Exhibition View: Data Doom Desire

The group exhibition Data Doom Desire explores how the rationalist desire to quantify and animate the world through generative means shape not only our perception but also our beliefs and sense of being, highlighting the ramifications of this very impulse. Rather than viewing data-driven processes as purely technical, the works in the exhibition scrutinize how they shape collective sensibilities and more-than-human networks. Technical reproduction and representation – through micro- and macroscopic visualization, sonification, animation, or online feeds — have been central to how we interact with the world and how affective dimensions of reality are shaped: from early land surveys to the rise of modern colonial scientific tools, to data visualization, planetary networks, surveillance systems, military infrastructures and machine learning. Data Doom Desire focuses on biased scientific inquiry, the affective dimensions of online content, the limits of human cognition and the infrastructures of conflict, disaster fiction, and doomed outputs.

Artists: Asia Bazdyrieva and Solveig Qu Suess, Sara Bezovšek, Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich, Santa Pile, Martin Gasser, Silvan David Peter, Christina Humer and Oleg Lesota, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, Martyna Marciniak; Jenna Sutela

Constant is a journey through the social and political histories of measurement. For most of recorded history, the human body was the measure of all things. Constant asks what led measurement to depart from the body and become a science unto itself. The film explores three shifts in the history of measurement standardization, from the land surveying that drove Early Modern European land privatization, to the French Revolution that drove the Metric Revolution, to the conceptual dematerialisation of measurement in the contemporary era of Big Science. Each chapter traces the relationship of measurement standardization to ideas of egalitarianism, agency, justice, and power. Cinematic and technical images that begin as products of measurement systems are stretched beyond their functions to describe the resistance of lived experience to symbolic abstractions.

Geocinema is an episodic research into through experiments in moving image, narration and collective thinking. Each probes into ways of understanding and sensing the earth while being on the ground, enmeshed within vastly distributed processes of image and meaning making.

The project traces the physical infrastructures and abstracted processes, which make up the supply chains of perception, attenting to the situated histories of sensing techniques which frame movements of the cosmos, atmospheres, oceans, and surveil flows of bodies and their congregations

In an era marked by doomscrolling, conspiracy theories, climate change-related anxiety and political tensions, in which we often question our way of life and wonder about our near existence, SND depicts the general feeling of unease and helplessness that we experience whenever we see what is going on in the world. Using a blend of visual material found online such as memes, short videos, and emoticons and the artist’s own works, the interactive website leads its visitors through possible futures of our planet and lets them explore multiple endings after the apocalypse(-s) unfold.

Spin-Wave Voices: Sonification of Nanoscale Spin Waves as an Engagement and Research ToolMagnonics is an emerging research field that addresses the use of spin waves (magnons), purely magnetic waves, for information transport and processing. Spin waves are a potential replacement for electric current in novel computational devices that would make them more compact, energy efficient, and sustainable. Spin-Wave Voices visualizes and sonifies simulations of spin waves in extremely small structures of different shapes; simulation data is slowed down and magnified billions of times in order to make it accessible to human perception, excitation of spin waves in different shapes can be interactively controlled. With Spin-Wave Voices, the artists probe tools for science communication and data analysis, fostering insight into the world of nanostructures that shape our information society on a microscopic scale.

AI Hyperrealism is the first chapter of Anatomy of Non-Fact, a project about mis- and over-information in the context of the looming threat of post-optical images. This chapter focuses on the figure of the fake Balenciaga Pope, which captured the attention and imagination of many, during the so-called ‘AI-boom’ of 2023. Mechanisms of AIgeneration, visual journalistic languages, and digital cloning are augmented, partly stultified, and reified. A monologue reflecting on the nature of fact, and delivered by the Balenciaga Pope, confronts the viewer’s expectation of authorities of truth and photographic image, while bending the established notations of visual evidence. In the context of mounting concern with synthetic image’s potential to provoke mass-misinformation events, the work urges a reconsideration of our visual culture’s relationship to photographic image instead. A series of definitions, old and new, are woven throughout the video piece, provoking a reframing of existing terminologies related to AIgenerated images, and a re-naming of phenomena connected to issues of misinformation.

A demon roams through an ominous synthetic environment, reconstructed from satellite images of Russian air bases: Khmeimim in Syria, Baranovichi in Belarus, and Belbek in Ukraine. Passing through their deserted corridors, interrogation rooms, and electricity substations, this parasitic force sprawls out from the military structures. Devastation follows in its wake. In Onset, Engelhardt and Cinkevich craft an unholy alliance of medieval demonology, investigative research, and CGI animation to uncover the hidden life of these military outposts. Over the course of the film, the true horror of Russia‘s wars coalesces into a parasitic monster possessing sovereign states in an attempt to destroy them from within.

Inspired by experiments in interspecies communication and aspiring to connect with a world beyond our consciousness, nimiia cétiï documents the interactions between a neural network, audio recordings of early Martian language, and footage of the movements of extremophilic bacteria. Here, the computer is a medium, channeling messages from entities that usually cannot speak.