Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt
March 14 - April 18, 2026
March 14 - April 18, 2026
short film, 5min 25s
+ oil and candle smoke over industrial stencils on canvas in rubber frame
+ beeswax sculpture/candle
+ collage on paper
+ ink drawings on paper
+ soundtrack
+ oil and candle smoke over industrial stencils on canvas in rubber frame
+ beeswax sculpture/candle
+ collage on paper
+ ink drawings on paper
+ soundtrack
FAMOUS MOUSE & JOAN OF ARC (2026)
Miracle Mouse has a religious vision in which Joan of Arc appears to him and sends him on a mission to save our souls.
Part of the constellation project Everything is Content, including the soundtrack with the same name.
Miracle Mouse has a religious vision in which Joan of Arc appears to him and sends him on a mission to save our souls.
Part of the constellation project Everything is Content, including the soundtrack with the same name.
Exhibition text of Alistair Hudson, scientific and artistic director at ZKM, Karlsruhe:
Joan of Arc: Dear Mickey, you’ve been liberated from copyright on the same day as the 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc.
Famous Mouse: Gee… Congratulations to us!
In medieval and early Renaissance painting, saints or divine figures speaking "down to earth" from above was a common, highly symbolic artistic convention. These compositions were designed to show the direct intervention of heaven into human affairs, often using specific visual tools to bridge the gap between the divine realm and the earthly valley. It is a trope that has lasted the course of time through William Blake to Monty Python.
Here, in Igor Simic’s Famous Mouse and Joan of Arc, the saint appears in the clouds above Mickey to warn of a great profanation, or rather, the total collapse of the hierachy of signs and symbols into a rhyzomatic, proto-primoordial soup of pure, undifferentiated content, in which we all swim with nothing to hold onto, whilst the techno-feudalists (seemingly somewhere above us) can trawl it at will.
Wierdly, the superflatness of all meaning turns out to be not so flat either, being more four dimensional, reaching simultaneously through time and space. Martyr Joan’s fiery end for blasphemy and Mickey’s watery birth in Steamboat Willie* are 497 years apart, yet here they are connected through time by a ray of holy light, in new circumstances, as newly liberated icons of media. On this day, that is the 1st of January 2024, Disney’s Steamboat Willie and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s landmark film The Passion of Joan of Arc enter into public domain. They are in this moment free of copyright, unshackled from ownership and released into to the open seas of usership and mis-usership.
Joan of Arc: Mickey, you signaled the end of humans.
Famous Mouse: Well, I don’t know about that…
This flicker back and forth between 1928 and 2024 is significant. Bracketed here is the pinnacle and demise of modernity and rise of the superintelligence. 1916 (the year of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon) is regarded by some to be more the pinnacle, but twelve years or so is close enough when considerring the phases of history. A few years later Walter Benjamin pens The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in which he describes how mechanical reproduction is devaluing the aura of the work of art, and its ritualistic value, and being replaced by its praxis in politics in a society of mass culture. For those of us brought up on the joys of popular, machine made culture, this always seemed a litte quaint, but in this moment, when AI slop becomes an everyday term, Benajamin’s text takes on a fresh resonance.
2024 was the year artificial intelligence shifts from the phase of intense, speculative hype, to the phase of methodical, widespread adoption, integration, and tangible value generation and the idea of an artifical general intelligence to supercede humanity get more tangible. A few years before in 2019, the inventor and computer scientist Danny Hillis (creator of the 80’s ‘Electronic Brain’ that was the Connection Machine) declares ‘The enlightenment is dead, long live the entanglement’. In this text for the Long Now, he describes the Age of Enlightenment as an era defined by humanity’s quest to conquer and control wild nature. But now, he argues, with the ultimate expression of Elightenment exuberence, the high powered digital computer, we have created an new era of superconnectivity and AI, and with it a new form of wild nature, a synthesis of the natural and the artifical over which we have no total control. We are tethered by wire to both the earth and the artifical networks, just through the minerals in our phones.
In this emerging and unfamilar environment new forms negotiated relationships are needed. Not just between people, but also the machines, natures, hybrids and and a highly complexified sensory world. We shouldn’t necessarily seek an aura again, this could merely be a simulation or mirgage. But, as the work of Simic indicates, we sure will need spaces to breathe, make what feels like meanifgful and personal connections, to feel something against our skin, or feel raw emotion and unprocessed thoughts, have ritual and a sense of being alive together.
