Author Archives: Pau Waelder

Testimonies: video art at the Berlin Biennale

Pau Waelder

The Berlin Biennale is celebrating its 12th edition with a program of exhibitions and events that take place in six venues around the city, until September 18th. The four main exhibitions are hosted by the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Hamburger Bahnhof, and the spaces of the Akademie der Künste at Hanseatenweg and Pariser Platz with a total of nearly 90 artworks by more than a hundred artists. Titled Still Present!, this year’s Biennale is curated by artist Kader Attia, with the support of an artistic team composed by Ana Teixeira Pinto, Đỗ Tường Linh, Marie Helene Pereira, Noam Segal, and Rasha Salti.

View of the exhibition at Akademie der Künste (Hanseatenweg)

The main theme addressed by the current edition of the Biennale is the effect of colonization, in land and history as well as in bodies, people’s lives, identities, and mindsets. This subject touches cultural institutions too, by pointing out the presence of looted artifacts and forms of presenting colonized cultures that only contribute to open the wounds of a history of colonial abuse. In a text written for the catalogue, Kader Attia denounces the hatred of others (whether foreigners, people from nomadic cultures, those experiencing marginalization and anyone not submitting to heteronormative patriarchy) and the invisibility of the wounds that inequality and exploitation have caused:

“Invisibility is discourse’s preferred weapon of control: always in denial of the crime, the enunciator claims victory while disavowing all responsibility.”

Kader Attia, Still Present! Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (Kunst-Werke Berlin, 2022), p.24

The concepts of wound and reparation are key to Attia’s work, and he finds in the processes of decolonization and the way in which Western societies have sought to build an image of a perfectly homogeneous modernity, in itself blind to the wounds it has created, an ideal framework in which to suggest forms of reparation through art. Art, he claims, can resist political and religious obscurantism precisely because it is unpredictable and constantly aims to reclaim people’s attention. He also states that artists seek to capture the present at a time when algorithmic governance collects data from our past actions in order to predict our future behavior. Trapped in this calculation of probabilities, the present no longer belongs to us, stresses Attia, and for this reason it must be recovered by means of the experience of art:

“Standing before a work of art, the spectator is plunged into another temporality, radically different from that of their environment, inaccessible to the insatiable appetite of algorithmic governance. […] art deconstructs so that it may repair and evolve, generating new forms of interpreting the present.”

Kader Attia, Still Present!, p.34,40
Center for Spatial Technologies & Forensic Architecture, Russian Strike on the Kyiv TV Tower (2022)

Being present

The artworks exhibited at the Berlin Biennale show that artists increasingly use video, 3D animation and data visualization in their portrayal of the present. Reality is captured through live footage, digital images, and all sorts of visual documentation. The exhibition spaces are filled with screens and projectors, sometimes extending their presence in the room with objects and imposing installations. The rooms at the Akademie der Künste, the Hamburger Bahnhof, and the KW Institute are dimly lit and labyrinthine, with displays creating areas of attention, that lend each artwork a space of its own, secluded in itself and rarely enabling a dialogue with nearby pieces. The documentary nature of most artworks also forces viewers to read the descriptions on the wall labels and concentrate on the story that each artist is telling. In this sense, as Kader Attia suggests, the artworks succeed in plunging viewers into a different temporality and making them fully present.

Artists increasingly use video, 3D animation and data visualization in their portrayal of the present

This temporality is both created and controlled by the artwork: as philosopher Boris Groys points out, video and time-based arts determine the time of contemplation. Through moving image and sound, notably the voice of a narrator, the artworks capture the viewer’s attention and force her to remain attentive while the story unfolds. This creates a particular pace for the visitor that demands more time and less distractions: these are not instagrammable exhibitions, in which to portray oneself in front of a tremendously huge object or a fiercely immersive installation, but rather spaces of discussion filled with the voices of the unheard. The enormous amount of footage to watch, the complexity of the narratives and the information one is required to process may seem overwhelming to a regular visitor. However, it is worth taking the time to patiently examine the artists’ exhibits, both in the sense of their public presentation and in the sense of producing evidence in a fictional court. 

View of the exhibition at Akademie der Künste (Hanseatenweg)

Visual records, both images and videos, have been considered irrefutable evidence of a fact until digital technologies and fake news finally put every image into question. Obviously, the depiction of historical events has always been subject to the interpretation of the victors, with visual artists being complicit in the creation of a narrative dictated by those in power. Today, artists addressing social, environmental and political issues are well aware of how images and messages are constantly manipulated, and therefore tend to avoid a position of authority, providing instead bare data, appropriated or filmed footage, witness recollections, and the stories told by those who ask to be heard. In this manner, the artist acquires an aura of neutrality, an actor who exposes facts with fair intentions in the form of a cultural product that, as the space that hosts it, is far removed from the complexities of real life. While this may seem to neutralize the political involvement of the artists and the educational (or indoctrinating) power of the artworks, it is actually the contrary. Art exhibitions enable a space where politics and society can be observed with detachment, as though one was reading a fictional story, and this allows one to confront other voices, other mindsets and realities that would otherwise be quickly ignored or dismissed. Being present thus also means being receptive, and willing to, at least, accept the existence of realities other than those we have created for ourselves.

Fragments of a reality

Fragmentation is a salient feature in many artworks, which rely on a variety of elements such as photos, maps, written documents and found objects. In 24°3′55″N 5°3′23″E (2012/2017/2022), Ammar Bouras addresses the consequences of the so-called Béryl incident, an explosion that occurred on May 1, 1962 while the French carried out underground nuclear tests near In Ekker in the Algerian desert. He creates a photographic montage and a video piece that explore both the geological layers of the area and the long-term consequences for the land through the testimonies of its inhabitants. The multiplicity of perspectives described both by the photographs and the video footage question the official history, which buried this event, and the possibility of an objective truth. 

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, OH SHINING STAR TESTIFY (2019/22)

Using CCTV footage of an Israeli military surveillance camera, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme tell in OH SHINING STAR TESTIFY (2019/22) the story of 14-year-old Yusef Al-Shawamreh, who on March 19, 2014 crossed the Israeli separation wall to pick akkoub (an edible plant important in Palestinian cuisine) and was shot dead by Israeli forces. This footage, which circulated online and was later removed, is projected onto a series of wooden panels that capture, distort and hide the projected image in their shadows, as other filmed and appropriated sequences enrich the context of the grainy scene and its crude depiction of the facts. Fragmentation in this case conveys the multiple layers of this event, framing it in a wider social and political context while avoiding the obscene spectacle of death that media outlets have made of drone footage since the Gulf War.  

Poison Soluble. Scènes de l’occupation américaine à Bagdad (2013) by Jean-Jacques Lebel, dives into this morbid spectacle by collecting and enlarging the snapshots taken by US military personnel while torturing and humiliating prisoners at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. With these magnified pictures, the artist builds a labyrinthine installation in which the visitor gets lost, surrounded by horrifyingly graphic depictions of violence and sadism, and the no less upsetting portraits of the proud torturers, smiling at the camera. The artist sought to force an involvement of the viewers, but the harshness of these massively distributed images also calls into question whether Lebel has not created yet another spectacle, this time for an art audience. Such criticism was raised by Iraqi curator Rijin Sahakian shortly after the opening of the Biennale and has finally led artists Layth Kareem, Raed Mutar, and Sajad Abbas to withdraw their work from the exhibition in protest. 

CCTV and drone footage have been used by the media in sensationalist reporting, to a point where their value as evidence is replaced by their effect on the audience

This controversy illustrates the power of the photographic image as both evidence and raw material subject to manipulation. This is particularly true for digital photography. The low resolution snapshots from Abu Ghraib, with their pixelated, badly compressed textures, can be immediately identified as a private record of an event, not meant to be seen outside a closed circle. CCTV and drone footage also belong to this category of images that have been continuously used by the media in sensationalist reporting, to a point where their value as evidence is replaced by their effect on the audience. 

