Chris Korda: The Heartbreaking Tragedy of Collective Failure
This conversation is not only about the Church of Euthanasia — even though
Korda’s radical antinatalist movement from the 90s seems to be more
urgent than ever. It is about us, about our future, and our home planet
Earth.
It is also about Chris’ current retrospective “The (Wo)man of the Future”
at Le Confort Moderne showing her many facets from being a transgendered
suicide cult leader to composing electronic music, creating digital
art, and developing free software for the last 30 years.
It’s an intimate talk between Reverend Chris Korda and Cardinal.e Jardin,
the newest member to the Church of Euthanasia in Europe. A chat between
two artists, one that is making her very own waves since decades and the
other — a young French musician — who is riding those waves in their
very own way today. Jardin, “one of the few people left who sincerely
intend to change the world” — as i-D labelled them — is asking the right
questions. And Chris’ is giving essential answers. Oui futur!
IN CONVERSATION: JARDIN AND CHRIS KORDA
PHOTOGRAPHY: PIERRE ANTOINE
Jardin: My lovely
Reverend, I’m so glad to join you for the opening of your first
retrospective “The (Wo)man of the Future” at Le Confort Moderne
(Poitiers, France) curated by Goswell Road. It will be another
opportunity for me — after your first show at Goswell Road
— to see the original materials you produced for our Church of
Euthanasia as a late-European-comer. I guess it will be intense for me.
What’s your relation with those objects? Can you describe to me and our
readers what’s your personal background to those artefacts?
Chris Korda: It might be helpful if I can approximately describe
the conflicting impulses I feel before I actually write anything,
because not all of my impulses are constructive, and I want to represent
the show in a positive way that the curators Anthony and Coralie will
approve of. It’s tempting to talk only about the Church of Euthanasia
because of what’s happening in the USA, and more globally, with abortion
and other regressions to the Dark Ages, but the show is only about half
Church of Euthanasia, or even less perhaps. It may seem incoherent to
people, because it is. I am not one thing. People have tried to portray
me as a monoculture, to claim that I begin and end with the Church, but
it’s not true. I contain multitudes.
I understand why people want to focus on the Church. It’s
extremely topical, more so even than it was thirty years ago. But during
those same thirty years, I had whole other careers — software
development, VJ-ing, digital art, phase art, virtual art, photography
and signal processing — that had nothing to do with the Church. Above
all, during those years I developed as a composer of music, to the point
where now increasingly I make music that sounds nothing like the music I
was making in 1995. I taught myself atonality, and adopted classical
instrumentation, and these are huge changes. But meanwhile climate
change is accelerating horribly, it’s obvious that humanity is
completely unable to control itself, and so all of my work sits under
the shadow of extinction. It’s depressing and confusing. And on top of
that, over these thirty years, my work has been consistently suppressed,
embargoed, censored, and de-platformed by mainstream media, denying it
the access and reputation that it certainly deserves.
Above all I think it’s necessary to talk about tragedy, and how
it’s handled in this show, because I suspect many people will be puzzled
to discover that much of my work is joyful, even exuberant. I strongly
disagree with Adorno’s famous quip that “after Auschwitz, to write a
poem is barbaric.” On the contrary, as I experience the Species
Holocaust, I feel it is my sacred duty to bear witness to it in poetry,
song, art, and every other media, and to do so with humour and empathy;
to communicate not only the bitter irony of our predicament, but also
the nobility of our ambitions, and the heartbreaking tragedy of our
collective failure to achieve them.
How to relate art to the experience of inconceivable horror? With
the stinking mud from the trenches still fresh in their memories, the
Dadaists struggled with this question. How to move beyond merely
regurgitating personal traumas, and transmute them into something
constructive and inspirational of lasting value? The urge to extract
value from horror is a crucial link between the Dadaists and the Church
of Euthanasia.
It’s always a
pleasure to talk to you and see how you transcend the ambient darkness.
That’s why I identify myself to your work. I felt the same when I
discovered your song “I Like To Watch” (2003) for the first time, you
always manipulate important themes, with a huge portion of poetry,
humour, sensitivity and serious gravity. I think I’ve always been
concerned by your multiplicity, maybe because of our non-binarity, but I
think mostly because it’s not acceptable to simplify the world. The
digital era is the realm of simplification. What do you as a coder think
about that? First time we talked for ID France I told you that I saw
many links between the Church of Euthanasia and your record “Akoko
Ajeji” (2019). What are the links with your newest record “Passion for
Numbers” (2022)?
I don’t identify the digital era with simplification, on the
contrary I identify it with an exponential increase of expressive
potential. Confusion often arises because of the supremacy of binary.
The fact that a binary digit is limited to only two values, zero or one,
frightens non-technical people because it seems to eliminate ambiguity.
