South likes: Smart New World at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf
Tabor Robak, film still from 20XX, 2013. Courtesy Team Gallery, New York.
South likes: Smart New World at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf
Smart New World
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany
5 April – 10 August, 2014
In order to see Smart New World at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, visitors have to comply with a complicated admission procedure developed by the International Necronautical Society (INS). It’s the digital capitalism, baby! The terms and conditions of this procedure have been designed to replicate policies enforced all over present-day digital business. Title of the exhibition is references to Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, a dystopic science fiction story written back in 1931, which in turn owes its title to The Tempest by William Shakespeare’s (How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, / That has such people in’t). The show inquires the evolution of the state-run surveillance apparatuses and how they developed along with the new technologies of digital capitalism. A thin line distinguishes an information society from a surveillance society, and yet this line is constantly twisted and blurred by partnerships between state-run and private-owned initiatives, everyday habits, business competitions. Of the many works exhibited in the show, a couple of examples will provide a better understanding of this complex scenario. Two films, one by Omer Fast and one by Santiago Sierra, address the boom of drones technology, inquiring the the visual impact of the most advanced war technologies developed in the field of unmanned aerial warfare. The advertising strategies presented by Tabor Robak focus on the seductiveness of new media technologies in shaping consumer’s desires. Kenneth Goldsmith’s Printing down the Internet offers another perspective on the digitalization of knowledge, advocating freedom of information and at the same time confronting the endless and impossible task of taking control of data flows. Trevor Paglen instead concentrates on the huge infrastructure system that sustain the American military and intelligence services. The digital reflection of the world is fragmented into infinite parts of a whole dynamic knowledge. Of one thing we can be sure: the amount of information we produce everyday, volatile, unstable and physically displaced as it is, doesn’t seem to stop growing.
Michelangelo Corsaro
http://www.kunsthalle-duesseldorf.de/index.php?id=351
Kenneth Goldsmith, Printing out the Internet, 2013, Labor, Mexico City
Santiago Sierra, film still from VETERANS OF THE WARS OF AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ AND NORTHERN IRELAND FACING THE CORNER, 2013, Courtesy Estudio Santiago Sierra, Madrid and KOW, Berlin
International Necronautical Society, INS-Declaration of Inauthenticity, Tate Britain, London 2009, Photo: INS Department of Propaganda, © 2014 Richard Eaton/Tate, courtesy of International Necronautical Society
Omer Fast, film still from 5000 Feet is the Best, 2011, courtesy of the artist and Arratia Beer, Berlin
Trevor Paglen, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Springfield, Virginia, 2013. Courtesy of the artist; Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne; Metro Pictures, New York; Altman Siegel, San Francisco
