My Holy Nacho

Abstract

My Holy Nacho (2014-2019) is a network-sculpture made out of misunderstandings, with Bernhard Garnicnig. It comprises many media and forms, object and temporal, including aspects of Unboxing, Diagramming, Ordering, Sectioning, Shipping. The project investigates the materiality of labour, online ordering and command and control in the digital sphere, performing a durational, transactional and transnational project that spans multiple years (2014-2019). For My Holy Nacho, a single object has been sent to different manufacturers and workshops to have various ‘processes’ applied to it via the ease of 'clickable' interfaces. In secret, and in turn, the two collaborating artists choose each process. The work interrogates the mysterious infrastructures activated when you click the ‘submit’ or 'send' button in a browser. This is a seemingly simple act that initiates the churning of global economies—a warehouse worker in a distant country fills a box, or a machine whirs into motion in a factory somewhere, filling out the order form, procedurally responding to our online commands. For much of the project, My Holy Nacho, as a final, sculptural object remains a mystery even to its creators. A single object is sent to different manufacturers and workshops to have various ‘processes’ applied to it. Each process is chosen, in secret and in turn, by the collaborating artists. After 10 processes, the object — whatever it looks like and whatever it becomes — is complete, and made public. The project is inspired by and named for Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, whose Telephone Paintings (1922) inaugurated a way of exploring the affordances of miscommunication and telecommunicative action-at-a-distance. The title, My Holy Nacho, also stems from a mis­hearing of the name Moholy­-Nagy; a mumbly mispronunciation in a Canadian accent to an Austrian not­-so­-native English speaker during a conversation in a pub in the UK. These are examples of the deformations, distances and gaps between our ideas, languages, technical systems, processes, and markets, their inherent creativities and potentialities. Presentations with the Nikolaj Kunsthal, in conjunction with Kunsthal Aarhus and their online commissioning of Order: My Holy Nacho, along with further actions with LINZ FMR and project publications. Portions of the project were created in dialogue with Mela Dávila Freire and Robert Jackson, with the help of Sóley Mist Hjálmarsdóttir, the support of Andreas Brøgger, and in collaboration with Moritz Greiner-Petter and the Barcelona graphic design studio Cosmic.es.