Exhibition ‘abstrakt Abstrakt’

Through the exhibition ‘abstrakt Abstrakt - the systematized world’ we sought out to analyse the nature and effect of abstraction systems.

Abstraction systems reproduce the ‘world’ in a new medium (e.g. the financial system) and have great effect on our lives through complex regulatory circuits. The extensive and powerful autonomy of such systems becomes obvious in moments of their dysfunction, like during the interruption of air traffic due to a scientific simulation of a vulcano cloud, or by the drop of the stock market due to automated computer trade. Under a regime of rationality scientists and engineers become performing agents of this development, and bring ever new abstraction systems (and even abstractions of abstraction systems) into action, empowered by computerisation and ‘software-isation’.

The NODE festival emerged from the ‘scene’ of users and developers of the programming language vvvv, which is widely used for the realisation of art and design projects. Coming of age, it is not solely committed to these roots, yet two dispositions still characterise its pursuit: On the one hand there is a great familiarity with the ‘workbench of abstraction’ (programming / conditioning of machines). On the other hand we share an artistic perspective, which is interested in the social and philosophical implications of this work.

Artists

NODE10’s exhibition presented pieces by 13 international artists

Ralf Baecker, Ben Fry, FIELD, Leander Herzog, Robert Hodgin, Thilo Kraft, Louise Naunton Morgan, Brandon Morse, John Powers, Patrick Raddatz, SOFTlab, Jorinde Voigt and Zimoun.

Impressions

NODE10’s exhibition ‘abstrakt Abstrakt’ collected works by several international artists that reflect these new conditions of artistic production. The nature and effect of abstraction systems became apparent in works of digital and mathematical nature as well as in pieces that analyse, observe and transform artefacts of an abstract society. Among others:

‘(n)arcissus’

Artwork

by SoftLAB

‘(n)arcissus’ was a site-specific spatial intervention in the stairwell of the Frankfurter Kunstverein, an artificial skin that drops down through the vertical space using gravity as a principle.

'Sketches 2005-2010'

Artwork, Video

by Robert Hodgin

Computer code is perhaps the most immaterial of materials, consisting of text sequences dotted with obscure typographic symbols that read almost as concrete poetry.

Eno Henze

Berlin/Frankfurt, Germany

Eno Henze is an artist, scenographer and designer based in Berlin and Frankfurt. His works examine how machines transform aesthetic reasoning and notions of the human. Combining theory with technology and computation, Henze creates images and spaces that oscillate between great complexity and clarity, between human and machine origin.

Marius Watz

New York / Oslo

Marius Watz (NO) is an artist working with visual abstraction through generative software processes. His work focuses on the synthesis of form as the product of parametric behaviors. He is known for hard-edged geometrical forms and vivid colors, with outputs ranging from pure software works to public projections and physical objects produced with digital fabrication technology.