Data speaks for itself

In contrast to the first-hand, visual testimony found in grainy digital footage from CCTV, drone, and smartphone cameras, data analysis and visualization provides a much more detached and abstract, but equally telling, presentation of evidence. Photographs and video clips remain important, but generally as a complement of graphs, simulations, and diagrams mapping the collected data in a meaningful way. 

David Chavalarias, Shifting Collectives (2022)

David Chavalarias’ Shifting Collectives (2022) exemplifies this turn towards data visualization in a detailed observation of the French political landscape. A researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, Chavalarias explores the degradation of democratic values and the trivialization of xenophobia and ethnic nationalism through a timeline extending the long of a wall accompanied by a series of graphs, images, video and sound. The display of information aims to disentangle the complex interplay between political candidates, ideologists, social and workers groups, and the media, in order to provide quantifiable evidence of the rise of populism and right-wing extremism. Again there is here a collage of fragmented documentation, although it is presented under a unifying graph and the authoritative voice of science: the orderly display of facts, names, and numbers builds the narrative by itself.

Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies (2021)

The collective Forensic Architecture is well known for their detailed research of cases of state violence through the analysis of architectural spaces and materials, using simulation techniques and information collected from witnesses. In Cloud Studies (2021) they address a type of aggression that, unlike bullet holes and broken glass, leaves no visible trace but causes permanent damage: the toxic clouds created by tear gas, airborne chemicals and petrochemical emissions. Fused in a single video, the collected documentation including video footage, 3D animations, fluid dynamics simulations, and countless photographs analyzed using machine learning techniques, is presented in a linear narrative in the form of a lecture that nevertheless includes certain dramatization. As in Chavalarias’ work, the display of information speaks for itself although here it is more scripted and lends itself to aesthetic concerns that confer the video its own identity as an artwork. 

In both artworks the presence of video and computer generated images denote the central role that this kind of imagery has adopted in the depiction of events by news outlets, at a time when the dominating perspective of a satellite or drone view and the tidy simplicity of a computer simulation can provide a much clearer and seemingly indisputable perspective than any number of witnesses’ accounts.

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, THIS UNDREAMT OF SAIL IS WATERED BY THE WHITE WIND OF THE ABYSS, 2022

Eyewitnesses

The voices of those who were there, the victims, the passersby, also the perpetrators, the plotters and the followers, tell stories that contain their own truths and commonly share the authenticity of a firsthand account. Every person describes their experiences with a mixture of truth and fiction, as a result of their interpretation of reality mediated by their beliefs. Thus, in every witness account there is a margin of doubt, an uncertainty that artists can explore in the depiction of their stories.

Omer Fast’s A Place Which Is Ripe (2020) presents the testimonies of two former London police officers who explain the ubiquitous presence of surveillance cameras in Great Britain in connection with the murders of two-year-old James Bulger in 1993 and fourteen-year-old Alice Gross in 2014, two notorious crimes that were solved thanks to CCTV footage. The footage showing Bulger taking the hand of one of his murderers was in turn widely distributed by the media and contributed to popularize the notion of the surveillance camera as a reliable witness. Fast films the officers from behind, to protect their identities, and combines their interviews with Google image searches based on their words, all displayed in three smartphones placed inside a drawer. The Google searches illustrate the officer’s accounts with a detachment that echoes the monotone sound of their voices and produces an eerie effect of repetition and normalization. The automated selection of the images also points to the development of surveillance cameras managed no longer by people, but by artificial intelligence programs. The terrible images that have transitioned from unquestionable evidence to morbid spectacle now become simple indexers of events for a computer to identify them.

In every witness account there is a margin of doubt, an uncertainty that artists can explore in the depiction of their stories.

View of the exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art

A different form of indexing can be found in Elske Rosenfeld’s AN ARCHIVE OF GESTURES (2012–22), an exploration of the revolutions and revolts of 1989/90 surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall and the re-unification of Germany. Through the notion of “gestures,” she proposes a blueprint for understanding how these uprisings lead to collective action and how the events are recorded and told. Again, the witness is a camera. The gesture of “interrupting” is analyzed by editing a video recording of the first session of the Central Round Table of the GDR, in which members of the new political groups and citizens movements and of the established parties came together to discuss the role of the Round Table in aiding the democratic transformation of the country. Rosenfeld focuses on a moment in which the meeting was interrupted by the voices of protesters out in the street. Going back and forth through the footage, she divides the scene in two, repeats certain gestures of the participants, captures their reactions and hesitation upon being told what is happening outside. As with Fast’s film, editing is a key element in building the narrative. Both artists, as interpreters of the witnesses’ accounts, make the story their own.

Beyond fiction

Our perception of the present is clearly mediated by the eye of a camera, but not only a photographic or surveillance camera. The virtual camera of a simulated environment in a video game or a 3D animation also creates a reality of its own, that can be experienced as intensely as our physical surroundings. Video game worlds, with their endless possibilities, can also hold a hyperbolical mirror to our reality, making visible those aspects that are hidden or ignored.

Maithu Bùi, Mathuật – MMRBX (2022)

Maithu Bùi’s Mathuật – MMRBX (2022) is a video installation based on a virtual reality game that addresses the Vietnamese diaspora through mythology and magic rituals for communicating with the dead. The virtual space here allows for a suspension of disbelief and the assimilation of a set of cultural codes that belong to the artist’s personal memory and the country’s collective history. The video installation occupies the room in a way that invites to perceive the projected images as a real space and immerse oneself in the narrative that the artist has created.

Zach Blas, PROFUNDIOR (LACHRYPHAGIC TRANSMUTATION DEUS-MOTUS-DATA NETWORK) (2022)

Zach Blas goes one step further in this direction by creating a theatrical setup in PROFUNDIOR (LACHRYPHAGIC TRANSMUTATION DEUS-MOTUS-DATA NETWORK) (2022). An ambitious installation composed of eight screens and two projections, the piece presents a fictional AI god that feeds on the emotional tears of simulated humans. The tears are transformed into text, images, and sound, in what is seemingly an autopoietic system that seeks to compute human emotion. Continuing his exploration of the politics and imaginaries surrounding facial recognition and predictive policing based on artificial intelligence algorithms, Blas creates a dystopian world in which humans have been replaced by their avatars and emotions have become data. While this overtly fictional story seems to be far removed from the reality depicted by Bouras, Abbas and Abou-Rahme, or Lebel, it is nevertheless deeply rooted in our present. Blas’ subject matter requires a different form of expression, which is more effective as an extravagant fiction than it would be as a collection of documents and people’s accounts.

Media art has often been described as the “art of the future,” but as these works show, it is an art of the radical present.

This selective vision of the artworks on display at the Berlin Biennale aims to point out how artists address the present through moving images, appropriated footage that was leaked online, witnesses’ accounts recorded on smartphones, simulated environments and 3D-rendered fictions. These contents, and the way they are presented, allow in turn to create a different temporality, as stressed by Kader Attia, that leads the viewer to a state of presence. If, as the artist and curator suggests, we must be “still present,” this can only be achieved through art that does not claim to be atemporal, but that is time-based. Media art has often been described as the “art of the future,” but as these works show, it is an art of the radical present.

Kinetismus: art that moves at Kunsthalle Praha

Pau Waelder

Kinetismus. View of the exhibition space. Photo: Vojtěch Veškrna, Kunsthalle Praha

Kunsthalle Praha is a new contemporary art space that opened its doors in February at the former Zenger Electrical Substation in the heart of Prague. Founded by the Pudil Family Foundation, it aims to connect the Czech and international art scenes through a varied program of exhibitions and events that take place both in their physical location and on their website, in the form of a “Digital Kunsthalle” that collects video documentation, articles, and digital guides to the exhibitions. The use of the term Kunsthalle identifies this institution with the focus on temporary exhibitions as opposed to hosting a permanent collection, which is nevertheless built through a program of acquisitions and will be presented to the public regularly in thematic exhibitions and in a digital catalogue.

