Originally published in Hungarian by Endre Cserna in Artmagazin, issue 151. English translation and foreword by Lili Rebeka Tóth.

πάντα ῥεῖ

Having been trained as a medievalist, I often encounter the question: what does the medieval have to do with our present times? Can the medieval teach us something? Anyone who has spent time with Cyprien Gaillard’s Ocean II Ocean will know the answer, in which the stepping stone is Vladimir Nabokov’s phrase: “The future is but the obsolete in reverse.”

I spent the last three years in and out of New York, the metal toilets, the ferry rides, and the cheap view of Niagara Falls all spoke to me. I drove a silver Chevy Malibu and often took Hungarian friends up to the Falls. It never crossed our minds to cross the border and pay for the “real” experience. All this, the metal fixtures, the ferries, the Niagara view,  reappears in Gaillard’s exhibition, where cycles of circulation and decay replace distinctions between what is natural and what is constructed. Like a child’s playground, time becomes Gaillard’s toy, something he zooms in and out of, surpassing the raw, clumsy finitude of human life and the romantic nostalgia we attach to the sublime infinity of landscape, temporality, and matter. One feels awe, sadness, and a detached admiration, as though only the Creator could truly witness what unfolds across such a span of time. Ocean II Ocean becomes an endless Wagnerian opera, without the liberating synthesis of resolution, a sequence of scenes quietly narrated by Gaillard’s eye.

 Cyprien moves fast, and like a shadow, rarely appears in public. I met him briefly while he was installing in Budapest, and hoped he might answer a few questions about his show at Trafó Gallery. Trafó’s exhibiting artists usually appear in short video interviews as part of their exhibitions, but Gaillard chose not to. The Hungarian audience was therefore left to interpret his work (and his silence) on their own. The show brought together three of his earlier films, including Ocean II Ocean, first introduced at the 58th Venice Biennale in a disused lighthouse at the edge of the Arsenale. I learned about the upcoming exhibition in late spring, and had to keep my fan-girl enthusiasm to myself until the public announcement in late August. There are only a few contemporary artists I admire as much as Gaillard for his ability to comment without words, and to draw invisible connections between the things that surround us. I may still hold on to an Arthur C. Danto-like understanding of art, but I expect nothing less from it than transformation: the turning of the mundane into the magical.

Of course, Gaillard does not work alone. He collaborates with musicians, cinematographers, and installation teams; his right hand and assistant is the Berlin-born artist and architect Max Paul. Although Gaillard never answered my questions - unsurprising given his travel schedule and his major concurrent exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich - Artmagazin’s editor-in-chief, Tünde Topor, encouraged me to share these reflections nonetheless. “In the era of AI,” she said, “readers seek something personal, something relatable. And besides, Trafó didn’t quite communicate who was coming to Budapest. They should have emphasized the Venice show, something Hungarian audiences could have connected to.”

I was also surprised by the modest attendance at the opening. But the small curatorial team (Bori Szalai and Judit Szalipszki) worked with remarkable precision to bring the show together during a transitional moment at Trafó, as the institution began a reconfiguration under its new director, Katalin Erdődi. The quiet opening does not diminish the strength of the exhibition; its cohesion, its attentiveness. Szalai told me that the three films had never been shown together before, and that this constellation offered Gaillard new layers of interpretation, especially when viewed against the Hungarian socio-political backdrop. I had hoped Gaillard might reflect on how his days in Budapest affected his earlier assumptions, but in his absence, the curatorial text provides a kind of answer: “The environment in which a building, a ruin, or an object exists is not static or timeless, but is created within a web of geopolitical, ideological, social, and cultural forces.” Gaillard’s work “makes the silence of violence audible.”^[1]

These lines brought to mind Hungary’s own Metro Line 2 - planned around 1950 and modeled after the Soviet example -  whose construction required the demolition of the old National Theatre in 1965 to make way for Blaha Lujza Square station. In Ocean II Ocean, the works confront the viewer with a grand narrative: the perpetual collapse of utopian ideals and their negligible scale in relation to deep time. Gaillard is often associated with Romanticism, and his most recent film, Retinal Rivalry,  introduced at Sprüth Magers during Berlin Art Week last April,  reaffirmed this association for me. Yet for the Hungarian audience, the Trafó exhibition offered a point of departure for reflecting on a broader tendency in contemporary art: the revisiting and mourning of modernity’s lost ideals. Through the lens of modernist ruin aesthetics, Gaillard’s works contemplate the decline (and possible afterlife) of modernist architecture and thought. Perhaps this is unsurprising in a country where the ruins of modernity, the postmodern condition, and Svetlana Boym’s dual forms of nostalgia — reflective and restorative — remain living concepts. What follows can be read as a continuation of these reflections, a theoretical companion to the exhibition written by Endre Cserna, first published in Hungarian in issue 151 of Artmagazin, and presented here in my translation. 

