Mark Fingerhut's Halcyon.exe: The Ride @ SULK Chicago

It’s summer time in Chicago, which normally means hastily assembled group shows, solo exhibitions that are up for way too long, and a welcome break from mediocre paintings in favor of some other kind of medium that is done just as badly, but maybe a little bit different (mediocre ceramics or other “craft” media) Mark Fingerhut’s current solo exhibition at Sulk Chicago, Halcyon.exe: The Ride; however, is a welcome analgesic to an otherwise largely staid summer thus far. 

Nominally, Halcyon.exe is a homemade computer virus, whose processes are illustrated via projecting the computer that it arrests control over onto a screen. The virus made its debut last year as a standalone work, and has been built upon by Fingerhut as a completely immersive program filling Sulk’s one room exhibition space. (It’s worth mentioning that this is an apartment gallery that is putting more investment in large scale new media work more so than galleries with budgets and square footage that are exponentially larger.) Between the installation (the ride) and the software (the projection), Fingerhut’s exhibition ends up being far more than the sum of its parts, presenting a quixotic second-person journey through the woes of global shipping networks, browsers, glyphs, web fonts and avian friendships. It takes as many cues from Hito Steryl and Jon Rafman as it does 4-D rides at Disney and Universal amusement parks. Fingerhut – who graduated from Pratt towards the tail end of Post-Internet craze in 2015 – has been working on this code for years, which may explain why on it’s own, the software may feel a bit dated. The software is resplendent with kooky typefaces, cagey second-person RPG style narration, and at the apogee of the virus’s runtime some very melodramatic karaoke, which in any other case I would say is shitty cliché for this style of work, but Fingerhut manages to break out all the stops in all the right ways. 

I’m told by Sulk’s founder, Taylor Payton, that Fingerhut explicitly rejects the software being called a video or film, and I am prone to agree with this assessment. A film is the same always, it is a recording of something, whereas a virus is a lot more like theater, there is a new run each and every iteration it is activated, and while the code/script are the same, there is always a degree of variability in how they unfold in real time.  It makes sense then that Fingerhut refers to Halcyon.exe as a “software poem”. In a way both code and poetry are largely the same – asignifying linguistic codes that produce a series of affects in the wake of their utterance, which is exactly what is happening here, where one poetic structure enables another to be sensible to an audience (the legible text narrating the story). These affects amount to more than trite readings of software qua poem, but rather produce tangible physical and atmospheric interferences that both impedes and heightens the audience's sense of self as being immersed into the adventure. 

The software is engrossing, but really it is its expansion as The Ride that really makes Fingerhut’s exhibition. As art erodes into the attention economy, becoming content rather than art, we need to see exhibitions that can engross and engage audiences in ways that subvert passive consumption and create tangible senses of place and time. With each ride and iteration more and more details come clear outside the software and in real life. While Fingerhut toys with bombarding his audiences with disparate images, texts, and surface conditions, he also does the same offscreen and in the gallery as well. The end result is a distinct way of being able to lose oneself in a milieu that creates itself with each and every iteration and depends on your occupation of such space in order to occur. The work’s theatricality is what enables it to differentiate itself from filmic passivity and results in its ultimate success.

If I am being withholding in my descriptions here it is intentional. This is an exhibition that offers something more and more rare these days: surprises (you heard that right - A PLURALITY)! If you can see it more than once please do, and don’t bother reaching for your phone either. If you are going to go for a ride go for the god damn ride.

It is pretty clear that I liked this exhibition, and you have two last chances to catch it this evening and tomorrow night. You can RSVP for a ticket on the ride on Sulk’s website.