Given Kunsthalle Praha’s foundational aims and the history of its building, it is only fitting that the inaugural exhibition is dedicated to the role that electricity has played in the development of art over the last century and up to the present. Kinetismus: 100 Years of Electricity in Art is an ambitious group show spanning a century of artistic creation through a selection of nearly a hundred artworks that connects the avant-gardes of the 1920s with the pioneers of kinetic and cybernetic art, and today’s digital art. Curated by Peter Weibel, revered theoretician, artist and director of the ZKM in Karlsruhe, alongside Christelle Havranek, chief curator at Kunsthalle Praha, and scientific associate Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, the exhibition’s curatorial concept is centered around establishing the legacy and relevance of electronic and digital art in contemporary society (an approach for which both Weibel and the ZKM are widely known) as well as cementing its position in the history of modern and contemporary art. In the text he wrote for the exhibition’s catalog, Peter Weibel denounces the lack of attention that digital art has received from the contemporary art world and its institutions:

“Most museums still refuse to include light art, sound art, interactive art, and cinematographic, cybernetic, or computer art as part of their collections or permanent exhibitions. It could be called a betrayal of the masses since such museums are not truly exhibiting the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but rather only paintings and sculptures from these centuries.”

Weibel, 2022, p.36

These strong words express the frustration of more than one generation of artists, scholars, curators, gallerists, collectors, and also art lovers who have seen over and over again how artistic practices linked to scientific disciplines and technological innovations have been sidetracked or utterly ignored in the mainstream contemporary art world, in which even photography and video have struggled to gain recognition as art. While this situation is clearly changing in recent years, there is still work to be done, not only to integrate digital art in the contemporary art scene, but also to understand its nature and history.

Kinetismus both adheres to the sober presentation of historical artifacts that is required of a museum, and the playful experience of visitors in front of a series of artworks based on ongoing processes. 

The NFT boom brought a renewed attention to digital art and consequently its history, although the crazed search for “OGs” has finally lead to the artworks of pioneers being used to attract newcomer collectors and boost sales at auction. It is therefore more necessary than ever to present the history of digital art to the public in all its manifestations and its complex ramifications, not only to bring attention to the names of those trailblazing artists who had been partly or almost totally forgotten, but also to better understand how the artistic practices linked to electronic and digital media came to be. Kinetismus aptly carries out this task in a way that both adheres to the sober presentation of historical artifacts and the information around them that is required of a museum, and the playful experience of visitors in front of a series of artworks based on ongoing processes rather than static objects. 

Woody Vasulka, Light Revisited, 1974-2001. Photo: Lukáš Masner, Kunsthalle Praha

The Four C’s: putting digital back into art

Peter Weibel points out that a singular trait of the exhibition is its aim to highlight the existence, for the past one hundred years, of an art based on electricity (“plugged-in art”) that he describes as “the predominant singular achievement of the twentieth century” (Weibel, 2022, p.36). Interestingly, this all-encompassing denomination overrides the myriad terms used to describe artistic practices based on emerging technologies since the work of the pioneering creators of algorithmic plotter drawings was described as computer art. It also connects these practices with the history of modern art, going back to avant-garde experiments with light, movement, and cinema. In this sense, the curatorial approach finds yet another form of integrating digital art into a long tradition of artistic practices that are already part of the established canon of modern and contemporary art history. 

Since the earliest experiments integrating emerging technologies into artistic projects, artists, theoreticians, and curators have sought to highlight the distinctive features of these art forms while making it clear that they belong to the fine arts, namely by establishing links and comparisons to painting and sculpture. From the seminal texts of artists such as Lászlo Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s, to the essays by theoreticians and curators such as Jack Burnham, Jasia Reichardt, Frank Popper and Herbert W. Franke in the 1960s and 1970s, to name a few, connections have been constantly drawn between art, science, and technology, seeking to expand the notion of what art is and how it relates to a society that is increasingly dependent on the technology it has created and shaped. 

Weibel stresses that the structure of the exhibition according to the “Four Cs” (cinematography, cinétisme, cybernetics, computer art) is what makes this exhibition different than other historical reviews of electronic and digital art

The field of what has been variously termed computer art, cyberart, electronic art, new media art, or digital art has evolved over the last sixty years into an art world of its own, but it has always been conceived by its proponents as part of the wider field of contemporary art. During the last decade, an increasing number of books and art exhibitions in museums and art spaces have underscored the connections between digital art and the history of art in the twentieth century. These approaches have been based on a concept or feature that can be traced in both digital and analogue artworks, such as the use of light, movement, instructions, or the participation of the audience.

For instance, in 2009, art historian Edward Shanken proposed in his book Art and Electronic Media (Shanken, 2009) a history of digital art based on a series of “thematic streams” such as “Motion, Duration, Illumination” or “Charged Environments,” that allowed him to connect the work of avant-garde pioneers such as Moholy-Nagy with that of established artists in the digital and contemporary art worlds such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Olafur Eliasson. Similarly, in 2018, curator Christiane Paul presented alongside Carol Mancusi-Ungaro and Clémence White the group exhibition Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which drew on the concepts enumerated in the title to bring together works of video art, generative art, and conceptual art spanning more than fifty years. 

teamLab, United, Fragmented, Repeated, and Impermanent World, 2013. Photo: Lukáš Masner, Kunsthalle Praha

Kinetismus similarly establishes thematic connections between kinetic art, cybernetic art, experimental cinema, and digital art (here presented under the term “computer art”), as well as dialogues among the artworks exhibited at the Kunsthalle Praha. Weibel stresses that the structure of the exhibition according to the “Four Cs” (cinematography, cinétisme, cybernetics, computer art) is what makes this exhibition different than other historical reviews of electronic and digital art, as it allows for a rich spectrum of associations, correspondences and interplays between artistic practices that have often been considered as separate approaches to artistic creation.

Certainly, the dependence on electricity to power light sources and motorized elements in kinetic artworks, cameras and projectors in experimental films, and computers in all sorts of digital art is a common factor to all of these art forms. This leads to two main elements that depend on electricity and ultimately connect all of the artworks in the exhibition: artificial light and movement, the latter more widely understood as a permanently ongoing process, as opposed to the static object that is a painting or a (classical) sculpture. To properly map all these connections and describe the artworks in this article would be a futile effort, as the texts written by Weibel, Havranek, and Nolasco-Rózsás for the catalogue already address the “Four Cs” in detail, and additionally a wealth of information about the artworks can be found at the exhibition’s digital guide, freely available online. Instead, I will focus on two differentiating aspects of the exhibition which are particularly relevant to the presentation of “plugged-in art” to the public: the attention to local and national art scenes, and the experience of the visitor.

Refik Anadol, Infinity Room, 2015. Photo: Lukáš Masner, Kunsthalle Praha

The legacy of Zdeněk Pešánek

While the digital art community has often criticized the contemporary art world for sidetracking or ignoring them, the history of digital art has been built mainly around artists and exhibitions from Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and particularly the United States of America. The blind spots in this history, which is still being written, are being addressed by artists, scholars, and curators from different nationalities who are enriching the knowledge about pioneering artists from Latin America, Asia, and other regions of the globe. In this sense, it is important that historical reviews such as the one proposed by Kinetismus pays attention to the contributions of their own pioneers.

The Prague show is structured around the work of Czech artist Zdeněk Pešánek (1896-1965), a painter, sculptor, and architect who was among the first to create light-kinetic works in the 1920s and the first to use neon light tubes in an artistic installation. He built the Spectrophone (1924-30), an instrument composed of a piano that projected moving lights onto a relief, combining music and visual kinetics. This machine would be the basis for his light-kinetic sculpture Edisonka (1926-30) at the Edison Transformer Station at Jeruzalémská street in Prague, which became a fundamental artwork of this period, alongside László Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator (1922–30). Later on, he created the series of sculptures One Hundred Years of Electricity (1937) for the façade of the Zenger Transformer Station, which were exhibited that same year at the International Exposition of Arts and Technology in Paris. Most of the sculptures were lost on their return trip, the series never being installed at its intended location. 

The 3D illustration created by Studio Najbrt reinterpreting one of the artist’s sculptures makes Pešánek’s work vibrantly alive and up-to-date, more post-Internet than 1930s avant-garde.

