November 24th 2023 - January 12th
The digital age liberates endless space, one tab at a time. Given this power, how should we respond?
The technological revolution brought a torrent of innovation and excitement about the future from scientists to artists alike. From the mundane aspects of our daily lives to the organisation of our chains of production, modern technology has restructured society on every level.
Though they follow a historical path, recent technological changes show an unprecedented acceleration in terms of their power and implementations. Faced with this intensification, we increasingly have to rethink how we interact with the world and engage with one another. All this change can feel overwhelming as data accumulates, spreads and multiplies, branching out into an intangible web of connections, all while precipitating environmental collapse. Most recently, the advent of Generative AI has disrupted the notion of authorship and put into question the very role of the artist in modern society.
Yet, modern technology can also offer many opportunities for creativity. The advent of the camera didn’t put an end to art, instead pushing us to rethink what we value in artistic creation, all while opening new modes of expression for artists. And despite the intensity of modern life, digital technology may also stage new and awe-inspiring encounters in art, as overwhelment is channelled into the sublime.
This exhibition features works from artists based in Berlin and Dundee, Scotland. Each work addresses modern technology as subject matter or as a tool for artistic creation, and expresses different attitudes towards the digital age.
Running through the exhibition, assemblage is recurringly employed as a way of finding meaning among the chaos of modern life. The collective drain.land utilises digital collage to bring together disparate elements of our informational landscape into an endless digital cave system. Joana Lucas combines digital manipulation and painting to create ethereal landscapes. Sieglinde Obexer creates semi-abstract compositions by bringing together close-ups of various mechanisms, confronting viewers with the pure aesthetics of our technological apparatus. As Eleanor Oliver describes her image transfers, assemblage can help “find synthesis in our overwhelming media landscape”.
Another question present throughout the exhibition is the role of different artistic mediums in the digital age. In LeafyGAN, Samuel Davies engages with Generative AI by creating his own dataset from scanned-in leaves, finding a sense of authorship in relation to AI generated art. drain.land utilises code as its artistic medium, as HTML pages glitch, branch out and loop upon themselves.
In other works, the role of the artistic hand is reaffirmed, which reflects the broader resurgence of traditional mediums since the 1990s. This might be understood as a grounding counterweight to the alienation caused by modern technology, which Byung-Chul Han describes as lacking “temporal stability”. Mathieu Cardosi harks back to Romantic painting in his depictions of abandoned buildings, where technological infrastructure and nature become one. Joana Lucas and Sieglinde Obexer also utilise painting in their work, reflecting on how traditional mediums may still be used to respond to our digitised world. Tying together digital and analog, Maria Korporal explores how traditional art might interact with the virtual, bringing her charcoal drawings to life through Augmented Reality.
This brings us back to the notion of synthesis. Overall, the works in this exhibit express a sense of awe towards our digital apparatus and the overwhelming power of modern technology. They strive for clarity by synthesising our sheer amount of data into aesthetic form. Faced with growing automation, to create art is to affirm ourselves as subjects, still curious and open to the world. In this light, art helps engage with the overwhelmingness of our era through sublimation, so as to create beauty and search for meaning among the chaos of it all.
Participating artists:
Mathieu Cardosi
Samuel Davies
drain.land
Maria Korporal
Joana Lucas
Sieglinde Obexer
Eleanor Oliver