ARTISTS:
The Atlas Group, Jean-Pierre Aubé, Bureau d’Études, Center for Tactical Magic, IRWIN, Mark Lombardi, Trevor Paglen, Marko Peljhan, I-TASC, Martha Rosler, Bálint Szombathy, Mladen Stilinović, Visible Collective / Mohaiemen, Roy, Huq, Lin, Nimoy
CURATOR:
Stephen Wright
Galleery Nova, Teslina 7, Zagreb
01/12/2006 – 07/01/2007
Although it is still common to think that “a map is not a territory” – meaning that life cannot be replaced by information content or reduced to it – the vast expansion of data collection through digital nanotechnologies and integrated networks suggests that qualitative transformations of administrative governance have become possible but by the sheer quantity of available data. Is the dream of total management on the verge of becoming a reality, in which action on the map is simultaneously action on the territory? “You have nothing to fear if you hide nothing” became the refrain of the ideologues of real information, but being an individual also means having something that is hidden. Artists have only recently begun to show a more sustained interest in the phenomenon of displaying, classifying, and gathering information—in short, in what we might call the aesthetics of data.
The Dataesthetics exhibition brings together twelve artists and art collectives who use data as artistic material. Dealing with cognitive mapping, discursive forms and forecasting the production of knowledge and research as an independent artistic practice (and not an introduction to the production of artistic work), the presented artists strive to establish the heuristic and socio-critical potential of the use of data.
Stephen Wright