As stressed by Christelle Havranek, Pešánek’s groundbreaking work did not receive the attention it deserved at a time when the rivalry between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany prefigured a global conflict that had already started its dead toll in Spain, as denounced by Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica (1937). Pešánek nevertheless continued his investigations and coined the term “kineticism” in his book Kinetismus from 1941. The repurposing of the Zenger electrical substation as the Kunsthalle Praha naturally led to conceiving an inaugural exhibition around electricity in art in which Pešánek’s work and ideas take a central role. In this respect, Havranek points out that it was not their aim to review the artist’s work (a task already carried out in a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Prague in 1996) but to place it in the larger context of the international art scene, spanning from the early decades of the twentieth century to the present.

Several pieces from One Hundred Years of Electricity (1932-36) and The Spa Fountain (1936-37) are exhibited in the first gallery of the Kunsthalle alongside artworks by his contemporaries Naum Gabo, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Duchamp, as well as kinetic art luminaries such as Julio Le Parc, pioneers of digital art such as Lillian F. Schwartz and Jeffrey Shaw, established names in the contemporary and digital art scenes such as William Kentridge, Olafur Eliasson, and Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, and young talents such as Anna Ridler. This juxtaposition of artworks from such a wide temporal range reinforces the relevance of Pešánek’s work, considered in its historical framework, but probably more importantly it is the 3D illustration created by Studio Najbrt for the exhibition poster and the catalogue cover reinterpreting one of the artist’s sculptures what makes Pešánek’s work vibrantly alive and up-to-date, more post-Internet than 1930s avant-garde.

In accordance with the general conception of the exhibition, the combination of a serious, properly documented approach to Pešánek’s artworks and their history, and a playful reinterpretation that takes over street billboards and is able to communicate with a wider and younger audience constitutes a sensible decision that should be common to all presentations of the history and the present of digital art.

Kinetismus. View of the exhibtion. Photo: Lukáš Masner, Kunsthalle Praha

Enjoying kinetic and digital art

Not everyone wants to read a long theoretical text before approaching the artworks at an exhibition. Some prefer to simply experience the artworks, and while it is true that one cannot expect to fully understand an artwork without some context or explanation, there is a strong value in this direct, unmediated exposure to the art. In Kinetismus, the exhibition space, particularly in the first gallery, involves an interesting contradiction: the room feels crowded, there are artworks everywhere (almost fifty in a space the size of an average art gallery), emitting noises and projecting light and reflections on each other. The initial impression is somewhat chaotic, but at the same time it reminds of early exhibitions of kinetic and electronic art from the 1960s and 1970s (which, I must say, I have only seen through documentation). The studio that designed the exhibition space, Schroeder Rauch, consciously aimed to create a “multi-perspective and dense exhibition,” in which “the artworks but also the visitors find themselves in an open landscape environment of objects, movements and light. Everything is in communication with everything.” 

Enjoyment is not a bad word when it comes to an art exhibition. With solid theoretical and historical foundations, Kinetismus offers a space for both learning and having fun.

This points to an aspect that is not so often a central consideration in an exhibition: the experience of the visitor. Through its selection of artworks and their placement in the different rooms of the Kunsthalle Praha, the exhibition becomes a cabinet of curiosities and a space of wonder and enjoyment. For some, this might be seen as a shortcoming (“the exhibition is not serious enough”, “the artworks do not have «space to breathe»”), but it is quite the contrary. By combining artworks from very different chronological moments and letting them “contaminate” each other with light and sound, the space that is created becomes less and cathedral and more a bazaar (in the sense of Eric S. Raymond’s influential essay from 2000), in which the visitor can choose what draws their attention and experience each artwork with a sense of surprise, letting the piece develop its process and reacting to it.

Enjoyment is not a bad word when it comes to an art exhibition. With solid theoretical and historical foundations, Kinetismus offers a space for both learning and having fun with a type of art that does not stare down from a high plinth but involves the viewer in its ever-changing process. Enjoyment brings with it a positive experience with the art, sparks interest, and leads to learning and appreciating the artworks in their context.

Art that moves, that stimulates thought and emotions, is remembered and valued. “Plugged-in art,” from kinetic to generative and AI-generated, has the ability to move, in every meaning of the word. It should always be presented in a way that allows it to do so.

Christina Kubisch, Cloud, 2019. Photo: Lukáš Masner, Kunsthalle Praha

References

Havranek, Christelle (2022). Introduction. In: Weibel, P. and Havranek, C. (eds.) Kinetismus. 100 Years of Electricity in Art. Prague and Berlin: Kunsthalle Praha, Hatje Cantz, 2022.

Shanken, Edward (2009). Art and Electronic Media. London: Phaidon Press.

Weibel, Peter (2022). 100 Years of Electricity in Art. In: Weibel, P. and Havranek, C. (eds.) Kinetismus. 100 Years of Electricity in Art. Prague and Berlin: Kunsthalle Praha, Hatje Cantz, 2022.

Claudia Larcher: “architecture can create, change, or destroy our environment”

Pau Waelder 

Claudia Larcher’s work explores video animation, collage, photography and installation with a particular cinematic approach to storytelling and the ability to extract narratives from apparently nondescript, everyday spaces. Based in Vienna, she has presented her work in numerous exhibitions in Austria and abroad, including Tokyo Wonder Site (Japan), Slought Foundation Philadelphia, the Weimar Art Festival, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, Manifesta 13 and Anthology Film Archives in NYC.

Larcher currently presents two artcasts on Niio focusing on her interest in architecture: Un/heimlich, a selection of videos exploring interior spaces that suggest an uncanny atmosphere, and Less is More, More, More! which brings together several artworks addressing the language of modern architecture and its promises of a better world. In the following interview, she elaborates on the themes that inspire her work and the narrative techniques she employs in her films.

Claudia Larcher, YAMA (2010)

A central theme in your work relates to architecture, both as an artistic discipline that finds its expression in form and space, and as the built environments we live in. What do you find most interesting about these two aspects of architecture? 

When it comes to architecture, I am really drawn to its power to create, change and destroy our environment. 

I am interested in how our everyday living surroundings shape us, how we shape them and how, in turn, our interactions with these spaces shape our mental and emotional states. I see the built environment as a kind of interface between the inner and outer world, a place where these two worlds meet. I am also interested in how our built environment reflects our political systems, our values and our sense of identity. 

Contemporary architectures are also riddled with algorithms with specific functions and thus determine objects that enable, restrict, or deny access. This can be experienced for example in my work Empty Rooms: Most of the places you can see in my videos were inhabited by me or shaped my attitude towards certain things. However, this personal fact should not be the main focus. Rather, I am looking for a common ground in the story to address several people with my work. 

When I install my digital works in exhibitions, I am very interested in uniting the exhibition architecture and my work in an installation to create a seamless immersive experience. 

Claudia Larcher, Empty Rooms (2011)

I see the built environment as a kind of interface between the inner and outer world, a place where these two worlds meet.

The traveling shot is a key narrative resource in some of your videos. This technique is used in cinema to immerse the viewer into a space and also to create a certain tension, an expectation. How do you use the narrative potentialities of the traveling shot in your work?

I think at the beginning I used the traveling shot as a kind of suspense tool, then I realized that it could also be used to create a sense of place, my personal impression of a place, but in a dream-like manner. I plan the shot ahead of time. Technically it is very difficult to remove elements at the end of every animation process, as the built environments are nested within each other, and influence each other. While building my scenes of the environments digitally, I’m thinking about the rhythm and the pacing of the shot, but I’m also thinking about the unexpected. I want the viewer to feel like they are in this new space with me and that they are experiencing the unfolding of the shot in real time. I want them to feel the tension and the anticipation of what is going to happen. Some of my films work with a narrative that needs a beginning, a cinematic arc of suspense and an end (for example my film Heim) But I also like to use the effect of the seamless loop, which describes a closed space (Empty Rooms) or a body (Self).

I want the viewer to feel like they are in this new space with me and that they are experiencing the unfolding of the shot in real time.