But if you think more carefully, you’ll realize that a binary digit is
almost never encountered by itself. Binary digits are aggregated into
numbers, and such numbers can represent literally anything. Digital
quantities are the essential foundation of a rapidly growing family of
representational systems which are theoretically capable of any amount
of gradation. Decimation (the assigning of numbers to quantities) is an
astoundingly successful technique for faithful reproduction of sense
stimuli. For example, high resolution digital audio formats have already
reached a degree of fidelity beyond which further improvements will be
undetectable by human ears. Photography too is now better served by
pixels than silver molecules. Film is still holding its own against
video, but not for much longer. Criticizing digital media for its
binariness is like criticizing literature for its use of black ink on
white paper. Content should be judged not by its encoding scheme, but by
the ideas that it communicates.
My fascination with machines and their expressive potential can
be traced to some of my earliest experiences. As a child I demonstrated
an instinctive affinity for machines, for example I often repaired the
family toaster merely by touching it. I devoured technical explanations
precociously, and spent countless days happily exploring science museums
with my mother’s encouragement. DuPont, IBM, and similar conglomerates
had huge showrooms in New York City which often featured dazzling
demonstrations of new technologies. I vividly remember my teletype chat
with ELIZA, an early software emulation of a psychiatrist. The 1970s
were also a fruitful period for kinetic sculpture, and I was certainly
influenced by the works of Alexander Calder and Jean Tinguely. But most
importantly, The Museum of Modern Art had one of Thomas Wilfred’s
“Lumia” machines in its collection, and this was undoubtedly the first
explicitly phase-based kinetic art I ever encountered. At the age of
thirteen I built a large motorized kinetic sculpture in the studio of
one of my father’s acquaintances, but regrettably it was lost.
My passion for numbers didn’t blossom until I discovered computer
science in college. It became immediately obvious that I had an
extremely unusual aptitude for computer programming. At my teacher’s
request, I stopped attending class and instead worked independently on
special projects. Soon after that I began a thirty-five year career in
software development. Much of my art could never have existed without
the engineering skills I learned from my profession. I enjoy
collaborating with machines because they have skills that I don’t have,
and vice versa. They supply speed, precision, thoroughness, and
repeatability, whereas I supply intention, emotion, instinct, and
whimsy.
I would like to see robots dancing to my polymeter music. They
are much better suited to expressing complex phase relationships than
human beings ever could be. Perhaps I could get a grant from Boston
Dynamics for polymeter robot dancing. Assuming industrial civilization
continues for a significant time, I expect robots to dominate dance and
athletics, just as they already dominate in strategy games. Thus far
robot choreography has been relatively cliched and anthropomorphic, but I
see it progressing towards a radically new art form. Engineers often
have conventional tastes and try to please an average human audience for
marketing reasons, but such aesthetic shortcomings could disappear
quickly as the technologies become more widely accessible.
Reading you, I need to be precise that I’m not technophobic. Even after publishing the video to “Départ”
on 2nd of June showing a sculpture from my friend Agir Bizarrement. It
will be the second excerpt from “Exode,” my upcoming EP-shortfilm
directed by Selim Bentounes. Here I translate the lyrics for you:
I leave all this behind
My prison, my apartment
Where I take the hundred steps
I don’t feel it
I leave all this behind
I’m going to pass the mountains
All these cheap dreams
I don’t want it
…
I take the train for nowhere
Years that we talk about it
To an island in the Mediterranean
Blue Ocean White Pyrenees
Our stories from another world
Where the other is by our side
I will bring the dream to life
With my thousand-year-old friends
I have nothing better to tell
All these years to break the chains
Now that the concrete has collapsed
For the horizon, for all these plains
Yes you know the air is less poisoned
Culture of magician
Vibrates calmly on the sound system
Cyberpunks with dogs, wind turbines
Autonomy for bitches & hyenas
…
I leave all this behind
My prison, my apartment
Where I take the hundred steps
I don’t feel it
I leave all this behind
I’m going to pass the mountains
All these cheap dreams
I don’t want it
…
It will never feel victory
It stinks of joy, it stinks of hope
We put the benefit aside
A few years of hold-ups
In our bags we have two three rifles
We’ll do what we want with this fucking life
The disease may well take me
I fuck borders in the middle of December
I want to suffer more anything
Nothing to fuck to flee to Mars
I want to stay with my bratz
Sometimes get high to the breed
Eyes on the valley
Watching Humanity Fly Away
To all the children I will meet
I have nothing better to tell
…
I leave all this behind
My prison, my apartment
Where I take the hundred steps
I don’t feel it
I leave all this behind
I’m going to pass the mountains
All these cheap dreams
I don’t want it
[Jardin, Départ — translation]
I’m not technophobic
but humanity has a certain taste to hijack technologies to a sad
purpose, over-exploitation, artificialization of soils, greedy
centralisation. I certainly prefer Boston Dynamics’ dogs dancing to your
polymeter sequencer.
May I ask you to explain the relation of the large scale vision you
designed in “Akoko Ajeji” and the apocalyptic-human-centered narrative
which is now the justification for any trans-humanist excess — like
sucking the Earth’s blood till we probably never reach an exoplanet? As
you already said: “One World One Shit.” Still at the end, are you an
optimistic person?