Joan of Arc: By going below the surface of the Content Ocean. In its depths lies the Oceanic Feeling of oneness. Mickey, you must be a precarious diver in the Content Ocean, who unselfishly delivers oxygen to creatures.
Famous Mouse: Gee, Joan of Arc, that’s a tall order.
*ironically, the only character in Steamboat Willie that utters any intelligible words is a parrot, the ultimate mimic.
Joan of Arc: Dear Mickey, you’ve been liberated from copyright on the same day as the 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc.
Famous Mouse: Gee… Congratulations to us!
In medieval and early Renaissance painting, saints or divine figures speaking "down to earth" from above was a common, highly symbolic artistic convention. These compositions were designed to show the direct intervention of heaven into human affairs, often using specific visual tools to bridge the gap between the divine realm and the earthly valley. It is a trope that has lasted the course of time through William Blake to Monty Python.
Here, in Igor Simic’s Famous Mouse and Joan of Arc, the saint appears in the clouds above Mickey to warn of a great profanation, or rather, the total collapse of the hierachy of signs and symbols into a rhyzomatic, proto-primoordial soup of pure, undifferentiated content, in which we all swim with nothing to hold onto, whilst the techno-feudalists (seemingly somewhere above us) can trawl it at will.
Wierdly, the superflatness of all meaning turns out to be not so flat either, being more four dimensional, reaching simultaneously through time and space. Martyr Joan’s fiery end for blasphemy and Mickey’s watery birth in Steamboat Willie* are 497 years apart, yet here they are connected through time by a ray of holy light, in new circumstances, as newly liberated icons of media. On this day, that is the 1st of January 2024, Disney’s Steamboat Willie and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s landmark film The Passion of Joan of Arc enter into public domain. They are in this moment free of copyright, unshackled from ownership and released into to the open seas of usership and mis-usership.
Joan of Arc: Mickey, you signaled the end of humans.
Famous Mouse: Well, I don’t know about that…
This flicker back and forth between 1928 and 2024 is significant. Bracketed here is the pinnacle and demise of modernity and rise of the superintelligence. 1916 (the year of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon) is regarded by some to be more the pinnacle, but twelve years or so is close enough when considerring the phases of history. A few years later Walter Benjamin pens The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in which he describes how mechanical reproduction is devaluing the aura of the work of art, and its ritualistic value, and being replaced by its praxis in politics in a society of mass culture. For those of us brought up on the joys of popular, machine made culture, this always seemed a litte quaint, but in this moment, when AI slop becomes an everyday term, Benajamin’s text takes on a fresh resonance.
2024 was the year artificial intelligence shifts from the phase of intense, speculative hype, to the phase of methodical, widespread adoption, integration, and tangible value generation and the idea of an artifical general intelligence to supercede humanity get more tangible. A few years before in 2019, the inventor and computer scientist Danny Hillis (creator of the 80’s ‘Electronic Brain’ that was the Connection Machine) declares ‘The enlightenment is dead, long live the entanglement’. In this text for the Long Now, he describes the Age of Enlightenment as an era defined by humanity’s quest to conquer and control wild nature. But now, he argues, with the ultimate expression of Elightenment exuberence, the high powered digital computer, we have created an new era of superconnectivity and AI, and with it a new form of wild nature, a synthesis of the natural and the artifical over which we have no total control. We are tethered by wire to both the earth and the artifical networks, just through the minerals in our phones.
In this emerging and unfamilar environment new forms negotiated relationships are needed. Not just between people, but also the machines, natures, hybrids and and a highly complexified sensory world. We shouldn’t necessarily seek an aura again, this could merely be a simulation or mirgage. But, as the work of Simic indicates, we sure will need spaces to breathe, make what feels like meanifgful and personal connections, to feel something against our skin, or feel raw emotion and unprocessed thoughts, have ritual and a sense of being alive together.
Joan of Arc: By going below the surface of the Content Ocean. In its depths lies the Oceanic Feeling of oneness. Mickey, you must be a precarious diver in the Content Ocean, who unselfishly delivers oxygen to creatures.
Famous Mouse: Gee, Joan of Arc, that’s a tall order.
*ironically, the only character in Steamboat Willie that utters any intelligible words is a parrot, the ultimate mimic.