Lili Rebeka Tóth

CRISIS, FLOW, AND HYBRIDITY

 In an interview, Cyprien Gaillard casually remarks that his works fight against nostalgia—by means of anachronism. This half-sentence is crucial: it points out that although at his Budapest exhibition we encounter fossils, turntable needles, and video loops that are all associatively tied to longer or shorter durations, we are not confronted with problems of time or longing for the past as such. Rather, what interests the artist is closure, the infinite and inescapable loop that is so characteristic of our era across several overlapping dimensions. Two defining constellations of the present flow are the incessant construction of never-existing golden ages and the way infinite global networks transform every process into endless, perpetual feedback, aligning our desires toward repetition and the maintenance of a constant state. Nostalgia thus becomes not simply remembrance or empathy, but a (chrono-)political action: the dismantling of progress and an open future, the freezing of the past into a fetish—a congelation that simultaneously homogenizes, smooths over, and totalizes, producing images of the past in which everyone has an assigned place, a fixed identity, and a pre-given, inescapable community. Order, stability, and belonging present themselves as ready-made answers. Gaillard’s collapsing and dematerializing modernist buildings, his video that renders global networks in a plastic and atmospheric way, and his pop-modern–fossil hybrids are in fact conceptual weapons aimed at overwriting these ready-made answers or at the imaginaries that sustain them.

 In The Cybernetic Hypothesis, a text by the short-lived French anarchist journal Tiqqun and the anonymous authorial collective associated with it, the authors point out that although common thinking identifies our postmodern era with the disappearance and fragmentation of grand narratives, the post–World War II world continues to be organized around a single fictional organizing principle, committing the crimes of cybernetics under the guise of liberalism. In their view, cybernetics is not merely the virtual sphere of information control and production imposed upon us from above, but, in essence, a far more abstract apparatus that, intertwined with capitalism, constitutes sovereign power. Cybernetics is a technology of governance in which earlier instruments of domination—discipline, punishment, surveillance, propaganda, economic influence, the diversion of political discourses, the immobilization of social hierarchies, and so forth—merge into one another: that is, a global war machine, the latest generation of totalitarianism, which Tiqqun considers fundamentally anti-human. Not only our economy, but virtually everything can be described, managed, and optimized according to cybernetic principles, and exists solely within this instrumentality. All types and phenomena of contemporary capitalism and the proliferating problems organized around them can be situated within this broader—perhaps not coincidentally less frequently invoked, yet more precise—descriptive category, whether we speak of surveillance, informational, digital, internet-based, platform-logical, algorithmic, attention-based, gig, cloud-based, or newly AI-shaped forms of capitalism. Cybernetic capitalism encompasses all of these.

 In Gaillard’s 2019 video Ocean II Ocean, the ocean appears as an entity, a hyperobject that exceeds individual perceptions of time and space. Despite its sublime scale, however, it cannot escape the global networks of cybernetic capitalism: in its temporality, extent, and flora and fauna, it inevitably becomes part of this system. From urban infrastructures to discarded devices, everything is channeled into its integrity, making it almost unavoidable that we recognize within it the parasitic, life-destroying relationship between system and nature, while images of deep time are arranged into continuity: fossils find their place within the unfathomably complex systems of our present-future. What Tiqqun calls cybernetic hypothesis is a post-political worldview rooted in American military research of the 1940s, particularly in the control- and command-oriented military research of mathematician Norbert Wiener. Ultimately, it assumes that the human can be reduced to pre-programmed biological, psychological, and social behavioral patterns that fit into logical relations, can be reprogrammed, and thus have their errors eliminated. This hypothesis presents itself as a harmless and impartial theory of information and communication, according to which, by removing the human factor from the system, transcending ourselves, we obtain a stable order maintained by objective “teleological mechanisms.” That is, we return to a primordial state of a non-fragmented, non-disoriented world.

This omnipresent, normalized, and rationalizing system is most visibly encountered in the organization of politics and the market economy in everyday life, yet its ambition goes far beyond this. Its self-propelling teleology aims to eliminate uncertainty entirely, but in doing so it faces the contradiction that if everything—including labor and consumption—moves toward complete automation and optimization, then at a hypothetical moment it must inevitably cease to exist. Thus, having outgrown the domain of warfare, “the problem of cybernetics is no longer the prediction of the future, but the reproduction of the present.”^[2] That the loop must never stop. While today’s political forces continue to organize their discourses along antagonisms such as “liberalism versus authoritarianism” or “internationalism versus sovereignty,” the monomyth of cybernetics bracketed both decades ago and functions flawlessly in virtually any contemporary political arrangement, whether in China or in Scandinavia. Communication systems of unprecedented scope and the seemingly emancipatory, democratizing phenomena of connectivity and interconnectivity operate as tools of social control and personalized, automated propaganda. The “invisible hand” is no longer merely an economic metaphor, but the principle of society’s self-creation and regulation, functioning through informational automatisms.