Claudia Larcher, HEIM/ HOME (2008)

The collage technique allows you to create heterotopias: spaces within spaces, with their own logic. What does this technique bring to your creative process, and to the concept of space you are working with? Do you see the screen as a heterotopia in itself, a space that becomes “other” and inserts itself into our living environment? 

The digital collage allows me to create a new space, an alternative space that is neither real nor imaginary. This space is the result of a combination of elements that have been taken from a reality or from an idea. It is not a utopia, nor a dystopia, it is another place. This alternative space is a place where I can experiment with different possibilities. With the collage technique I can take an element from a street or a building and place it in a different context, in a new space that I have created. 

If you’ve seen several videos of mine, you may have noticed that I use certain image elements multiple times. For example a plant which is illuminated with artificial light. This picture exists in my archive and is a kind of representative of a certain topic, in this case of global warming. This image then appears like an actor in different films.The idea of achieving a déjà vu in the viewer amuses me. But I also experiment with the audience, namely whether they perceive something as real or how far I can go until they recognize the “fake.” Sometimes I am surprised that the audience thinks it is a real, physical camera shot, for example in Heim, Noise above our Heads or Self, because they are not informed about the possibilities of CGI and cannot even imagine a manipulation. 

Yes, I think the screen is a heterotopia in and of itself, a space that becomes “other” and inserts itself into our living environment. I see the screen as a space that we are constantly occupying and interacting with. For me, it’s an extension of the physical space that is almost seamlessly completed, like the cell phone display that we look at several times a day.

I see the screen as a space that we are constantly occupying and interacting with. For me, it’s an extension of the physical space that is almost seamlessly completed.

While there is almost no human presence in your Rooms videos, this presence is felt through the objects scattered around, the doors, the handles… What do you find most interesting about depicting seemingly empty spaces that are filled with stories? 

In Empty Rooms for example, I look for the memories stored in spaces and their emotional qualities. These seemingly empty spaces that I depict tell a story in themselves, through the traces or objects that people have left behind. These rooms are a kind of witnesses of lived history, which are layered like the wall plaster. The objects you see tell something about the inhabitants, they are portraits in themselves, so to speak. I like the idea that objects are living beings and remind us of the history’s aftereffects that cannot be suppressed. 

Empty Rooms, in particular, recalls abandoned underground bunkers or rooms in an industrial warehouse or workshop, spaces that have no obvious use, non-places whose utilitarian architecture I examine as if they were monuments to their supposedly simple economic purpose. 

Claudia Larcher, Collapsing Mies (2020)

In many of your films we find an exploration of the uncanny, which is made more evident as the spaces become increasingly surreal, although at times this is achieved through a depiction of quite nondescript places, which become interesting through montage and music. Can you elaborate on the role of sound and the visual elements you choose in creating an uncanny atmosphere? 

According to Sigmund Freud, the uncanny is a condition of the mind in which one feels the presence of something strange and unfamiliar in the presence of something that is normally familiar. In the uncanny experience, the repressed returns in alienated form. The German word “heimlich“ (homely or secretly) is in two ways the mirror image of “unheimlich” (uncanny) – on the one hand it means the hidden, the concealed and on the other hand the homey – familiar. (See my film Heim/Home). The projection surface – the screen functions as the mirror, but is capable of much more than an ordinary mirror. I can charge it with images that go far beyond the reflection of reality. Thus, the steady camera movement, which visually drills deeper and deeper into the architecture of a single-family house, irritates the viewer. The uncut view is familiar and at the same time uncanny to the human gaze, since it omits the blink of an eye as a film cut. At the same time, in the deserted setting, the architecture and the things to be seen in it function as supposed actors with the contents inscribed in them. On the one hand, these are naturally determined by their owners, but on the other hand they are also “vessels” that can be brought to life through the projection of the viewer’s content. The secret biographies of the spectators are suddenly mirrored into the uncanny. 

The use of sound in my films is crucial. I think the uncanny is achieved by the juxtaposition of sounds and the lack of them. But there is no recipe for the creation of my sound tracks. Sometimes I design them myself (see my film Heim/Home), or an already existing piece of music by a composer serves me (Empty Rooms, composer Constantin Popp) or I commission a composition (Collapsing Mies, music by Alexander J. Eberhard). There are also cases where silence creates the desired effect and one has to concentrate entirely on the moving image. But what unites the music is the use of soundscapes, by which I mean the acoustic imprinting and shaping of certain places, for instance the individual acoustic spaces or soundscapes of biotopes or cities. Particularly in field recording, sounds from nature, technology and the environment are recorded with a microphone and used both unprocessed or slightly processed as well as electronically alienated. These approaches are present in all my sound tracks.

Concrete Island: reading Ballard through digital art

Pau Waelder

Literature and the visual arts have always been close allies. The words of poets, novelists, and philosophers have inspired painters, sculptors, and multimedia creators, while the images, objects, and experiences created by visual artists have in turn moved writers to imagine stories and fantastic worlds. The examples of this creative exchange would be endless, not only among artists, as is the case of Maria Turner, a character in Paul Auster’s celebrated novel Leviathan (1992) that is directly inspired by the work of artist Sophie Calle, but also among curators, this being the case of the current edition of the Venice Biennale, whose curator Cecilia Alemani named after Leonora Carrington’s book The Milk of Dreams.

In light of these fruitful collaborations among wordsmiths and image makers, we initiate a series of artcasts on Niio that bring together a variety of artworks in the form of a reading or illustration of a novel. The selection is carried out by extracting from the text the themes that relate to certain artworks, the images it evokes, and conversely how the artworks can further explore ideas or situations that are merely suggested or briefly described in the book. The selection also draws connections among the artworks themselves, independently of their connection with the novel, and opens up new forms of interpretation.

The first artcast in this series is dedicated to J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974), the second installment in his “urban disaster trilogy,” initiated with Crash (1973) and followed by High Rise (1975). The novel tells the story of Robert Maitland, a wealthy architect who has a car accident that leaves him stranded in an abandoned area between intersecting motorways in London. Trapped in the median strip, he cannot get help from passing drivers or the inhabitants of the high rises nearby, and must struggle to survive. As time passes, the embankment gradually becomes his “island,” a place where he feels safe in his loneliness, a voluntary castaway who may not want to be rescued. 

Ballard took inspiration from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), the quintessential story about a castaway, and replaced the exotic setting of a remote island off the coast of Trinidad with a waste ground in a motorway intersection. In the introduction to the 1994 edition of the novel, the author emphasizes this connection and how a romantic tropical fantasy can become a mundane urban nightmare:

“The day-dream of being marooned on a desert island still has enormous appeal, however small our chances of actually finding ourselves stranded on a coral atoll in the pacific. […] The Pacific atoll may not be available, but there are other islands far nearer to home, some of them only a few steps from the pavements we tread every day. […] As we drive across a motorway intersection, through the elaborately signalled landscape that seems to anticipate every possible hazard, we glimpse triangles of waste ground screened off by steep embankments. What would happen if, by some freak mischance, we suffered a blow-out and plunged over the guard-rail onto a forgotten island of rubble and weeds, out of sight of the surveilllance cameras?”

J.G. Ballard, Introduction to Concrete Island

The story begins with a blow-out that causes Maitland’s car to lose its direction and plunge down an embankment next to the M4 motorway. By leaving the signposted path of the asphalt road, the architect veers off his normal life and even the society he knew. What happens next should be understood as a fable, a somewhat implausible scenario that conveys a deep truth. 

The embankment

“Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Maitland saw that he had crashed into a small traffic island, some two hundred yards long and triangular in shape, that lay in the waste ground between three converging motorway routes.”

J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island, chapter 1

The abandoned plot of land that Ballard probably modeled after the A40 Westway bridge near White City in London (according to Mike Bonsall) becomes one of the main characters in the novel, a sloped terrain that is apparently deserted but gradually unveils hidden architectures and unexpected inhabitants. In Unstill Life (2014), ZEITGUISED creates a photorealistic 3D model of a highway overpass, that is explored using consciously artificial camera movements. The entire space seems to be in the process of being created, or adjusted, and suddenly turns into a flooded area. 

