[spectre] exhibition New Materialisms (Station 3.6)

[Darko Fritz]

New Materialisms (Station 3.6)

14 - 28 . 10 . 2016
Town Museum Korčula
 
part of the exhibition-in-progress New Materialisms
artists: Martin Callanan, Ivan Marušić Klif, Eloi Puig, Goran Trbuljak
curators: Darko Fritz (Grey Area), Eilidith Lucas i Geoff Lucas (HICA)

http://sivazona.hr/exhibitions/new-materialisms-station-36

Project New Materialisms has been a collaboration between grey) (area – space for contemporary and media art and HICA (Highland Institute for Contemporary Art), carried out through multiannual series of exhibitions, performances and lectures. New Materialisms project reflects historically divergent art practices and discursive fields of concrete and conceptual art, as defined in the 1960s. Project tackles understanding of those art practices through the discourse of post-media contemporary approaches to art as well as via post-digital condition of our every day life, whereby digital is interwoven with each aspect of our social being. New Materialisms strives to formulate a dialogue among important authors of concrete and conceptual art and contemporary practitioners who work within the post-media context, while assuming the design of aesthetic experience as a vital mechanism which has its agency in the process of creating the physical world.

Text Trends by Martin Callanan looks at our perception of words and data when displayed in graphical form thus studying the spectacularization of information. The work uses the data about the usage of Google search engine gathered within a four-year period, while reducing that process to some essential elements: searched terms vs. frequency of searched over time are presented in the form of a line graph. Through human perception of words and data, the work encourages the critique of the phenomenon of generating data.

In the untitled work by Goran Trbuljak, which is being at display within the permanent exhibits in Korčula's Town Museum, there is a hand counter which the author counts the visitors with, or, more precisely, the visitors who have been coming to his solo-exhibitions openings since the early 1970s. Those who have come more than once are counted only once. The second work is also without a title. Identical hand counter, but with another figure, one which shows the number of the people who came to his solo shows in 2016. With these works Trbuljak, via for him typical institutional critique, takes part in the questioning of the large quantification of the matters and phenomena in contemporary society from the first person position, which also reflects on the interpretations of the notion of new materialism seen through the optics of different fields that use the same term, but very often with different meanings.

The Internet project "The Fine Line H-K-H-F" by Eloi Puig connects four locations, namely HICA (Inverness, Scotland, UK), Grey Area (Korčula, Croatia), Hangar(Barcelona, Spain) and Funchal (Madeira island, Portugal), monitoring weather at each location in real time. The Internet document shows a map of Europe with four locations, from each the line is started to be drawn on the map and develops over a period of two months. Four lines change their properties every day according to the weather report. This process ultimately creates a dynamic drawing generated by the particular climate of each location.Four variations of weather are taken in consideration: sun, clouds, rain and extreme weather, from 9th August to 1st September 2016. Unfortunately, the huge fire that caught Funchal showed the importance of meteorological conditions and their vital impact on people and environment.

Puig's art book Speresaic was made with the experimental software called Roloc, which operates with chromatic code of images, id est analyses an image from the spectre of colours chosen by a user. An image is subsequently converted into stripes of different sizes, depending on the chromatic proportions of an image. An image is being recomposed into vertical stripes of pure colours. Speresaic demonstrates a selection of photography of a location in Barcelona and their repeated recoding via Roloc software. Upon the artist's invitation, the user Ljiljana Bomeštar, who visited Barcelona as a tourist, chose a set of five colours inspired by the location that she visited for the first time. Author then made a series of photo-works of the square that made an impression on the user (Plaza de Sant Pere) and recoded them chromatically.

Series of the portraits by Ivan Marušić Klif's colleagues and friends came to light via a special process. 3D scan of a face is shown on a screen of an analogue oscilloscope, which then directly rays the photo-paper. The oscilloscope was used for the manipulation of raster data, investigating into the nature of a visual signal.

supported by
Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia
Endowment Kultura Nova
Dubrovačko – Neretvanska County
Korčula Town