In her latest works, Edna Baud captures a mood evocative of one of the climactic scenes in Serial Experiments Lain, where the titular character emerges from a tangle of wires in her room and tells Alice, her friend, that she functions as software in human form, a program that doesn’t need a body. Alice touches Lain’s face and tells her she’s wrong: “Your body’s cold, but you’re alive, Lain.” The confrontation between the two characters and the clash of their perspectives illustrates the tension between departure from and return to materiality.

As coherent individuals with defined identities, we play the roles of users of various services, tools, and products every day. We adopt these roles seamlessly, entirely without reflection. When we are in the user position, we don’t feel it. We interact with physical processes and locations – such as information transmission or data centers – which, outside of specialized contexts, exist in our minds only as vague mental images, far beyond our reach.

In the widespread drive to attract growing numbers of users, what’s material undergoes a sort of apparent erosion. This isn’t the result of a conscious decision, but rather the byproduct of the implicit expectations we place on our tools and products. At some point, it becomes unprofitable to remind us that our devices have anything beneath the surface, that there’s hardware underneath the interface. Buying new items brings greater profit than repairing, so even at the design stage, it’s not worth suggesting that there is something beyond the façade. The transparent cases of the y2k era, which openly displayed the components doing the work, now read as nostalgic, naive, or simply as bad design. As we’ve advanced, we’ve moved from a time when using a device required deep knowledge of its workings to a place where such awareness is unnecessary, becoming arcane knowledge.

Lightness, simplicity, and invisibility; we value most what we can use effortlessly, smoothly, and instinctively, like our own limbs. New eyes that see more yet remain unnoticed, new limbs that reach further yet remain beyond our awareness, unfelt. The fact that we experience this more and more, so much so that we now only notice its absence, does not mean we have truly abandoned the material. We’ve simply become better at shifting its burden away from ourselves.

On the other side of the scale lies an opposite tendency – forgotten materiality re-emerges; we’re reminded of distant and unfamiliar places to which we’ve outsourced what we no longer need or want to deal with. We speak of infrastructure and the costs that determine our ability to assume the role of the user. We notice the machines behind it all, which themselves comprise other machines, in which we too are made of machines. A complexity beyond individual comprehension becomes apparent. It’s the same feeling we might get while looking out over a city skyline, a slight unnerving that whispers, “no one wanted this; this isn’t the work of a single person.” It suggests that cities – and more broadly, living infrastructure are more than the sum of their plans; they’re an evolution beyond the grasp of any one individual, a complexity of interactions in which the human factor is merely one component.

The tension between these tendencies throws us into a cyclical loop, where materially difficult circumstances (economic crises, pandemics) intensify the proliferation of seemingly immaterial technological solutions. Edna Baud’s works emerge from within this tension. Looking upon them as a whole, we notice a centralization of non-human agencies, inanimate entities. These entities interact with each other, sometimes in the presence of humans, but more often left to their own devices.

Baud’s perspective is not a value judgment, it arises from a shift toward materiality within this cyclical loop. Her works highlight the rich unlife of technology and its evolution that goes hand in hand with our own. In the images she presents, humans do not play an active role; they appear only in relation to the surrounding matter. In this way, Baud attempts to depict the agency of non-human entities on their own terms. The visuals of primarily cool tones, smooth surfaces, monochromatic palettes, metallic compositions, and constructions made of machine parts removed from their original contexts seem to question, or incisively underscore, our vitality and physicality. The occasional human figures do not bring comfort; they are rendered in the same visual language as inanimate matter – cold, seemingly frozen in a process. They come from a world where the human and non-human share the same pulse, human and object, animate and inanimate, are all equal. All these groups, regardless of form, express a conatus, the unreflective drive to continue existing, unmotivated by usefulness in relation to anything else. From this position they seem to ask “Why do you run from the fact of being a machine among machines?”

In our co-evolution with technology, we have already successfully ceded much of our labor, something we assume as obvious when it comes to physical tasks, but which just as thoroughly extends to cognitive functions such as navigation, memory, and information transfer. At first glance, it might feel as though something has been taken from us, or that a kind of exchange has occurred. But from a broader perspective, these functions have simply been extended to non-human entities with which we are now entangled in an actor-network.

In this sense, the selection of objects in Edna Baud’s works is not incidental. Power lines, networks, mirrors, vehicles, data storage tools appear in various configurations, functional and out of commission, in primary and repurposed applications. The artist does not argue for a simple hierarchy reversal or fantasize about a vitalist will of the inanimate. Baud summons them as physical manifestations of abstract actions carried out by dispersed human and non-human actants. To give them concrete, material representations, she uses a variety of techniques – she literalizes the metaphors inherent in the language of technology, renders immaterial relationships as material, showing how the former stem from the latter; she depicts machines in operation even in the absence of humans, as well as machines that are broken or deconstructed, drawing attention to matter’s tendency to persist independently of our intent. In this context, painterly abstraction takes on a role closer to the visual representation of abstraction in software engineering, a general form, ready to assume specific value.

By default, we view technology through the lens of tools. Edna Baud’s work leads us to the idea that our creations, in their web of mutual relations, are no longer dependent on us. In reality, they are not our products but beings within a network of dependencies that includes humans. As both technological and economic complexity grow, fueled by increasingly intricate supply chains in late stage capitalism, materiality seems to slip away out of our field of vision. The language of magical metaphor becomes the default way to describe technology, even as technology increasingly takes an active role in shaping our desires, social interactions, and political views. This isn’t about naively reversing roles, but rather about acknowledging that the balance has been irreversibly disturbed and that our relationships with non-human objects demand the development of new default foundations, an awareness of our place in a network of forces, of how we affect and are affected. Cultivating this awareness requires us to leave behind the weightlessness offered by light, ephemeral solutions and to confront the coldness of material reality.

— Ida Dziublewska