent. I am vertical (but I would rather be horizontal) features a broad range of practices, viewpoints and generations. There are iconic works from the history of iMAL and there are new creations. They talk about feminism, craft, DIY culture, media archaeology, the environment and more.

I am vertical (but I would rather be horizontal) at iMAL. Photo Romane Iskaria

Navid Navab in collaboration with Garnet Willis, Organism + Excitable Chaos, 2024. Exhibition view at iMAL. Photo Romane Iskaria

What all these practices have in common (apart from their engagement with digital culture) is that they defy our current technocapitalist context. They cast a critical eye at the detrimental environmental, social and political impacts of technology. Sometimes the artworks do so by showing the limits of mainstream digital tools and infrastructure. Sometimes, they suggest alternatives to them.

Raquel Meyers, Follow the Red Dots

Val Macé, Harmonie. Exhibition view at iMAL. Photo Romane Iskaria

When i read the title I am vertical (but I would rather be horizontal), I thought about videos and how horizontal is the format of choice of cinema, while the vertical format suggests (to me at least) a more self-absorbed engagement with videos. TikTok instead of cinéma d’essai. Turns out that my interpretation of the title was a total fail. It’s the title of a poem by U.S. author Sylvia Plath. I am vertical (but I would rather be horizontal) evokes the disconnect between the verticality of humans and their eagerness to be horizontal, in a position that would nurture and connect with nature. That’s what the works in the exhibition are about. They show a desire to care for the rest of the living and a deep anxiety in front of the climate urgency, extractivism, turboconsumerism and a (Western) society that has lost its bearings.

Here’s a few gems i discovered in the show:

Claire Williams, Psychic Radio. Exhibition view at Imal. Photo Romane Iskaria

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the invention of communications technologies such as the telegraph, the telephone and the radio sparked an enthusiasm for the possibility of communicating with supernatural beings and dead people. Even pioneering inventors like Thomas Edison, Konstantin Raudive, Oliver Lodge had a marked interest in experimental and occult sciences.

Claire Williams uses craft techniques not only to revisit spiritualism but also to deconstruct digital technology. She embroiders speakers, stitches antennas, crochets resistors and creates noise with knitting.

The Psychic Radio she is showing at iMAL takes the form of a table covered in a black felt fabric which doubles as a radio. The work imagines an electronic embroidered circuit that would have been crafted by female mediums of the late 19th century using the textile techniques found in the 1890 book Encyclopedia of Needlework. The result is akin to crystal radios, ultra-simple radio receivers that use minimal homemade electrical components powered by the energy of radio waves. This embroidered radio distances itself from the sleekness and crude rationality of contemporary devices engineered in Silicon Valley. It is a sensing and tactile surface that uses radio waves to reveal the presence of ghostly energies of our electromagnetic environment.

Sunjoo Lee, Electric Garden, 2024. Exhibition view at iMAL. Photo Romane Iskaria

Sunjoo Lee planted a small garden that powers a clock using Microbial Fuel Cells. MFC converts chemical energy into electricity using microorganisms as biocatalysts to break down organic matter, such as wastewater or agricultural waste. Each container acts as a battery and is equipped with electrodes that harvest electrons emitted by the anaerobic soil bacteria. The plants and insects in the garden feed the bacteria, allowing electricity generation to continue as long as the ecosystem thrives.

Electric Garden is an ecosystem where microbes, plants, insects and electronics coexist and collaborate. The work reimagines electricity as a living entity that needs to be cared for. Devices powered by the garden are designed to accommodate the slow, fluctuating currents of the microbes.

Cécile Babiole, GOBO GOBO HEY!, 2012. Installation view at iMAL. Photo Romane Iskaria

Cécile Babiole, GOBO GOBO HEY!, 2012

GOBO GOBO HEY! presents a variation on the theme of gobos. A gobo is a piece of perforated metal that is placed inside or in front of a projector to control the shape of the emitted light and its shadow. In 2012, during a residency at iMAL FabLab, Cécile Babiole used a laser cutter to make small plexiglas gobos.

She then placed the gobos inside big, old-school slide projectors. The images projected on the wall reveal the physical violence of the digital manufacturing process. By heating the plexiglas, the laser deformed, burnt, melted the material and darkened its original colour. There’s nothing sophisticated, delicate nor precise about the visual result. The cuts of the gobos, magnified by the projection, look crude, almost hand-drawn.

The title is a nod to the punk culture of the late 70s and reflects the brutal nature of the machine. Gabba Gabba Hey! was a catchphrase of punk rock band Ramones and their fans. And indeed, there’s something a bit punk in the way the artist mixed laser cutting, a vanguard technology back in 2012, with an obsolete technology like the carousel slide projector.

Leonard Leyens, La brèche. Installation view at iMAL. Photo Romane Iskaria

La brèche is an installation that doubles as an introduction into the work of pl4tform.org, a collective investigating forms and practices that evade the centralisation, opacity and capitalisation of communication channels. Through the tinkering with tools, the demystification of techniques and the attempt to make them common.

La Breche (the breach, the gap) looks like a refuge and functions like one. It shelters the visitor from capitalism and offers a series of custom-made tools, such as a box hosting a radio transmitter to do community radio, a mobile server, archives from field recordings, a wattmeter that shows the actual consumption of energy of the installation (both the energy going out at the moment and the total of energy consumed since the opening of the exhibition.), etc.

And then there are some artworks that i loved when i discovered them ages ago. None of them feel dated today:

Suzanne Treister, Hexen 2.0. Exhibition view at iMAL. Photo Romane Iskaria

Susan Treister‘s investigation shows the connections between the rise of mass intelligence, the history of the internet, the occult and the counterculture in dense maps and diagrams and a hand-coloured deck of Tarot cards.

Quentin Destieu, Sylvain Huguet – Collectif Dardex, Refonte, 2014-2015. Exhibition view at iMAL. Photo Romane Iskaria

Quentin Destieu, Sylvain Huguet – Collectif Dardex, Refonte, 2014-2015

Dardex made primitive spears and weapons made from different electronic waste materials. Copper alloys, aluminium and gold were extracted from e-waste, melted and poured into moulds, echoing the ancient techniques of making weapons. By bringing us back to the Bronze Age, the work suggests a post-apocalyptic humanity that will need rudimentary tools, not computers, to survive.

Jonah Brucker Cohen, Alerting Infrastructure!, 2003. Exhibition view at iMAL. Photo Romane Iskaria

Each time you visit the iMAL website, you activate Jonah Brucker Cohen‘s jackhammer, damaging the building a little bit more. Alerting Infrastructure! “amplifies the concern that physical spaces are slowly losing ground to their virtual counterparts.”

I am vertical (but I would rather be horizontal) was curated by Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux and the iMAL team. The exhibition remains open at iMAL in Brussels until 21 September 2025.

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