In Adriana Ramić’s work, a taxonomic impulse reveals a persistent gap that emerges between life and its models. While earlier bodies of her work explored the way that this dynamic occurs in computer logics and the development of various technologies (e.g. sourcing content from AI decision-branch problem sets that propose the lives of ladybugs as intelligence; the foundational 2006 image dataset of image-caption pairs, imagenet; and explorations into inducible failure methods of computer-vision training software), the introduction of video into her practice in 2021 shifted the center of this work. For the last four years, the subject that finds center for her emerges almost solely from sentient life.

In her 2025 exhibition at David Peter Francis gallery, a reduced imageset is assembled: a linear array of collectible zoological stickers, originally packaged with a milk chocolate bar distributed and manufactured by the Croatian confectionary company Kraš, find an indexical arrangement adorning dark, wall-mounted wooden strips. With their analog, informational aesthetic, they spatially anchor two larger chambers: sleek, partial rectangular prisms of smoked glass glowing with the high-definition video of a beetle’s stumbling gait as it explores the landscape. With softly tinted gallery windows, the exhibition takes on a dream-like feel, recursive, fractal, iridescent.

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There’s sort of a structural failure of language that runs through everything in your work, so I’m wondering how much of the practice might be functioning as a placeholder to understand the aesthetics of a system, versus when it's actually trying to understand the language, maybe the image-pairs, as content?

Yeah, the structural failure of language is a big part of it. I’m interested less in understanding the aesthetics of a system and moreso in looking at precise moments occurring within it, or their absence. And while systems have interested me for a long time, my approach is no longer focused on a system or technical frameworks, and more open-ended.

That makes sense—The image dataset lingers here, in spite of that, though. Do you have feelings about the way that more contemporary, expanded image sets have been developed since your early interest in them? I was curious about this with the work since this structure of data has such a specific arc from the mid-2010s where it was so playful and experimental—like “look what I can make it do”—that now feels staked in a different way. The conversation has gone mostly towards a labor angle of copyright and property, obviously.

Right, there's so many different layers of exploitation, from the sourcing of the data to the moderation of the data. I wanted to get away from technology as a dominant topic in my work. I sought focus on the more inexplicable vignettes that arose in working with machinic translations among information and images. Mystery has been very important to me, and it was these moments that moved me, and that I considered central to the work, but machine learning itself tended to overshadow everything else as a topic. And I stopped using it for this reason, as well as feeling in general revulsed by the growing omnipresence of its corporate forms, in favor of a sort of “computation without computation.”

Thinking about aspects of those earlier bodies of work of yours—like this sweep of the finger across the keyboard being replaced by the trace of the bug as it travels and reveals its decision making branch—all of it really feels like emphasizing what slips through the cracks between any interface. Sometimes it’s between language/image, sometimes between computer/world, but it still ends up finding some sort of generative chasm. It makes a lot of sense to have a conversation of computing without computers within that.

I mean, a computer is an interesting modality of externalizing different sorts of life systems through parameters and decision making. Not to be like, “we are all computers,” because I don't think that, but
I'm always interested in what those parameters restrict or symbolize. The way scientists study behavior in general (animal and human) is also super interesting to me, like how life gets divided into these particular intervals of existence, and I reflect on that while I’m filming. I’m captivated by the way we teach our machinic simulations to emulate or handle humanlike situations–it’s somehow instructive in its parametrical confinement. Looking at computer and animal behavioral science preprints is a part of my routine. I find moments in these papers that, as artifacts, became more compelling to me than generating things myself.

The booklet that I produced for this exhibition opens up with nouns, mostly animals and plants, in brackets, like “[cup, otter, orchid, kangaroo, rose]”; I found them in a paper about the memory of machine agents, in how they might remember learning classification tasks. I also really liked these word concatenations, made up of the same word in different languages like farpapmaripterling for butterfly, as a way to test understanding of a machine. These simple, elemental methods for reconstructing meaning transform for me when they are taken out of context and take on a new, strange, sonorant echo.

How did you come to work with filming the beetles?

I was thinking a lot about sickness, mortality, and the fragility of life while I was preparing this exhibition. My mother was undergoing chemotherapy; I moved to live with her and support her through it. There, just outside her apartment I met the beetles and started filming them regularly.

This work, in many senses, was a long time in the making. One of my most vivid dreams was that of waking up and opening a cookie tin, the kind that could contain anything else but cookies, and many large, bright, colorful, patterned beetles flew out. I was panicking in the dream about how I could put them back in that tin and woke up. Years later I came across the ‘beetle in the box’ idea in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, where he describes a scenario in which everyone has a box with a beetle inside, that beetle being pain. We only know what our own beetle looks like, and not what other peoples’ beetles look like.

