Venice: V-A-C Foundation – The Electric Comma Exhibition

 

Photograph courtesy KADIST Collection and V-A-C Foundation

V-A-C Foundation

The Electric Comma - Exhibition

The Electric Comma is a group exhibition curated by Katerina Chuchalina and Pete Belkin, produced by V-A-C and developed in dialogue with KADIST, combining the V-A-C and KADIST collections, until March 31. Taking its title from Shannon Ebner’s installation The Electric Comma, the exhibition focuses on shifts in language, perception and understanding in the age of artificial intelligence. Through varied practices and from different backgrounds, participating artists deal with the negotiations between the conscious mind and today’s pervasive learning machine, imagining pathways of exchange between human and nonhuman, ranging from the poetic and intuitive to the algorithmical and analytical. A number of works in the exhibtion look at ways in which we communicate with information technologies and the ecological impact they may have, paralleling cryptographic and biological systems, revealing or imagining living infrastructures for artificial life.

Daria Martin - Soft Materials – 2004

16mm film looped

www.v-a-c.ru

photograph courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London and V-A-C Foundation

Shannon Ebner – Dear Reader – 2011
single channel video 3’

The construction and interpretation of language is key in understanding how our minds work, how we perceive and communicate with an increasingly connected and automated world. In the thirteen-line poem that forms the basis of Shannon Ebner’s series The Electric Comma, written language is transformed in abstract and more intensely visual form. By turning unfinished poetry into image, Ebner’s process exposes the nonlinear, often erratic way in which we experience language.

 

Dayanita Singh – File Room – 2011
gelatin silver prints

As the majority of our collective histories, memories and imaginations are being digitized, the effects of this on the human condition and on our planet as a whole remain underestimated. Encountering Dayanita Singh’s File Room is like glimpsing a frozen, forgotten world of paper. An archive of archives, this series of photographs depicts seemingly infinite stacks of records and memories stored within India. An elegy to the disappearing paper trail, File Room is a stark reminder of today’s sea change in humanity’s relationship to memory. The way stories are told, records are kept and histories are constructed no longer follows the same trajectory as before.    

Above. Co-curators, Katerina Chuchalina and Pete Belkin talk with Francesco Manacorda, in the center, who will curate part two of The Electric Comma, which will take place at the Moscow Museum of Art in April 2018.

Bridget Riley – Stretch – 1964
emulsion on panel

Photograph courtesy the artist and V-A-C Foundation

Andrey Shental – Descent into the Fungal – 2016-2017
two channel video installation – mushrooms

Andrey Shental’s video installation Descent into the Fungal features fungal mycelium networks that enable connected plants to communicate in addition to transmitting nutrients and energy, looking at how certain life forms benefit from this network of connections while others fall prey to it. Today, a growing super-organism of algorithms and databases increasingly filters how we perceive, learn, communicate and remember. Sprawling around the globe like a fabric of mycelium, our current digital infrastructure bears more resemblance to living systems than outdated analogue technologies.

 

Alighiero Boetti – Due mani e una matita (Se resto sul lido…) – 1976
mixed media and collage on paper

Urban Fauna Lab – Misting Miner – 2016
ethereum mining rig with 4 graphics cards water cooling cycle, glass aquarium

Misting Miner, a vapor sculpture by Alexey Buldakov from the Russian collective Urban Fauna Lab, visualizes the invisible phenomenon of mining crypto currency. The excess heat produced by the computer as it performs this process is a latent and untapped source of energy that can be redirected and used in many ways.

 

Daniel Keller - Soft Staycation (Gaze Track Edit) - 2013
flexible Led curtain, video

   

Director of the V-A-C Foundation - Teresa Mavica