Category: Exhibition

In Éphémère (Flowers Were Waiting), Thomas Albdorf disguises stills from his video “Flowers Were Waiting on the Balcony of the Room, So Beautiful!” (2018) as commercials. The video is based on a scenario one could encounter during a holiday trip – whilst entering the hotel room, a nice bouquet of flowers is already waiting on the balcony that opens up a view towards the sea. The video was shot entirely in a studio, using fake marble tiles, plastic flowers and a printed backdrop. Whereas he lower section of the video contained named objects, the upper section showed only the sea. In post-production, specialized image-analyzing-software filled the upper section artificially, based on the information it could extract from the lower: “The work is a dialogue between me and the software, an attempt of revealing processes that are already part of the vast majority of images we create and consume every day.”

With its references to conventional methods and aesthetics, Éphémère could be read as plain advertising on a first glance. Upon closer inspection, it falls apart, offering no information to hold onto.

Datafication Act 1 – May Ian Valley 0101 is part of a moving-image series that Yarli Allison develops to explore themes of digital humanity. In this looping nightmare “Act 1”, she imagines daily impacts of AI emergence and gamification on one’s behavior – taking the most intimate sexual encounters as an example. Viewers will join the data-mining authorities to monitor May Ian’s (美人) machine-readable body, known as “Subject 06”. In the control room, all the subjects’ sex acts are constantly being extracted and analyzed. They will be rewarded unpredictably every time a new data pattern is detected, creating an addictive effect.

This is the first time Yarli Allison returns to hand-drawing to mimic a digital interface. The labor-intensive hand-making process allows her to play with alternative artistic decisions, and question the relationship between art-making and digital AI tools. Combining fiction, performance, sexual acts, 3D modeling, and electronic music, the work is a “fried rice”, swinging in between surveillance systems control and care.

Everything material has the potential to be enclosed in sauce. But no matter how hard you try, turning the thing and strategically biting in the right places, it still runs out the other side. It flows and drips. An excess of sauce is intolerable!

In the midst of theoretical questioning an everyday moment, Clara Boesl’s sauce dispensers burst into vacuum like compressed tomatoes. This is what constitutes the horror vacui of the net: the opacity of total calculatedness. Punctured by a thoughtless accent – a large serve of ketchup. The original sauces were thinner and more bitter than today. The sensation of touch is not concerned with the nature of material, solely with the moment of exchange.

By handling auxiliary constructions, we anesthetize classification systems. Saturated with formal causalities, the world persists in a rigid form. A thixotropic substance changes its flows by means of added energy. Shaking turns lumps back into varnish. The flowing forms of digital surrogates fail at the limits of their nature. Only when digitality is contaminated by reality the interface drips out of the screen.

Quick Fix is an interactive installation that allows the audience to buy followers or likes for small change in just a few seconds.

The concept of purchasing ready-to-go products from vending machines on the streets is well known. Usually the offered products satisfy our essential or addiction needs; tampons, cigarettes or cold drinks must be available on a bank holiday as much as in the midst of the night.

But is the same true for likes and followers on social media? By approaching Quick Fix in the natural habitat of vending machines, the public space, passers-by can answer this question by listening to or ignoring their inner desire to be popular online. The piece questions the inflation of online attention and the disconnectedness of our personal with our online lives.

Quick Fix is commissioned by Pixelache Festival in Helsinki, where it premiered in 2019.

The interactive multimedia installation Nothing to see here allows the viewers to explore their surroundings through an Augmented Reality application.

The audience gets a glimpse of something they are not meant to see: the daily operations of the DRM (Department of Reality Maintenance). Two agents are trying to fix an error, working hours to make sure everything runs smoothly and that our world continues to appear consistent and intact. They are mired in the guts of this world.Digital infrastructures have come to be what binds and holds the world together, hard to imagine if they collapse or disappear. We tend to forget the physicality of these immense structures, driven by power grids, claiming a large share of the world’s energy and natural resources. We tend to forget the invisible parts of the networks anatomy, the thousands of data signals passing through our bodies and the air around.

Nothing to see here challenges our perception of reality, uniting the audience in a digital experience they can agree is there, while we all know it’s not really there.

