Pujita Guha and Abhijan Toto for the Forest Curriculum

In Natasha Tontey’s video installation Wa’anak Witu Watu (2021), digital renderings of weeds, grass, and fern flit energetically across the screen like static on a TV screen. The forest appears animated. The primary medium here is digital animation after all. The forest is also animated in another sense, as having life breathed into it—it is vital, mobile. Animation derives from the Latin animus—life or breath. In Tontey’s animated world, a dismembered Minahasan goddess claws her way out of a lotus puddle, creating another human, a girl—who in turn morphs into a four-legged critter, half-girl, half- man, seeking the world out in all its wonder. Here, porosity is crucial: bodies swirl, transform, emerge, and shape-shift. And such critterly transformation of the self or the forest—continuously morphing between empty skies, volcanic mountains, and fidgety grasslands—thrives on the liquid nature of digital reproduction. Bodies bleed into each other as pixels float and stick to bodies like viscous silicone gel. A multi-species relationship: a becoming and unbecoming of bodies written in and by the liquid image. Yet this porosity is not smooth; it is written with error, glitches, and decrepitude, with images and bodies breaking apart, becoming an Other. Tontey’s Wa’anak and her recent body of work conceptualises the Mapulucene—a mythopoetic, science-(as)-fictional account of Minahasan cosmologies or economies of gifting, sharing and mutual aid. Mapulus is the act and belief of gift-giving in life’s everyday transactions through food, matter, and emotional labour alike. Tontey’s work narrativises a birthing of a Minahasan world in seven days, parsed out in seven interconnected chapters, where each act of material transference of gifting is encoded in glitch, or noise; each aberrant line or pixel moving between food and gods, landscapes, and video game screens compositing or tethering one world with the other. This currency of transaction is via error or glitch: a line, a pixel or a chromatic aberration. It is the residue of what cannot be held in place and shape: that which always falls off at the seams. Glitch is the currency of transaction here—the very medium with which communications, exchanges, and transformations occur. If glitches are to be taken seriously, their specificities accounted for, we’d have to argue that the basis of exchange and communication is not really what is stable, solid, or what already has meaning. Communication, an exchange, or gift- giving flourishes on the glitch or the error which refuses to settle. Forest Curriculum proposes that the basis for communication is not communication itself—the act and the regime of exchanging signs, codes, and inferences—but miscommunication. What of exchanging things that don’t accrue value, that don’t make sense? With Tontey, we wish to think of how the digital and environmental is not the site where information is exchanged, or bodies transformed, or even where speculation is performed. With the digital and the environmental, we wish to think about how we inherit glitch, waste, aberration, or error as it latches onto bodies and surfaces, transforming everything that it touches as it spreads.

This essay appears in ESP Esperanto Cultural Magazine Issue 2.: The Glitch In The Art System, Tokyo (2022).