I may sound optimistic, but beneath that I’m a pragmatist, a
realist, and an existentialist. We’re obliged to play the ball from
where it is, not from where we’d like it to be. I don’t feel imprisoned,
I have no desire to escape, and even if I did there’s nowhere to escape
to. Intact nature no longer exists, and I’m untroubled because I don’t
romanticise nature. Earth is altered by human thought and will become
more so. We’re marooned here for the foreseeable future, because outside
of Earth’s protective atmosphere, hard radiation would kill us rapidly.
Colonisation of exoplanets is wishful thinking. People consistently
underestimate the lethality of space.
As Church of Euthanasia members, we agree to nothing more or less
than non-procreation, and why? Surely not because it’s an effective
population reduction strategy. Since the Church was founded in 1992, the
human population has increased by a third. We take a lifetime vow of
non-procreation for its symbolic value. Refusal to procreate is a potent
symbol of limits to growth. By sacrificing our reproductive potential,
and refusing to contribute our DNA to the future, we turn our personal
lives into examples of living within limits. We broadcast to the world
that human beings are not necessarily helpless victims of their bestial
drives, that we can behave rationally and cooperate constructively to
achieve a more enlightened future.
I don’t romanticize the past. For most of the few hundred
thousand years that Homo Sapiens has existed, life was unimaginably
brutal, a pointless parade of grotesque cruelty. The notion that all
human beings are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
is little more than 200 years old, an eye blink of geological time. For
most of human history, there were no rights. If you were born male,
your life revolved around flattering the local warlord, and if you were
born female, you were reproductive machinery, to be used like a copier
until you broke. Social mobility was unheard of. Your fate was
determined by the sperm and egg lottery, the biological crapshoot of
your ancestry, and in many places that’s still true today, horribly.
Women didn’t acquire the right to vote until the mid-19th
century. Struggles against racism, sexism and homophobia occurred
throughout my life. I witnessed dramatic victories for civil rights,
female liberation, and LGBTQ+ rights, progress that was unthinkable in
previous generations. Like me, you are a beneficiary of this progress.
More than that, you had a front row seat at the banquet of life. I know
this from the way you speak and write and conduct yourself. For all of
its faults, industrial civilization lavished us with literacy, numeracy,
and countless other benefits. Let us not take these precious gifts for
granted. It’s understandable that you’re tempted to hide from the
challenges posed by modernity, but by hiding, you do the future a
disservice. As beneficiaries of progress, we have a responsibility to
give back, to share our advantages with the less fortunate, and this we
do by using our creativity to illuminate the world.
My projects are my children, and they bask in the love that would
otherwise have been usurped by biological offspring. “Akoko Ajeji” is
my blessed baby, bathed from birth in unconditional love. By redirecting
my love away from biological destiny and towards art, I point the way
for our future. We can no longer grow biologically. We have reached and
vastly exceeded the ecological limits of Earth. From now on, we can only
expand intellectually, and those of us with the necessary tools must
rise to the occasion, and inspire us to be the better angels of our
nature.
Those past months and
years were and still are really intense for all of us. There’s no way
to escape for sure. But I know that you are a prolific creative person.
Are art, music, thoughts, coding, body experiences, and collective
organisations ways to escape a really heavy and destabilising reality?
This beautiful metaphor of us as nature’s angels sounds like an
out-of-body experience and of course makes me think about the life which
will keep going without us after human extinction. To me, art is a way
to find and give meaning to a surprising, troubling, unjust, joyful,
pleasant, exciting life. I’m not really interested in what will stay at
the end. I only count the movement, the intensity, the ethics of the
interconnections between the world and me, which is really hard to focus
on. What’s your relation to your multiple practices, as Chris Korda —
the (wo)man of the future?
I don’t want to escape from reality, because it’s the only viable
foundation of truth. Philip K. Dick was right to call reality “that
which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” As Einstein
quipped, the moon is really out there, even when you’re not looking at
it, and to claim otherwise is childish solipsism. In the film “Platoon,”
Sergeant Barnes expresses my deepest convictions when he says “I am
reality,” and continues that “there’s the way it ought to be, and
there’s the way it is.” To succeed in life, we must distinguish between
what can and can’t be changed, and face the former bravely while humbly
accepting the latter.
My favorite architect, Eero Saarinen, famously opined that “the
purpose of architecture is to shelter and enhance man’s life on Earth
and to fulfill his belief in the nobility of his existence.” And I feel
similarly about my art. My task as an artist is to depict my inner world
as faithfully as possible, by unflinchingly materializing the figments
of my imagination. I’m not obliged to be pleasing, coherent, or even
comprehensible; I’m only obliged to stay true to my vision. By
transmuting the raw material of my subconscious mind into artifacts, I
strive to inspire and create transcendent value.
Art is part of the story we’re telling ourselves about how we got
here and what we should do about it. Art gives my life meaning, and
connects me to the collective story of civilization, to our past and
future. Meaning can only come from us, because as Clive Langham grimly
reminds us in “Providence,” “out there in the icy universe, there’s
nothing.” Despair is a wasteful, selfish response to the certainty of
death. The ephemerality of existence is precisely the motive to use time
wisely before we become what Black Elk so eerily called “grass on the
hills.” We burn brightly because we can.
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