This holistic system of global capitalism enables the manipulation of consumer-voter preferences, the continuous sense of threat arising from virtual and actual crises—that is, the directed dynamism of desires—while flows of information circulate in unstoppable feedback loops, with organic and reciprocal communication taking place between humans and machines. “Nothing expresses the contemporary triumph of cybernetics better than the fact that value can be described as information about information.”^[3] The logic of the cybernetic hypothesis continuously recreates, on the one hand, the illusion of endless growth and, on the other, that of boundless human communality, of an omnipotent and utopian collective intelligence. According to the French anarchists, it is the centaur of implicit (economic and/or cultural) destruction and pseudo-organic circulation that holds us captive. Against this, anachronism—Gaillard’s cunning tactic—breaks the loop. It does not idealize the past, but inscribes it into the fragmentation, stratification, and alienness of the present. Anachronism does not yearn backward or dictate desires; rather, it collides, generates tension, and opens space for other times, other possibilities, and thus better futures.

Another model of crisis is embodied in the fossil–turntable needles (Ammonite Dub, 2015, and Nautilus Dub, 2022). These present the surreal chance encounter and incompatible mixture of antiquity and modernity—not loops, not narrative events, but images that reflect a crisis of the cultural imagination. Whether we think of the werewolves of medieval literature, the living-dead of Romanticism, or the machine-humans of science fiction, the hybrid always signals a rigid, stalled state. In contrast to the excitement of metamorphosis, the liberating possibilities of transition, or the ecstasy of transformation—all narratable in different ways—the hybrid interrupts the nostalgic and totalizing flow. The hybrid is the offspring of pessimism and crisis, which are everywhere around us: the present is simultaneously realized science fiction and failed history; total communication manifests primarily as visuality and aesthetics, yet at the same time as an unreadable heap of data and code that linguistically encloses us in circulation; society itself is fragmented, overthought impotence alongside undifferentiated, primitive energy, and so on. The hybrid threatens the illusion of continuity and coherence: an attack on the contemporary principle of reality that—following Jean Baudrillard—is a graver offense than visible aggression or explicit rebellion, because it undermines the circular flow of time, the excess of identities, and the familiar frameworks of expected narratives. Thus, it is not merely a sign of latent instability, but an active “terror” against culturally and socially system-conform expectations: it refuses the liberating possibilities of metamorphosis or transition, emphasizes the ineliminability of problems, and points out that the world’s systems—be they economic, political, or technological networks—are never fully controllable, but generate connections that may carry error, obsolescence, and even meaninglessness. At the border zones, it threatens the familiar while making visible the inevitability of uncertainty and chaotic entanglement.

Within the cybernetic paradigm of the world presented and aestheticized—yet also, in a sense, fought against—by Cyprien Gaillard exhibition, history is interpreted only in teleological terms, where the number of “conspiracies” (of collusion and initiation), of invisible vectors aligned toward a common goal, becomes the measure of the world’s directedness and successful operation. This cunningly determinist logic is not only a technique of incessantly optimized social control, but can also potentially become a tool of critical praxis: in the hands of the “less initiated,” a method that does not call for new hierarchies or seek stable reference points in chaotic flow, but attempts to uncover, write, and understand the moving and hidden relations of power and the past, and of deep time, according to its own aims. It does not reproduce capitalism’s movement of continuously and simultaneously narrowing and widening its own frameworks, but is capable of diagonally sidestepping, interrupting it—redrawing and rendering less legible the prescribed sequence of steps. Thus, it can occasionally achieve (partial) successes, even though the existing order learns from it, incorporates its techniques and acquired knowledge, and mimics its moves. (In this case, one might think, for example, of how sympathetically every hybrid entity has been rendered in popular culture and even in design.)

The cybernetic paradigm encodes—into a mythical, immovable primordial institution—a regulatory style that towers, pyramid-like, unquestionable and inherited, within the communication-saturated desert (or ocean?) of reality. “[…] desire that passes from the head of the despot to the hearts of his subjects.”^[4] To free ourselves from the control of this paradigm, we would need to become nomads—indeed, from the perspective of order, practically uncivilized, almost barbaric, naked and unpredictable, scarcely even acquainted with the meanings of direction and movement. But who is capable of this at all? Essentially, we are all participants in, sustainers of, and subjects to this conspiracy at the same time. Horribile dictu, the impossible mission is to understand ever more deeply the nature of this oppressive-progressive conspiracy, to suddenly pull ourselves out of the water (the ocean?) by our own hair, to absolve ourselves of all suspicion as accusers, to exile ourselves from the ranks of the initiated, and yet still be capable of thinking with the methods of this all-encompassing conspiracy, of intelligently diverting its tools or, where appropriate, overdriving its inherent logics.

 Endre Cserna

Cyprien Gaillard: Ocean II Ocean Trafó Gallery, Budapest 6 September – 9 November 2025

[1] Curatorial text for Cyprien Gaillard’s Ocean II Ocean at Trafó Gallery, 2025. 

[2] Tiqqun: The Cybernetic Hypothesis. South Pasadena – Cambridge, Semiotext(e) – MIT Press, 2020, p.63.

[3] Tiqqun: The Cybernetic Hypothesis. South Pasadena – Cambridge, Semiotext(e) – MIT Press, 2020, pp.58-59.

[4] G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, L’Anti-Œdipe, Capitalisme et schizophrénie, Paris, 1972, 262. Trans.: Anti-Oedipus, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000, p. 221.