New Viewings #34

Constant Dullaart’s „Loudly Crying Face“ is a performative project which goes as follows: Once one of the installation views is posted on social media, the picture will usually receive comments in the comments section below. Only this time, it will be liked by hundreds of different Instagram accounts and will receive massive amounts of the same emoji in the comments section 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 This feedback will be documented in a screenshot which in turn will be re-inserted into the gallery space. Another installation view is posted on social media. The picture will again be liked by hundreds of different Instagram accounts and will receive massive amounts of the same emoji in the comments section. 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 This feedback will be documented in a screenshot which in turn will be re-inserted into the gallery space. And on and on. The idea is that the work is moving in a constant feedback loop between the space of the gallery and social media. The ultimate accumulation of symbolic capital.

Constant Dullaart’s often conceptual work manifests itself both online and offline. Within his practice, he reflects on the broad cultural and social effects of communication and image processing technologies while critically engaging the power structures of mega corporations that dramatically influence our worldview through the internet. He examines the boundaries of manipulating Google, Facebook and Instagram and started his own tech company Dulltech™ with Kickstarter. Constant Dullaart is a former resident of the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and lives and works in Berlin. His works were shown at MCA, Chicago, Whitechapel Gallery London, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Import Projects Berlin, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, ZKM Karlsruhe, Victoria & Albert Museum London, Upstream Gallery Amsterdam, and MAAT Lisbon. In 2015, he was awarded the Prix Net-Art, the international prize for internet art.

Aram Bartholl searched the huge password collection for “walter”, “benjamin” and “nightmare”, and filtered out those that contained these terms. This is the first pun, as Walter Benjamin, author of the famous essay „The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“ (1935), contrary to common belief, was less interested in the question of the aura (read: uniqueness or authenticity) than in the question of reproducibility. The mirrors usually reproduce a „uniqueness“ – here, however, the viewer is missing from the reflection. Passwords – in this case printed on the mirrors – are supposed to be unique in order to be safe; however, here, we see that they’re just the opposite. By carrying the name Benjamin within them, they invoke their inevitable, unavoidable (digital) nightmarish reproduction (a pun on the current NFT hype). In addition, Aram Bartholl will install a USB Deaddrop at the (real) gallery from which the list of “Walter Benjamin Nightmare” passwords can be freely downloaded.

Opposite to the mirror triptych three crates from the computer game Counterstrike (ca. 2000) are placed on the gallery floor. Their heavily pixelated texture which is reminiscent of early computer games only reveals itself on closer inspection. In the game these boxes serve the sole purpose of making the space complicated and to offer hideouts for the first-person shooter players. At the same time, these low-res, pixelated boxes are a reference to one of Bartholl’s earliest projects which he realized about a decade ago. The project consisted of transferring the boxes from Counterstrike to real space and installing 20 of these “steel” and “wooden” boxes in an old prison yard in Sheerbrooke, Quebec (“Dust – Winter Prison”, 2013). It is not without irony (third pun!) that the analogue sculptures that were originally taken out of Counterstrike are now returning to digital space – this time that of the 3D virtual gallery. They are hybrid objects carrying within them the detour to the analogue space, reflecting in the mirror the precarious state of authenticity: Walter Benjamin’s Nightmare.

Aram Bartholl uses sculptural interventions, installations, and performative workshops to question our engagement with media and with public economies linked to social networks, online platforms, and digital dissemination strategies. He addresses socially relevant topics, including surveillance, data privacy and technology dependence, through his work by transferring the gaps, contradictions, and absurdities of our everyday digital lives to physical settings. Bartholl has exhibited, among others, at MoMA Museum of Modern Art NY, Skulptur Projekte Münster, Palais de Tokyo, Hamburger Bahnhof, Seoul Museum of Art and the Thailand Biennale. Aram Bartholl is a professor for art with digital media at HAW Hamburg, and he lives and works in Berlin.