Whether we like it or not, there are some corporate logos so ubiquitous that they crept into our subconscious. In his latest series, artist Tom Galle, known for his clever works that explores the impact of corporate culture on our everyday lives, takes famous brand emblems and fashions them into weapons: the Facebook logo turns into a crowbar, MacDonald’s golden arches are transformed into a knuckleduster, and a razor-sharp blade is formed from Nike’s iconic swoosh. “Anything but harmless” is what these logos-turned-weapons seem to express.

Exposed in shops around the exhibition area, they seem to be precious objects that one can buy, and thus highlight the silent danger of the advertising industry. These powerful brands that have become ordinary in our societies have a considerable impact on the environment and our private lives. With this artwork, Tom Galle lets us picture ourselves wearing the brutality of corporate companies as highly contemporary fashion items.

The pandemic caused an ever-increasing digitalization of everyday life. At the same time, it revealed the fragility of highly interconnected ecosystems, of which human is also part. This period is a period of reflection. How do we imagine our possible futures? What are our hopes, our wishes and anxieties? How will our world look like regarding population movement, technology advancements and climate crisis in the future?

Short phrases selected from a series of imaginary texts on possible futures are printed on banners and presented in the public space inviting the passengers to stop and read them. Can you read the phrases out loud? Can you listen to your voice, can you listen to other people’s voices?

The material presented derives from texts hosted on the offline digital network Networks of Trust, which utilizes the P2P protocol IPFS. Networks of Trust (2019 – 2021) is a series of multimedia installations investigating the deep history and the possible futures of networks. Within the framework of the work, people are invited to share imaginary stories about the possible futures of climate crisis, population movements and technology in their areas.

The idea to this work came up when Edurne Herrán thought about a possible loss of all her digital files and asked herself: “How can I measure the intangible?”

The goal of the installation is to take the virtual to the physical level, making the intangible tangible. Nothing we created in the virtual world is trivial: our tools have been copied and digitally reproduced. Technologies help us carry out everyday tasks, and while some argue that technology has made our lives more complex, we can see how it has changed our world, un-cluttering our desks and simplifying our lives.

The main idea is to explore the physicality of digital files and their arrangement in physical (public) space in order to make the personal visible and see how it affects environment and audience. With 3D Desktop Edurne Herrán has recreated her computer desktop environment in the real world so that the audience can dive into it, not by clicking but using their bodies. This work functions as an intervention in public space and a metaphor for the information we share virtually.

QT.bot is an artificial intelligence, trained on the textual and visual data of the community mapping platform Queering The Map, that generates speculative queer and trans futures and the environments in which they occur. Their digital mind is constructed from an implementation of the Open AI GPT-2 text generation model trained on over 82 000 text entries from the platform, and a StyleGAN trained on scraped Google Street View imagery of the tagged coordinates on Queering The Map.

QT.bot’s digital inter-subjectivity straddles the line between the plausible and the fantastic, turning towards the potential of failure, chaos and incommensurability in the queer use of machine learning technologies. The experience of encountering the narratives and environments of LGBTQ2IA+ life that QT.bot propagates is one of disorientation – time, space, and stable subjectivity collapse, revealing from the ruins the multiplicitous visions of the futurities contained within the data. In collaboration with the voices of their human community, QT.bot fabulates on the absences of the archive, orienting us away from what is, and towards what could be.

Until some decades ago, travelers used to consult travel guides written by specialists. Since the rise of the internet, these traditional handbooks have been replaced by trustworthy websites like Trip Advisor, where users exchange reviews about their desired destination. Nowadays, another platform became the most effective marketing tool of the travel industry: Instagram created a space, where influencers and advertising agencies stage perfect looks and happy protagonists in beautiful destinations around the globe. The Wanderers Above the Sea of Fog was published as a contemporary version of the first red travel handbooks by Baedeker and Murray, as a book with Instagram posts by ten travel influencers.

For FMR 21, Liontou brings these pictures in the physical space by turning them into unique location points. But these are not normal pictures: the Instagram aesthetics is reduced to the core. Instead of a glossy colorful pictures, only the average color of the images is depicted. The resulting monochromatic images question how authentic travel ads can be, and what is left of these photos if they do not “capture a moment forever” anymore.