Henrik Mauler, the creative mind behind ZEITGUISED, has described his work as “virtual vandalism […] my approach of finding things and then tinkering with them until they either break or are put back together in a new way, with an uneasy, uncanny edginess” (theFOUND, 2022). In the video, the highway is actually “tinkered with,” reoriented, reconsidered, until it suddenly becomes something altogether different. Similarly, the median strip where Maitland’s car lands transforms into a somewhat exotic “deserted island,” where he will struggle to survive, send messages to the outside world and develop an uneasy relationship with its inhabitants. The painstaking precision of the simulation fools the eye and makes us wonder whether this is actual footage of a real road or a full 3D animation, which creates the kind of uneasiness that Mauler is looking for and that can also be found in the work of photographer Thomas Demand. The way in which the illusion is broken is similar to the tire break that suddenly leads Maitland’s Jaguar through a temporary wooden barrier and down to the embankment where it finally crashes.

The Jaguar

“The front end had been punched into itself like a collapsed face. Three of the four headlamps were broken, and the decorative grille was meshed into the radiator honeycomb. On impact the suspension units had forced the engine back off its mountings, twisting the frame of the car. The sharp smell of anti-freeze and hot rust cut at Maitland’s nostrils as he bent down and examined the wheel housing. A total write-off – damn it, he had liked the car.”

J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island, chapter 1

Maitland’s car plays a passive yet crucial role in the story, first as a sign of the architect’s wealth and the vehicle that lands him in the embankment, then as his first shelter on the island. It provides him with the goods it can give, and when it is no longer useful, its owner sets it on fire. 

Junkyard III (2019) is a film by Felix Luque and Íñigo Bilbao that belongs to a larger project exploring our society dominated by cars as a sign of status and a selfish, unsustainable form of mobility sustained by an economy modeled after the massive use of fossil fuels and the extraction of rare earth minerals. In a text about this project, media theorists Jussi Parikka and Yiğit Soncul aptly suggest considering “the car industry as the accident of the fossil fuel culture” and ask: “what if we think that the whole industry, with production, distribution, excavation and use, and what it has been doing to the earth’s “resources,” the organisation of labour and gender roles, an historical accident that undermines the viability of organised human existence?” (Luque, 2021). Here the concept of the accident and the exploration of car wrecks carried out by the artsts in a junkyard using a 3D scanner can be directly linked to Ballard’s text and his wider critique of an urban society shaped by fast lanes and high rises.

Catherine and Helen

“He thought of Helen Fairfax asleep in her flat, as always on the left side of the double bed that filled the minute bedroom, her head lying on the righthand pillow, as if she had deputised the various sections of her body to represent both herself and Maitland. […] By comparison, Catherine would be sleeping quietly in her white bedroom, a bar of moonlight across her pale throat.”

J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island, chapter 3

Stranded on his island, Maitland recalls memories of his wife Catherine, but also of his lover Helen Fairfax. The three form an uneasy triangle, with both women knowing of the other. Their bodies are apart but forcefully put together in Maitland’s thoughts and the secrets they have all kept from each other. The architect’s injured body is what initially keeps him stranded in the embankment, unable to leave or reach for help, but progressively it is his mind and his unwillingness to go back to the life he had and to the relationship with the two women that turn him into a castaway. 

Interested in the human body both as a biological organism, a shape, and a geolocated element in our permanently connected data systems, Solimán López has developed in High Meshes (2019) a collection of 3D scans of the naked bodies of anonymous participants, which are combined and placed together by an artificial intelligence software, according to their digital information. Age, race, gender, nationality, income, or social status become irrelevant as the bodies are treated as mere data, and rearranged without even considering their physical boundaries. The way in which people become data in the artist’s work reminds of Ballard’s exploration of what becomes of a person when the systems and protocols of our structured society fall apart, when he or she leaves the “ellaborate signalled landscape” (Beckett, 2015) and falls into a different kind of reality. While Ballard sought this situation in doomsday scenarios in which technology becomes useless, Solimán López moves in the opposite direction, towards a fully digital environment in which human control is lost to the algorithms of an artificially intelligent system.

Escape

“Perhaps, secretly, we hoped to be marooned, to escape our families, lovers and responsiblities. Modern technology, as I tried to show in Crash and High-Rise, offers an endless field-day to any deviant strains in our personalities. Marooned in an office block or on a traffic island, we can tyrannise ourselves, test our strengths and weaknesses, perhaps come to terms with aspects of our characters to which we have always closed our eyes.”

J. G. Ballard, introduction to Concrete Island.

The ending of the novel signals what has been hinted since its first pages, that Maitland is actually a voluntary castaway, and that being stranded in a median strip is the logical conclusion of a long held desire to be left alone. His journey, as it has been reiterated, is psychological: the transition from his socially accepted persona (however entangled in escapist flirts) to the child he once was, happy in his loneliness. Ballard suggests, in the introduction to the novel and the reference to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, that we all in a way seek this isolation and to escape a comfort zone that sometimes feels like a prison. The open ending of Concrete Island leaves the story in a state of unresolved continuity, in which the exceptional becomes mundane and no decisive action will ever be taken. It is a telling portrait of our society, in which anything can become business as usual and all major decisions are endlessly delayed for fear of destabilizing the statu quo. The world beyond the embankment in Concrete Island is a dull gray, a nondescript succession of passing cars and silent high rises, in contrast to the richly coloured space that is Maitland’s island. Seen from the main character’s perspective, the story may be read not so much as a dystopia, but rather as a new beginning.

The Grey Zone : 629d:85dd:9c0d:b5a0:b674:1d5f:a990:c307 (2022) by Gregory Chatonsky depicts a mysterious sculptural object placed in what appears to be a wasteland next to an industrial area. The animated image was created using an artificial intelligence program and is part of a series exploring the idea of a “gray zone” resulting from the mixture of the black box of technology and the luminous white space of the art gallery. Intricately linked to materiality, the tradition of sculpture, and the possibility of a post-anthropocentric from of creativity enabled by AI, The Grey Zone is also connected to Internes (2022), a project consisting of 3D-printed concrete sculptures describing a post-apocalyptic world that has become a nondescript environment which can only be perceived by means of augmented reality technology. Again, this is possibly a dystopia or a new order of reality, something that is often hinted at in Ballard’s novels. 

The artworks selected for this reading of Concrete Island are particularly apt at creating a strange atmosphere placed somewhere between hyperrealism and fiction, by means of 3D scanning, 3D modeling, and the use of artificial intelligence programs. In fact, Ballard’s approach to realism by offering detailed descriptions of every element in the scene can be compared to the precise rendering of a 3D scanner, which nevertheless creates a fictional space, while his exploration of what goes on in Maitland’s mind, as well as the somewhat illogical, dream-like state of his thoughts reminds of the outputs of a generative adversarial network (GAN). Unrealized as a film, although Ballard himself wrote a screenplay based on the novel in 1972, Concrete Island seems to find a better translation into moving images through the fragmented approach of a series of digital artworks than it would as a single visual narration. Maitland’s ordeal is, in the end, more psychological and allegorical than real, and belongs to a type of narration that does not involve imagined facts demanding a suspension of disbelief, but rather asks the reader (or viewer) to become fully immersed in the author’s fictional world, and through this fiction, understand their own reality.

Patrick Tresset: “I thought that I could put back emotions using computers”

Pau Waelder

Patrick Tresset is an artist who explores a form of mediated creation in which his drawing style is transferred to a set of robotic drawing machines or applied to video footage to create artworks that are curiously algorithmic and spontaneous at the same time. He is also the co-founder of alterHEN, an eco-friendly NFT platform and artist community whose artists have participated in a previous artcast on Niio. Tresset has also presented his series Human Study in a solo artcast launched recently.

I had the chance to interview him in his studio in Brussels on the occasion of my visit to the Art Brussels to discuss his work and the series that originated from an exhibition in Hong Kong that he had to remotely orchestrate during lockdown.