This video work questions the picture of the empty gallery space as a site of art production. With every slide, Instagram story filters with typical city names like “Lagos”, “Oslo”, “Los Angeles”, “Melbourne” and “Jakarta” are applying different atmospheres to the gallery space, nonstop. While implying an international jet set art style we all know, most galleries were closed over Covid-19 restrictions last year and they were only visible through online platforms such as Instagram. However, the center of attraction of „Show Desktop Show“ is undoubtedly the video of the swimming lady wearing a pink three-armed sweater.[1] The sweater’s third arm can be used as a scarf or as a piece of jewelry (like a brooch). By proposing a three-armed sweater, Nadja Buttendorf is questioning our idea of how a body should look. A T-shirt is shaped like a T because we have two arms, but what would a B-shirt look like? The sleeve usually gets its function from the arm that is in it. A sweater with three sleeves leaves one sleeve “unused” in most cases. The sleeve is thus freed from its purpose and opens up to new uses and functions, detached from the logic of constant improvement. For now, Nadja Buttendorf’s three-armed sweater exists in two sizes: Nadja and Schicki.

The work Green Screen To Edit After Effects Photoshop Key Square Uni-sex Clothing refers to the found footage pictures “redirect-4377.jpg” and “redirect-4373.jpg” which Buttendorf found while searching online for green screen clothing for her live streams. The green screen that becomes transparent in post-production can be replaced by any motif, image, background etc. and also carries the gallery space in itself. The green square is printed on demand in the artist’s studio on textile brought along.

Nadja Buttendorf questions current norms and codes of gender constructions and value creation mechanisms of the human body in our digital society.
Her works underline that our understanding of technology is also linked to patriarchal power relations and draw multi-layered new narratives in which women become visible again as an elementary part of the history of technology. She extracts communicative moments of participation in the Internet both in her performative jewelry objects and in her tutorial workshops. Buttendorf’s work has been exhibited at HKW Berlin, HMKV Dortmund, Künstlerhaus Bremen, La Gaîté Lyrique Paris, MU Eindhoven, NRW Forum Düsseldorf, Halle 14 – Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, D21 Leipzig and panke.gallery Berlin. Buttendorf is a trained goldsmith and studied fine arts at the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle (Saale).

[1] This could be read as an ironic reference to a 1985 design creation of the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake. Most likely, however, this is a reference to Cousin Imar who is a relative of the Addams Family. Imar apparently had three arms, one in front. When Morticia Addams knitted him a new sweater, Gomez Addams commented the sweater’s purple color would match Imar’s eye.

Sebastian Schmieg determined this similarity image by image with the help of Google’s “Search by Image” function: Instead of searching with words, one uploads an image and receives similar images as a result. Employing this method, two photos of the empty gallery have been interpreted by Google as a question, placed in the archive of circulating images and filled with a „path“ through this archive. Just as the photos of the gallery are now repeatedly transformed and manipulated by various artists, the archive also appears in ever new forms, and so the images in the Google archive also become visible as copies of copies of copies.

Users of Google’s Search by Image can also specify which color the found images should have. Using this limitation, Sebastian Schmieg has created three videos that are taking a black, a white, and a transparent image, respectively, as their starting point. Each of the following images is then taken from a subset of Google’s archive, consisting of only black, only white, and only transparent images. The three resulting videos convey an uncanny and strange impression. It is as if we’re inside the machine, the algorithm, and we’re witnessing the execution of its logic from within. Sometimes, however, the meandering path displayed in the videos is also funny: from the Black Square to a football, to signs indicating sports activities, leisure, and praying, to the logo of King County leading to the logo of a bulldog, and then on to 17th century Dutch still life paintings to interior decoration („Starting with a Black PNG“). The second (“Transparent”) video starts with black and white architectural elements jumping to kitschy coffee mugs (used in architectural offices?) and then develops into a colorful parade of emoticons, calendar icons, sun symbols, runes, biohazard warnings, police badges, logos of karate associations, to the East African Business Council and to “100% off!” – an emotional roller coaster. The third (“White”) displays jewelry, jewelry, jewelry and then white paper, wallpaper, stones, beans, peas, borders fences, phallic smoke stacks, obelisks and church towers, and continues on to baking and milling machines, diesel generators and cryptic diagrams. The algorithm sees patterns where we don’t see any. An alternative title for this work could be therefore: „Inside machine vision.“

Sebastian Schmieg investigates the algorithmic circulation of images, texts, and bodies. He creates playful interventions that penetrate the shiny surfaces of our networked society and explore the realities that lie behind them. In particular Schmieg focuses on labor, algorithmic management, and artificial intelligence. He works in a wide range of media including video, website, installation, artist book, custom software, lecture performance, and delivery service. Schmieg’s work has been exhibited internationally at The Photographers’ Gallery London, MdbK Leipzig, HeK Basel, and Chronus Art Center Shanghai. He lives and works in Berlin and Dresden.