The title, [Beetle] is also important in this sense–the brackets function as a container themselves, but also, like the groups of bracketed nouns in the booklet, its contents may be ephemeral and changing. In the exhibition, I look for that opening: the glass vitrines are not fully enclosed, and the beetles are seen outside, freely flying around and grasping in bright light, while the space itself is dimmed and windows tinted.

Do you feel like the beetles function in a proxy capacity when you're filming them, or is there more of a distance that forms?

I am careful about projecting symbolism onto them because they’re autonomous beings, and we actually have no idea what they’re experiencing. I am also thinking about proximities and distances within perception itself, both ours and theirs. Maybe that’s also what the work is about, too–not just reacting to the ‘beetle in the box’ idea against private language, but what happens when those beetles are outside of the boxes. AA Cavia, who wrote a text accompanying the work when it was shown at KW in Berlin, connected the process to “Nathalie Sarraute’s notion of a ‘tropism’--a spontaneous inner movement of the mind, mirroring ‘that of the movements made by certain living organisms in response to outside stimuli, like light.’” That was very resonant to me. There’s a sort of inverse relation between the interiority of these mysterious beings whose exteriorities are ultra perceptible in their shimmering iridescence.

Like, the ability to see consciousness in anything else?

[Laughing] Yeah. I don’t know, like when I was little, I would always have this like–this sounds odd but: I would look out onto the horizon and there was this videotape that would play in my head all the time–I wondered if this particular videotape is common?--where I’d look out onto the horizon and then there would be an orb, which would be growing in scale as my proximity from the orb increased in distance, like I was in a space shuttle going into space and I was going away from Earth and the Earth was that orb and it was like getting smaller and bigger at the same time–[laughing] and I just, I would like feel like I was going outside of myself into space and was like, trying to go outside of my conscience but recognizing the very limitations of my consciousness and perception relative to other people and my inability to access other people’s internal consciousness. And I was just in that spaceship, zooming away.

This was a usual daydream tendency?

Yeah, it was just like a repeat videotape that would play in my head as a child.

I feel like the way that dolphins and octopi are positioned as having closer proximities to our conception of consciousness, say like with the ability to dream or any of these other things that we use as markers of an interiority–like, I am convinced by those scientific observations–but 
I'm also curious about the utility of an interiority discourse. I find myself skeptical in it, sometimes.

In what sense are you skeptical?

I don't even always know why, I just think it gets leveraged in certain ways in which I notice something happening.

In the sense of a hierarchy of sophistication of interiorities?

I think that might be it, or at least one aspect of it.

Yeah, I find that strange as well.

I wrote a piece a few years ago—in some ways specifically on this question—and while researching, I discovered pretty large communities of reactionaries online marking a number of (what I think are) irrelevant indicators of intelligence–whether someone has an internal monologue, or the production of mental images in their head–and this was their marker of humanity, basically. And there was a quote that was circulating recently where Lacan was like, “I want to speak to Mao to learn if the Chinese have an unconscious.”

I see similar manipulations happening here, it’s the sort of thing where they may be fine on their own, without any leveraging of power or demarcating of intelligence in a way that has any stakes. And maybe there are useful reaffirmations of, like, what a novel form does to think about the use of narration of an interior, but then, in actual practice, I see it leveraged in certain ways.

I agree, I see these moves recreating prejudice and oppression. I am interested in the means with which interiority and intelligence is measured. There’s a lot of things we don’t know. I mean, maybe I sound naive or fanciful, but who’s to say that these beetles don’t have an incredibly complex inner world?

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Adriana Ramić (b. 1989, Chicago) has been exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at SculptureCenter, New York (2024); Autokomanda, Belgrade (2024); inge, New York (2022); lower_cavity, Holyoke, MA (2021); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2019); Kimberly-Klark, New York (2017); with a forthcoming solo exhibition at Switchboard, Berlin (2025). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin (2024); Wschód Gallery, New York (2024); Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (2023); Den Frie Center of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2021); Stroom den Haag, The Hague (2019); Signal Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2018); Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2016); LUMA/ Westbau, Zürich (2015); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2015); and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015). Ramić holds a BFA from the University of California San Diego.

Coco Klockner (b. 1991) is an artist and writer living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She is the author of K-Y (Genderfail Press, 2019), and her writing has appeared in Texte Zur Kunst, Spike Art Magazine, The Whitney Review, Real Life Mag, and elsewhere. Klockner has had solo exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York; Bad Water, Knoxville, TN; stop-gap projects, Columbia, MO; The Anderson Gallery, Richmond, VA; Vent Space, Baltimore, MD; and her work has been included in group exhibitions at Skol Arts Actuels, Montreal, QC, CA; White Columns, New York; Lubov, New York; Gaudalajara 90210, CDMX, MX; Bass & Reiner, San Francisco, CA; MoMA PS1, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; Stove Works, Chattanooga, TN; and Musik Installationen Nürnberg, DE. Klockner is director of the project space hatred 2 in Brooklyn, and her upcoming solo exhibition at SculptureCenter, New York, opens October 2025.

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