Grant Stevens: Agitated presence –Horizon of Happiness

By Stephanie Berlangieri

The psyche has always been affected and reconfigured by its encounters with technology. The modernists registered the effects of mass industrialisation in the Second Industrial Revolution as catastrophically disturbing the wholeness of subjectivity, using fragmentation as a formal device to articulate a new experience of selfhood (think Georges Braque, TS Eliot, James Joyce, Gino Severini, Virginia Woolf). So, too, did cultural theorists and philosophers of the time observe a shift. German sociologist Georg Simmel examined the influence of the modern metropolis on mental life, noting that the concentration of rapidly changing sense impressions generated by the urban environment ‘use[d] up’ more consciousness compared with the lasting impressions of rural life that flowed ‘more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly’. In response, he claimed the ‘metropolitan man’ developed defence mechanisms to cope with overwhelming nervous stimulation, shoring up his intellect to become hard and unfeeling. Simmel’s urban dweller suffered inner reactions to external stimuli: the rush of the hordes, the stench of smog, the clang of heavy industry.

While the Digital Revolution has conjured analogous descriptions of psychic disintegration and dispersal, these are no longer the result of industrialisation. In today’s knowledge-based economy serviced by what has been termed ‘immaterial labour ’,our cognitive faculties and affective investments are treated as limited resources. Capitalism’s adaptability has meant our psychic functions have themselves been industrialised, becoming the focus of value extraction by governments and corporations alike. Traders in the attention economy use interface design strategies to encourage and extend user engagement through clickbait headlines, content personalisation and recommendation algorithms. Our perceptual experience is trained accordingly: it flits between tasks, seeking out ever more stimulus, attending only momentarily to the most glaring demand on consciousness. This is what literary critic N. Katherine Hayles calls a state of ‘hyper attention’, the cognitive mode she contends is defining a generational divide.

The late philosopher Bernard Stiegler would classify the attention economy as an instance of ‘aesthetic conditioning’, a modulation of consciousness according to the temporality of marketing consumption. He saw the realm of the aesthetic, understood broadly in terms of sensory perception and feeling, as the principal domain of social control in this hyperindustrial epoch. ‘Temporal objects’–cinema, television, music–in Sitegler’s view, do the work of regulating consciousness particularly well, given their capacity to seize and carry its flow, and, with it, consumer desire. This manipulation of time eliminates the possibility for individuals to develop meaningful attachments to objects and ‘singularities’, which he regarded as the prerequisite to political community. What results is a generalised state of ‘symbolic misery’, a widespread disengagement from the construction of collective social meaning. The remedy Stiegler called for is the mobilisation of aesthetic production that reclaims the temporal object ‘to fight aesthetic conditioning on its own terrain’.

Of course, a market opportunity arises from this misery. The wellness industry is one of late capitalism’s antidotes to the forfeiture of political community, offering meaning in the form of positive affirmations and 7-day juice cleanses. It serves corporate profit-making interests and government penny-pinching through a rhetoric often based on an elusive concept of ‘happiness’, that places responsibility for personal wellbeing on the individual, perpetuating social atomisation, and thus capacity for control. The rise in mindfulness and meditation practices, divorced from their origins in ancient Eastern spiritual practices, are reappropriated as quick fixes that can be implemented by spiritually starved knowledge workers. Silicon Valley technology professionals on both the political left and right are some of their biggest proponents, reinterpreting Buddhist principles in the name of self-optimisation. The concept of impermanence, for instance, has been reinterpreted by transhumanists (namely, James Hughes, former Buddhist monk and founder of the Cyborg Buddha Project of the US-based Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies) to justify self-enhancement through technological means, when, in fact, the dharma teaches the doctrine of anattā (non-self or substancelessness) to relieve suffering. Stiegler’s call for unified participation in symbolic activity is sidestepped yet again.

It is from within the actuality of cognitive capitalism, and the wellness industry’s efforts to provide a market solution to its depleting impacts on the psyche, that Grant Stevens attempts to respond to Stiegler’s rallying cry. In Horizon of Happiness (2023), the artist has gathered the linguistic detritus of corporatised wellbeing, compiling a spreadsheet database of phrases from positive psychology exercises, mindfulness meditations and affirmations. These are presented in a randomised sequence rendered on screen in real time using Unreal Engine, a video-game development tool. A CGI sky serves as the backdrop to the text, its changing weather patterns and day-to-night cycle also generated live in response to predetermined settings. The sky is a common trope in wellness graphics–the hugely popular Calm meditation app is branded with an azure gradient, for example – and is a recurrent metaphor in guided visualisations. In my own dabblings in meditation over the years, I can’t count the number of times a palliative voice has invited me to picture my thoughts ‘as passing clouds in the sky’.

The accompanying ambient soundscape amplifies a sense of drawn out, infinite time. The absence of a voice ushering you through the meditation avoids the potential for the text to be read as the instructions of a sentient AI agency. As a result, the phrases are further interiorised, grasped in the way they might be if they were encountered during a routine doomscroll session.

The work is therefore cinematic in Stiegler’s radical sense, exploiting the psychic hold of the temporal object. It synchronises with the current of consciousness and lulls you into a state that is, paradoxically, both soothing and disconcerting. Horizon of Happiness is a work that, to use Hayles’ words, ‘instantiates the cognitive shift [to hyper attention] in [its] aesthetic strategies.’ While quieting, it still reproduces the agitated presentness of networked online experience. The work doesn’t insist on a romanticised Luddite escape from technology, nor does it strive to envision some techno-utopia. Stevens acknowledges the destabilising effects of online attention grabs, but he goes beyond presenting a sneering critique of Big Data. He is cynical of the corporatisation of wellness yet also recognises the benefits of meditation apps and other self-care strategies for some individuals, including himself. Stevens works from his position as a hyperindustrial subject, striving to make sense of its affective characteristics, and to recover some agency in the collective production of aesthetic experience.