Necromania

Another way of reading Hengeveld’s piece through the lens of Heidegger is in terms of Heidegger’s taxonomy of being. In Heidegger’s thought, there are three types of beings in the world:

World-less Inanimate objects – simply do not perceive the world, are not aware of existence or non-existence

World-poor Animals – strictly bound to experience the world as it already exists

World-building Humans – have the ability to create our own enduring structures, environments and meaning

According to Heidegger these divisions do not contain value judgements, but rather, each being is complete in their own world.

These classifications are interesting in relation to Hengeveld’s “Uprising” and “Independent Rider On The Lam” projects. Both projects include shopping carts which seem to roam by their own agency. As discussed earlier, the cart in “Uprising” roams the lake within the bounds of a tethered anchor. “Independent Rider On The Lam”, similarly, roams by seemingly its own volition. This piece uses an electric motor to allow the cart to move without being pushed by a human.

In terms of Heidegger’s thought, the shopping carts are ‘world-less’ beings. However, Hengeveld’s contextualization of these objects seems to challenge these boundaries. As the carts exist and act in different contexts, we are challenged to reconsider our own relationship to these objects. As ‘world-building’ creatures, do our creations have the ability to act in value systems other than our own? Furthermore, can or will humanity be able to create other world-building entities and what does this mean for us?

In this first part of our two part interview with Robert Hengeveld, the artist discusses the origins of his shopping cart based projects. Hengeveld brings up two interesting points in relation to his discovery of forgotten shopping carts.

Firstly, Hengeveld’s discovery of human debris or garbage in remote areas speaks to the ubiquity of our reach as humans. However, Hengeveld’s discussion highlights the eerie side of this discovery – that no matter how far we travel, our trash is already there to meet us. In this sense, our trash, seems to have a life of its own. In his book “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter”, German media theorist Frederick Kittler asserts that our technology has created a ‘situation’ or environment for our own existence. While this claim was, in fact, made years earlier by the famous Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, it is Kittler’s description of the functioning of this environment that differs. Kittler claimed that as information technology progressed, the need for human interaction diminished. One only needs to think of war drones, or cars that park themselves to see this process in action today. For Kittler, the ‘situation’ has forgotten us. Data streams no longer need to be (or even can be) processed by humans and therefore some sense of agency is lost.

While Hengeveld speaks to this sort of repositioning, he also positions ourselves, and our trash, in relation to nature. As Hengeveld described in the interview, the currents of nature operate without our input. Trash is carried down river, buried and decomposed along the shore or in the case of Chernobyl, the situation of nature quickly responds to the vacuum of human action.

Both of these sentiments bear great weight in today’s schizophrenic society. We fear technology but also worship its narrative of progress. We revere nature as a mystical source of power, but often forget the terror of the wilderness. Hengeveld’s pieces help us to recognize some of these disparate positions so that we can examine the validity of our often contradictory perceptions.