New Elements – Analog Computing and the Environment

by admin | May 16, 2022

New Elements – Analog Computing and the Environment

with Laboratoria Arts & Science Foundation
New Tretyakov Gallery Moscow
Curated by Daria Parkhomenko & Dietmar Offenhuber
In partnership with Kaspersky

The exhibition NEW ELEMENTS explores an unusual perspective on data and computation, centering on the physicality of information and its implications for how we make sense of the world. 12 works by artists from different countries show how to close the gap between data and the world.

Artists: Memo Akten (Turkey – UK), Ralf Baecker (Germany), Erich Berger (Finland), Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov (Russia), Thomas Feuerstein (Austria), Forensic Architecture (UK), Ryoichi Kurokawa (Japan), Tuula Narhinen (Finland), Anna Ridler (UK), Tomas Saraceno (Argentina), Theresa Schubert (Germany), Aki Inomata (Japan)

Curatorial text
website

Berlin_Lokal_Zeit

by admin | Nov 27, 2020

Berlin_Lokal_Zeit

BERLIN_LOKAL_ZEIT is a participatory project that aims to capture and jointly reflect on experiences of everyday life in the city during the pandemic. Which phenomena appear, how do they change and how do our attitudes towards them change over time?

30 participants documented and processed the many small changes that have taken place since the beginning of the pandemic in images, text, and audiorecordings. Using CLB Berlin Moritzplatz as a hub, artistic works and performances explore the experiential space of the city.

Link to the Project website

Foto by Nika Radić

What we talk about when we talk about data physicality

by admin | Sep 19, 2020

What we talk about when we talk about data physicality

Best Paper Award IEEE CG&A

For the IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications journal special issue on data physicalization, I wrote a paper on data materiality, especially focused on which concepts of data are mobilized in the data physicalization discourse and practice.

Data physicalizations “map data to physical form,” yet many canonical examples are not based on data sets. To address this contradiction, I argue that the practice of physicalization forces us to rethink traditional notions of data. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to examine how physicalizations relate to data. This paper develops a two-dimensional conceptual space for comparing different perspectives on data used in physicalization, drawing from design theory and critical data studies literature. One axis distinguishes between epistemological and ontological perspectives, focusing on the relationship between data and the mind. The second axis distinguishes how data relate to the world, differentiating between representational and relational perspectives. To clarify the aesthetic and conceptual implications of these different perspectives, the paper discusses examples of data physicalization for each quadrant of the continuous space. It further uses the framework to examine the explicit and implicit assumptions about data in physicalization literature. As a theoretical paper, it encourages practitioners to think about how data relate to the manifestations and the phenomena they try to capture. It invites exploration of the relationship between data and the world as a generative source of creative tension.

The paper can currently be accessed as a pre-print on the arxiv server

The Inscriptome: virus as a visual instrument

by admin | Sep 19, 2020

The Inscriptome: virus as a visual instrument

In this piece for the (now defunct) Strelka Magazine, Orkan Telhan and I looked at the cultural and historical context of viruses and their vaccines as media of inscription. Based on the model of 19th century arm-to-arm vaccination, we look at how the governance of viral inscriptions is a delicate balancing act.

The virus inscribes itself onto the body, but how does it inscribe itself onto the city and the world at large? A new inscription system based on material proxies, bioindicators, and metagenomic signatures allows us to see viruses as recording agents and better understand which spaces they conquer, which species they traverse, and what can stop them.

Link to the archived text

Image: Color plate by Francisco Javier de Balmis shows smallpox vaccination scars. Courtesy of Welcome Library

besenbahn (2001, remastered 2020)

by admin | Jan 23, 2020

besenbahn (2001, remastered 2020)

“the freewaysystem in its totality is now a single comprehensible place, a coherent state of mind, a complete way of life” – Reyner Banham

“Traversing homogenous suburbs and multiplexed freeways, Besenbahn clinically and elegantly fragments the notion of a ‘road movie’. Using time slice technology, this videographic experiment transcends time and place as it ruptures the geometries of movement and perception.” — Melbourne Film Festival

“It´s subject is not ”natural” perception, but perception put in motion by modern means of transportation, and therefore implicitly the history of an epochal transformation of the way in which time and space is experienced. It has come to a preliminary end in suitable contexts – for example cities such as Los Angeles, which has been shaped by the history of motorization – where moving perception now seems to be regarded as integral to natural perception. The thesis presented by besenbahn in this regard would therefore be that the specifically aesthetic quality of such animated perception is absent from the forms of audiovisual representation which are already considered natural (such as indicating movement by means of a tracking shot): In its fragmentation of the continuum of perception, the “subjective geometry which defines space through intervals of time” (Dietmar Offenhuber) illustrates a manner of experience which could remain submerged because it is already so familiar” – Vrääth Öhner

2001, 10 min
video: Dietmar Offenhuber, music: tamtam (Sam Auinger, Hannes Strobl)
more information on www.stadtmusik.org

Besenbahn is distributed by Sixpackfilm and included in the INDEX and VISIONary anthologies