A dark circuit-board sculpture hangs at the entrance to bitforms gallery in the Lower East Side. It blinks erratically as it picks up surrounding WiFi signals. Inside, there’s a series of circuit-board wall mounts sprouting hundreds of wires, tall abstract paintings in neon pigments painted by tamed drones and gold-plated surveillance cameras aimed at each other.
Ridiculous, vibrant, playfully mysterious—Addie Wagenknecht has turned our society’s most ominous objects of technology into art tools and metaphors for her first New York solo show, Shellshock, open now through December 7.
The American, Austria-based artist, is a member of the Free Art and Technology Lab (“F.A.T. Lab”) and a front runner in the open source hardware movement. For her previous projects, from the meme mash-ups in Pussy Drones to the baroque CCTV chandelier Asymmetric Love Number 2, Wagenknecht has tamed some of the more disturbing and controversial aspects of modern technology. In Webcam Venus, a collaborative piece with Pablo Garcia, Wagenknecht directed adult webcam performers to reenact classical paintings by Modigliani, Botticelli, and Schiele, challenging our contemporary notion of “mediated sex objects” by placing them in the narrative arc of art history.
Shellshock plays on our collective real and fabricated anxieties toward technology in a post-Snowden world. As we expect government surveillance and dread personal data leaks, we can find some comfort, reassurance, and levity in Wagenknecht’s body of work.
We spoke to the artist about the Cloud, privacy, and technological fluency as means of survival.
MARINA GALPERINA: Since 2007, your drone paintings have evolved from monochrome black to vibrant, from minimalist to Rothko-esque. How have your materials and technique changed?
ADDIE WAGENKNECHT: With the newer pieces, I was interested in making a work that was interactive without using computers. The paintings behave more like traditional sculptures, but if you take a picture of one or change the light or the angle from which you are viewing one, the action presents the work in a new form.
In rxrxrx, two gold-leafed, closed-circuit surveillance cameras are staring at each other. They feel a little lonely—those two particular surveillance paths, so exclusive in their permissions to monitor society, and they’re left at looking at each other. How do you think surveillance culture is affecting us and the authority’s relationship with us? How are your current and previous projects subverting this authority?
It’s not even about relating to surveillance anymore or having a relationship with it; it is now becoming more about fluency and the navigation of technology as a means of survival. If you don’t have the fluency to modify or overwrite a system, it owns you.
The issue, which draws me back to technology recently in my creative works, is the gap between the literate and illiterate. Fluency in programming is becoming an important requirement to survive in a read-only society, and it is not an immediately attainable standard. At the same time, privacy has become a luxury only for the initiated. In parallel terms, surveillance indirectly forms part of the larger system of exclusion, so we have to find ways to include all. The CCTV cams were really about making irresistible objects that hint a sort of romantic tragedy, a form of practical fiction.
Ridiculous, vibrant, playfully mysterious—Addie Wagenknecht has turned our society’s most ominous objects of technology into art tools and metaphors for her first New York solo show, Shellshock, open now through December 7.
The American, Austria-based artist, is a member of the Free Art and Technology Lab (“F.A.T. Lab”) and a front runner in the open source hardware movement. For her previous projects, from the meme mash-ups in Pussy Drones to the baroque CCTV chandelier Asymmetric Love Number 2, Wagenknecht has tamed some of the more disturbing and controversial aspects of modern technology. In Webcam Venus, a collaborative piece with Pablo Garcia, Wagenknecht directed adult webcam performers to reenact classical paintings by Modigliani, Botticelli, and Schiele, challenging our contemporary notion of “mediated sex objects” by placing them in the narrative arc of art history.
Shellshock plays on our collective real and fabricated anxieties toward technology in a post-Snowden world. As we expect government surveillance and dread personal data leaks, we can find some comfort, reassurance, and levity in Wagenknecht’s body of work.
We spoke to the artist about the Cloud, privacy, and technological fluency as means of survival.
MARINA GALPERINA: Since 2007, your drone paintings have evolved from monochrome black to vibrant, from minimalist to Rothko-esque. How have your materials and technique changed?
ADDIE WAGENKNECHT: With the newer pieces, I was interested in making a work that was interactive without using computers. The paintings behave more like traditional sculptures, but if you take a picture of one or change the light or the angle from which you are viewing one, the action presents the work in a new form.
In rxrxrx, two gold-leafed, closed-circuit surveillance cameras are staring at each other. They feel a little lonely—those two particular surveillance paths, so exclusive in their permissions to monitor society, and they’re left at looking at each other. How do you think surveillance culture is affecting us and the authority’s relationship with us? How are your current and previous projects subverting this authority?
It’s not even about relating to surveillance anymore or having a relationship with it; it is now becoming more about fluency and the navigation of technology as a means of survival. If you don’t have the fluency to modify or overwrite a system, it owns you.
The issue, which draws me back to technology recently in my creative works, is the gap between the literate and illiterate. Fluency in programming is becoming an important requirement to survive in a read-only society, and it is not an immediately attainable standard. At the same time, privacy has become a luxury only for the initiated. In parallel terms, surveillance indirectly forms part of the larger system of exclusion, so we have to find ways to include all. The CCTV cams were really about making irresistible objects that hint a sort of romantic tragedy, a form of practical fiction.