After working as a painter for fifteen years, you decided to study arts and computational technologies. What drove you to become interested in computer science and programming?

Well, actually, I was already interested in computing, because my dad gave me a computer when I was nine years old, and as a kid, I managed to do some little things, and I got fascinated by it. I particularly remember this possibility of creating little worlds that would be autonomous. I studied computing, but back then it was business computing. And after that, I decided to become a painter, move to London… I think I was a painter for thirteen years. And in the meantime, computing evolved a lot. So I always kept my eye on it, and after some time I got back into computing. So it was not new, computing. And I had this intuition that I could do something with it, because I knew I could program. I could imagine things. 

As a painter, I had a creative block. It just didn’t make sense to continue painting. And also I had lost my spontaneity, everything I did in painting looked stiff, and unemotional. I couldn’t do emotion. Strangely enough, I thought that I could put back emotions using computers. I was always into doing those very spontaneous drawings, and so as soon as I got back into programming, I worked on drawing faces, from the beginning, and then there was the internet. Thanks what I found online, I kept learning and I came across the Algorists: Roman Verotsko, Cohen… well, Cohen is not part of the Algorists, so Verotsko, essentially. And I saw they were using pen plotters. So I bought myself old pen plotters on eBay. And I started to do drawings like that. I wrote those out on my own for two or three years, using scientific libraries and other resources. But I felt that I was stuck, and I knew that I needed to go further to achieve what I was looking for.

You have mentioned that you transfer your drawing style to the robots. Can you elaborate on this mediated process?

When I was doing my Masters studies, I was working on simulated drawings, and it’s only during the doctoral studies (I started a PhD that I never finished) that I did proper research. It’s a risky thing in computing, but mainly, we’re learning drawing, psychology, perception and things like that… motor control, and all those things. I really researched a lot. And all that influenced the program. But also at this time, I understood that a drawing system needed to be embodied, particularly since I was interested in gestural drawing. So the way I did it was that I simulated different processes that interact, with parts dedicated to low level perception, then higher level motor control, and strategy. 

The style of the drawing has never been forced. The style is a consequence of the characteristics of the robot. If you just change little parameter on in, or on the camera, or the speed of the app, that will be enough to give the resulting drawing a different style. So it’s really an interaction between the body, the character and the characteristics of the robot. My input is in there in that the technique that they have is a technique I used when I was trying to draw. There is detachment in a certain way, but it’s not so detached, because I am in the system –I programmed everything myself. 

So there is this weird thing with control, because in the beginning I have control, but then when the robots start, I don’t have any control. And that leads to an interesting form of spontaneity. For me it’s always fresh, but the problem is, because it is using humans, not everybody’s a performer. A lot of people do it for the portrait, and then during the process, they notice that it is not just a machine that makes their portrait. Here I feel that there is the usual problem of entertainment and art. That does not happen with the still life drawings, because the whole system is encapsulated in itself. It’s a different type of storytelling.

For about a year, you have created a new type of artwork by applying the drawing program to video footage. What led you to use this technique? Particularly since you were just mentioned the embodied creation of the drawings.

It all came about because of NFTs. I needed something digital to sell, to mint. And it started like that. I did some experiments a few years back with video, so I already had some ideas but it really came to be through NFTs. I wrote a program to extract a big interface over the program I use for the robots, that enables me to play with and create these animations. It was by necessity. But in the end, I explore the same themes, only that now I know better what I’m exploring.

Let’s talk about the exhibition Human Study you had in Hong Kong, back in 2020. I find it interesting how it was developed under lockdown, and how the animations that you have now presented on Niio reflect that particular atmosphere.

Yes, it was a very interesting process. The exhibition was planned normally during Art Basel Hong Kong, but obviously it didn’t happen because of COVID. They moved it to November, but still they didn’t get the authorization to open the theater. So, it was decided to carry out the exhibition without an audience, using actors or anyone who was around, so sometimes it was the technical staff and not actors. To me it was particularly interesting because I helped select the actresses and the actors, so it became something like a piece of theater. I had created a generative system to edit the video feed from the cameras, so while I was doing everything from thousands of kilometers away, I became the director of a performance.

ISEA2022: the possible spaces of new media art

Pau Waelder

Drone show on the closing night of ISEA2022 Barcelona

The 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art took place in Barcelona from 9 to 16th June, bringing to the city a community of more than 750 experts in art, science and technology and hosting 140 presentations made by experts in the field, 45 institutional presentations, 40 talks given by artists, 23 screenings, 18 posters and demos, 16 round tables, 13 workshops, and 13 performances. The main organizer of the event was the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), in partnership with ISEA International, the Government of Catalonia and the main cultural and political institutions in the region.

Directed by Professors Pau Alsina and Irma Vilà from the UOC, the symposium included a densely curated art program with several exhibitions in the city that can be visited during the summer. While organizing the symposium, Alsina and Vilà established collaborations with the major cultural institutions in Barcelona, resulting in a particular presentation of new media art that has permeated the local contemporary art scene, establishing a dialogue with the curatorial approaches of the different venues. This interplay can be seen in the three major exhibitions spread over the city: What is Possible and What is Not at La Capella, Possibles at Recinte Modernista Sant Pau, and The irruption at Santa Mònica. While the most established art institutions in Barcelona, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) and the Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB), hosted the talks, lectures, and a series of performances, the three spaces have had the task of collectively presenting an overview of artistic creation in the field of art, science, and technology (AST). The result is particularly interesting, as it has brought about a rather unprecedented variety of formats, themes, and approaches to creating and presenting art made with and about digital technologies and scientific research.

The exhibitions in Barcelona feature three different forms of presenting new media art: a setup similar to contemporary art biennials, a process-oriented, artist-in-residence environment, and a new media art festival exhibition.

In my role as Chair of Artworks of the symposium, I oversaw the whole selection process of the more than 600 artistic projects presented in an open call that exceeded all our expectations. The peer-review process involved more than 200 scholars, artists, curators, and art professionals to whom ISEA and the Barcelona team are deeply indebted. The selected artworks were presented to the curators of Santa Mònica and La Capella, with the third exhibition putting together a selection curated by Irma Vilà, a presentation curated by myself through Niio, and part of the BEEP Collection. The curators in the respective venues integrated the artworks they selected into the narrative they had developed for their spaces, which organically led to three different forms of presenting new media art: a setup similar to those of contemporary art biennials, a process-oriented, artist-in-residence environment, and finally the kind of exhibition one typically encounters at a new media art festival. While these approaches could have found a more dialogical setup in a shared space, the fact that they constitute three separate proposals makes it an enriching experience for a visitor who attends all three exhibitions knowing that all the artworks are related to the field of art, science and technology.

Antoine Schmitt. Generative Quantum Ballet 21 Video Recording, 2022. Artwork included in the selection by Niio at the exhibition Possibles.

Santa Mònica: new media art as contemporary art

The curators of Santa Mònica, Marta Gracia, Jara Rocha and Enric Puig Punyet, selected more than twenty artworks from the open call which they grouped under an overarching theme addressing the conditions of life on our planet after the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Climate change is a prevalent subject in this exhibition, as exemplified by It will happen here, in Barcelona, an algorithmic cinema installation by Roderick Coover, Nick Montfort, and Adam Vidiksis that elaborates a never-ending narrative about the impact of rising waters, which will entail migration and extinction. The piece is presented as a large-scale projection that takes half of the second floor of the former convent. Other artworks address our relationship with the planet from the wider perspective of the anthropocene, such as Quadra Minerale-Rare Earths by Rosell Meseguer, which connects mineral colonization with our dependence on digital technologies, and Tools for a Warming Planet by Sara Dean, Beth Ferguson, and Marina Monsonís, which consists of a crowdsourced collection of current and speculative tools for adapting to life in our changing world, contributed by designers, artists, activists, and scientists. These artworks are presented in the form of archives and displays that remind of the classical cabinet of curiosities.

