In the 19th century, Karl Marx declared “Everything that is solid melts into thin air”. His statement described the fluidity of modern times: the speed of systems of transportation and communication, the accelerated pace of our daily lives, the flow of electricity, gas and oil to fuel the industrial revolution. All this activity “melted” previously-held beliefs and unmovable realities of the preindustrial era. In the 21st century, our electronic culture has only increased this dissolving effect, dominated by the Internet as a conduit of unfathomable amounts of data flow.
The exhibition Melting the Solids by Daniel Canogar explores how the world of data negotiates its relationship with the physical world. The project emerges from the artist’s preoccupation with the intangible - and invisible - nature of one of the main driving forces of our economy and society: the data-sphere. This “crisis of visibility” makes it very difficult for most of the...population to comprehend how Big Data is impacting their lives. To materialize the world of data is an attempt to help us cognitively incorporate this new reality.
The exhibition at Art Bärtschi and Cie features two series: Flow and Echo. The first series, created especially for the gallery, are four ribbon-shaped LED-screen artworks that traverse the exhibition space with curving gestures, connecting walls with ceiling and floor. The screens become conduits of data related to real-time meteorological information of the city of Geneva, including wind speed, temperature, barometric pressure and humidity. The flow of information is represented via particles that leave trails behind them, creating abstract forms that take the pulse of the city’s activities.
The Echo series, on the other hand, are luminous curving LED panels that feature gently pulsating abstractions. These artworks are listening, and responding, to distant phenomena via the Internet, including rainfall in over 100 cities, the air quality index of the city of Geneva and active fires burning across the globe. In the era of the Internet of things, these artworks are also characterized by being interconnected. But, rather than becoming data-visualization vehicles, they glow and pulsate while casting light on the surrounding exhibition space.
Melting the Solids attempts to give form to our newly expanded perceptual capabilities that the Internet provides. We now have at our fingertips huge amounts of information, a lot of which is crucial to our survival as a species. The incessant amount of data currently being processed makes it hard for us to distinguish what is relevant from what is trivial. It depends on us as artists and creators of tools of digital engagement to find ways to better represent, and shape, the algorithmic reality that is emerging today.
Daniel Canogar, November 2018
Entrada actualizada el el 20 may de 2022
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