Lucie Rosenfeldová & Matěj Pavlík | Chaos Therapy

Lucie Rosenfeldová’s On The Management of Doubt (2014, part of the GMU collection of Moving Images) – the first of two videos in this exhibition – reflects a time when technology was seen as a model for self-management and self-improvement. Computers were predictable, and so could lay a stable grid over an increasingly unpredictable world. Coaching and therapy offered a rational, mechanistic approach to our personal and professional relationships and asked us to take responsibility for the things we put into the world and the results that came out. Ten years later the second video – a new collaboration between Lucie Rosenfeldová and Matěj Pavlík – tries to establish what has changed about the relationship between ourselves and the world we construct through technology. Our lives have become less predictable, while the systems we have for managing uncertainty – climate models, career plans or economic projections – are less effective. Chaos Therapy suggests that the management of doubt today no longer aims to eliminate uncertainty but instead, like the automatic drawings referenced in Pavlík’s new photographic prints, embraces the irrationality that was always part of culture and technology, overflowing the grid of predictability and embracing the things we can’t control.