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The exhibition NEW ELEMENTS explores an unusual perspective on data and computation, centering on the physicality of information and its implications for how we make sense of the world. 12 works by artists from different countries show how to close the gap between data and the world.
Forensic Architecture presents Cloud Studies (2021) as part of this exhibition.
“The idea that digital information is abstract and exists outside the physical world is a harmful myth. Since technology has entered all aspects of our lives, its material nature deeply affects us. Artworks at New Elements bring digital data back to reality and show how everything is interconnected” — Dietmar Offenhuber
NEW ELEMENTS consists of three parts — “The Autographic World”, “Material Computation” and “Digital Materiality” — and collects artistic approaches that deal with the physical aspects of information: in the natural environment, in technological systems, or in the inaccessible structures of neural networks.
The physical world is an analog computer. Everything that happens in the atmosphere, the soil, or the water inscribes itself into the world in countless ways. Polar ice, ocean sediments, and coral skeletons record the history of the global climate and aggregate it into physical patterns. But such autographic processes are not limited to the natural world; they also lurk below the abstract world of digital information.
Physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach introduced the concept of “elements” to overcome traditional dualisms of body and mind, matter, and information. For Mach, an element is a physical event that can manifest itself both as an object and a sensation.
The seemingly abstract world of digital information, which governs much of our lives, is brittle — never safe from the countless intrusions of the analog. From benign glitches due to an overheating processor to cyberattacks, from chip shortages to the energy footprint of blockchains — the material world, with all its messiness and unpredictability, constantly lurks beneath the immaterial virtual surface.
Image credits: The exhibition New Elements, Laboratoria Art&Science Foundation, The New Tretyakov Gallery, 2021. Photo: Yuri Palmin.