Climate change, the Anthropocene and our social and spatial relationships during the pandemic are prevalent subjects in the exhibition at Santa Mònica

Our social and spatial relationships during the pandemic are also a recurring subject in the exhibition, with artworks such as Muted by Lauren Lee McCarthy, which collects several performative pieces she carried out during lockdown and afterwards, establishing different kinds of mediated communication with friends and strangers. McCarthy’s work takes the form of an installation with a double bed and several digital devices displaying the documentation of these performances. Also related to the pandemic, #See You at Home – The Domestic Space as Public Encounter by Bettina Katja Lange, Uwe Brunner, and Joan Soler-Adillon creates an immersive and interactive installation based on a series of 3D scans of people’s domestic spaces collected during lockdown, which has evolved into a reflection on the boundaries between the private and the public. While the exhibition, as can be expected, features numerous screen-based artworks and some VR environments, the overall experience is closer to what one might expect from a contemporary art biennial, with a predominance of objects, prints, and video installations.

Chemical Ecosystem by Yolanda Uriz

La Capella: work-in-progress

The artistic director La Capella, David Armengol, chose to combine the presentation of a selection of artworks from the ISEA open call with those of the artists participating in Barcelona Producció, a yearly program dedicated to promote local talent through grants for research and production. The result is a well-balanced combination of artistic projects, all of which are characterized by their processual nature, be it as reactive sculptures, algorithmic animations or data-driven visualisations. Here it is telling that in most cases the artworks selected by ISEA reviewers cannot be told apart from those of local artists experimenting with technology. For instance, Anna Pascó’s ZENZ(A)I, a neural network that creates sayings by collecting meteorological data from different locations, could well have been part of the open call, as would also Estampa’s computer visions of an urban landscape or Mario Santamaria’s geolocative installation. The five selected artworks from the ISEA call turn towards nature and artificial intelligence in their reflections of the world around us, from Anna Carreras’ generative drawing Arrels, Yolanda Uriz’s stimulatingly olfactory Chemical Ecosystem, and the intimately analog Water Drop Viewer by Roc Parés, to the AI-inspired construction of language in d’Eco a Siringa by Josep Manuel Berenguer and the speculative robotics developed by Mónica Rikić in Especies I, II y III. While the artworks in this exhibition are no less complete and fully functional than those in Santa Mònica, the setup and narrative of the show lead more clearly to considering them as works-in-progress, not unfinished but always evolving, and it that sense provide visitors with a different experience, in which the experimental, the potential, and in fact the possible take a more prominent role.

View of the exhibition Possibles at Espai Modernista Sant Pau

Sant Pau: the realms of the digital

The Art Nouveau historical building of Sant Pau hosts a temporary exhibition in a dark underground room that is actually an illustrative example of the kind of spaces where digital art has been shown in the context of new media art festivals over the last decades. Dominated by a large selection of artworks from the BEEP Collection, the largest collection of digital art in Spain, the exhibition mainly consists of screen-based works and installations, many of which are interactive, and creates an atmosphere densely populated by the lights and sounds emanating from the artworks. The BEEP Collection, started in 2006 by entrepreneur Andreu Rodríguez and directed by Vicente Matallana, features a wide spectrum of new media artworks by pioneers such as Peter Weibel or Analivia Cordeiro alongside established names in the field such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, and Daniel Canogar, as well as younger local artists, such as Santi Vilanova, Mónica Rikić, and Alex Posada. Built year after year with individual acquisitions, it presents a sample of the main developments in new media art over the last three to four decades, with examples of video art, interactive art, bio art, generative art, artificial intelligence art, light installations and so forth. The presence of the collection’s pieces greatly contributes to give the exhibition this aura of a new media art festival both in the aesthetic qualities and the variety of the artistic projects.

A selection of artworks from the ISEA open call curated by Irma Vilà explores the varied forms of perception of reality mediated by digital technologies. Liquid Views by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, a pioneering interactive work created in 1992 and updated for this exhibition, confronts viewers with their own image in a mesmerizing “mirror of Narcissus” that anticipated, 30 years ago, our current selfie culture and the appeal of tactile interfaces. Last Breaths by Linda Dement, Paul Brown, and Carmine Gentile develops a different form of register of the existence of a person. The last breaths of the artist George Schwarz, who died of a cardiac failure, were recorded. The audio values were turned into a 3D printed sculpture of living cardiac cells. Evoking loss and memory, the piece confronts the power of science with the inevitability of death and suggests a new way of perceiving an ephemeral, yet crucial moment in a person’s life. The living, interconnected system of a forest is consciously presented as an empty vessel in a series of 3D scans of a natural environment in Queensland (Australia) made by Keith Armstrong. Common Thread connects the deceivingly realistic rendering of the forest with the shallow perception of nature by Australia’s colonizers, as opposed to the profound understanding and rich mythologies of its original dwellers. This view can be compared to the ironic take on Artificial Intelligence created by Thierry Fournier in Sightseeing, a fiction about an all-too-intelligent AI whose task is to observe a beach through a CCTV camera, leading it to ultimately question what it perceives as well as its own purpose and existence. Finally, Paul Brown addresses a further stage in the perception of reality by elaborating in Quantum Chaos Set a visualization about the quantum world of uncertainty, through a photograph of felt fibres that undergoes continuous transformations generated by random sorting algorithm that repositions each pixel of the image. 

A selection of artworks from the ISEA open call curated by Irma Vilà explores the varied forms of perception of reality mediated by digital technologies

The exhibition is completed with a presentation of artworks curated by myself on Niio. Following the themes of the symposium, I addressed the subjects of humans and non-humans, natures and worlds, and futures and heritages through a selection of video works displayed on a single screen. In Generative Quantum Ballet 21, Antoine Schmitt takes his interest in choreography and performance arts and his signature minimalistic visual element, the white pixel, to the realm of quantum systems in a generative artwork of which a video excerpt was shown. Jeppe Lange creates a beautiful and poetic narrative around perception in Le monde en lui-même, a video work that uses hundreds of post-impressionist paintings in a mesmerizing collage. Diane Drubay challenges our complacent perception of the world in times of climate change in Ignis II, an animation showing the transformation of a placid summer sky into a menacing storm in the span of 14 seconds, which correspond to the 14 years left until we reach a point of no return in our warming planet. Oblivion finds a visual representation in Frederik de Wilde’s Oh Deer!, an AI experiment showing a short clip of a deer being continuously processed by a Generative Adversarial Network that the artist modifies to progressively remove information, until nothing is left but a grey square. Sabrina Ratté addresses both nature and memory in FLORALIA, a speculative fiction about a virtual archive room preserving extinct plant species. The selection concludes with Snow Yunxue Fu’s Karst, a virtual reality artwork that takes us to spaces that are beyond human reach, questioning whether the ability to experience them in a simulated environment may expand our notion of the reality around us.

3D printed sculptures by Varvara and Mar at Galería Alalimón

Digital art in the art galleries

Beyond these three main exhibitions, the presence of artists working with digital technologies in commercial galleries exemplifies the increasingly normalized presence of new media art in the contemporary art market. Anna Carreras presented her generative artworks in a solo show at Ana Mas Projects during the days of the symposium, while the artist duo Varvara and Mar brought their newly developed 3D sculptures and prints to Alalimón Gallery and Mario Santamaria presented his explorations of networks in a solo exhibition at Àngels Barcelona. All three solo shows combined screen-based artworks with prints and, in some cases, sculptures, which points to a telling flexibility of formats that seamlessly move between the physical and the virtual.

These last examples provide an explanation to the rich variety of approaches to new media art that can be seen in the three exhibitions currently on view in Barcelona. Not only due to the curator’s visions and decisions, the plurality of forms of artistic projects related to science and technology is caused by the artists’ own interest in moving away from a strictly “new media” aesthetic that has been so common in festivals and specialized events and exploring a culture that is already immersed in the digital and does not always require complex technological devices. Our daily life incorporates the experience of virtual environments, artificial intelligence, and interactivity, and is routinely affected by algorithms. This means that the possible spaces for new media art are expanding to the point where distinctions are no longer necessary: everything is, and has always been, art.