The Best Algorithm-Enhanced Artistry At Norway's Freshest Arts Fair

Change is the subject of Metamorf 2014: Lost in Transition, a biennial exhibition of art and technology organized by curator, muse, and artist Espen Gangvik in Trondheim, Norway during the month of May. In addition to laptops, servos, transistors, and miles of wire, the artists use ideas like algorithms and nature’s generative systems to construct their projections, installations, and contraptions and, so, to examine change. This stands in sharp contrast to the way technology too often makes headlines: the voracious algorithms of Wall Street and our interference with Earth’s climate. The exhibition offers new ways—humorous, hopeful, piquant—to reimagine and reinterpret technology, the city, and our understanding of both man made and natural processes.

The presiding technical trope here is the algorithm—the math that computers use to make decisions. The algorithm is part of what is behind some recent financial crashes and is also how entities like Google, Amazon, and Netflix push (some might say manipulate) us toward the cultural offerings that help make us who we are.

A presiding spirit informing the show is John Cage, the mid-century American composer who used chance processes—a toss of the I Ching—to compose music and allow everyday life enter his art. His most famous musical composition is 4’ 33”, in which the audience ostensibly hears four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, but in fact hears coughs, creaking chairs and other random emissions—the luminous sounds of ordinary life. This turns out to be a perfect example for many of these artists of how to use rules to seemingly bypass the artist’s will or ego and arrive at something expressive.

I spent three days in Trondheim to present some of my own photographs at the biennial, and here is much, but by no means all, of what was there. The first section covers artists who use algorithms, often to capture some of the flow of life. The second section focuses on artists who use or simulate natural processes to look at change—sometimes drawing data from Trondheim itself to compose the works—and the third section on works that I couldn’t categorize but that display an immediate visual appeal.

The Emergent City by STANZA

British artist STANZA’s installation The Emergent City consists of a miniature city laid out on the floor of the Trondheim Center for Contemporary Art. Its components—little buildings, circuit boards and more—are all tied to several sensors that monitor environmental data around the city of Trondheim. The data that streams in from the sensors STANZA installed around Trondheim’s sleepy byways powers his chipper little city, abuzz with sounds, blinking lights, and small motors turning. It evokes the sense that everything is happening at once.

The installation is fun, but it’s something else, too. As STANZA explains, “The city is everything, everywhere, without limits. It’s a virus on the skin, spreading outwards, upwards, and underground. There is no need to limit the city…. The city has moved from metropolis, to megalopolis, to the ecumenopolis. The city is everywhere.” His work uses some of the same data as the spies, enforcers, and commercial floggers of the world who monitor us constantly. But The Emergent City seems to be saying that the city and connecting with its people can be a source of great joy, if we listen to it and let it be instead of controlling and surveilling the life out of it.

Corpora in Si(gh)te by doubleNegatives Architecture

The international (Japan, Switzerland, and Hungary) architecture collective doubleNegatives Architecture (dNA) asks a building’s surroundings to design it, forgoing the architect in what's definitely no easy client pitch. For dNA’s piece at the Gråmølna, Trondheim Art Museum called Corpora in Si(gh)te, the collective installed sensors atop the museum that monitor local climatic and other information. An algorithm then designs a shape specially for the museum building, hands-free, and the result is data and diagrams projected in shimmering, ever-changing complexity on the museum wall. The idea is to bypass the ego of the architect and give the environment itself some say.

Digital Grotesque by Michael Hansmeyer and Benjamin Dillenburger 

At Gråmølna (the main venue), the Swiss architects and programmers Michael Hansmeyer and Benjamin Dillenburger exhibited Digital Grotesque, 3D-printed rooms also designed by algorithm (which The Creators Project previously covered here). The team wrote algorithms that, according to the pair, emerge in unpredictable form, and that divide and subdivide space.

The blocks I saw in Trondheim were both of heavenly delicacy and uncanny in their beige-tinted solidity and could have come from the distant past almost as easily as from present. The work is involuted and cave-like, as the title, which derives from the world grotto, suggests. Grotesque is also a style, of course, pertaining to gargoyles and other strange and ugly beings and shapes. French literary scholar Rémi Astruc decribed key elements of the grotesque: doubleness, hybridity, and metamorphosis—surprisingly mathematical ideas that seem highly algorithm-friendly.

Exploded Views 2.0 by Marnix de Nijs

Marnix de Nijs' projection, Exploded Views 2.0, also at Gråmølna, presents a shifting, spangled composite of the world’s most photographed tourist sites. The artist, in his printed statement says, “The work analyzes GPS tags of all the pictures available on photo-sharing websites… and reconstructs the top 400 most photographed locations in 3D. The work represents the world according to the way it is photographically represented on the web.” The wash of images is controlled by a trackball the size of a large cantaloupe and is projected on the wall. In a mercurial world tour, brightly granulated tourist sites slide into view, and familiar pediments, fountains, and lawns morph into one another and slip away. Conceptually, it’s a satire of tourism, of greed for the next wonder of the world—a savage indictment of the trivializing capacity of the camera and the deadening hegemony of the picturesque. But, damn, it’s beautiful.

Murmur Study by Christopher Baker

American artist Christopher Baker’s Murmur Study also draws on data—the nether-feeds of Twitter—and also could be seen as a critique of vacuity. Baker set up a device that sifts Twitter for messages with common expressions of emotion such as “ooo,” “argh,” “meh,” and “grrr” and they are printed out in Trondheim as they are being written all over the world.

Cash register tapes arrayed near the ceiling of the Gråmølna space unfurl their tweet-marked paper strips in fits and starts, down the wall, and into fluffy white heaps on the floor. Left unchecked, they might fill the building and perhaps the world, like author Jorge Luis Borges’ fantastical map, so detailed that it was as big as the world. Perhaps these tweets are banalities so common they blot out thought. As one message put it, “I want some subway oooo daddy.” Maybe not one for the ages. But there’s another way to look at it. Baker’s installation shows that feelings flow so fluently and constantly from the human breast that they can attain a kind of low poetic majesty.

Reunion2012 by Anders Tveit and Eskil Muan Saether

I was unable to elbow my way into performance of Anders Tveit and Eskil Muan Saether’s Reunion2012, a homage to a Cage 1968 performance called Reunion, so my comments will be brief. The composers wired a chess board, installed magnets, and wrote algorithms to produce music out of the game. It’s a neat conflation of Cage with Marcel Duchamp, the Dadaist who famously gave up art to play chess. Visitors to the main space can compose their own music by sitting down to the board and playing a game or two.

Receptive Environment by Daniel Palacios

For Receptive Environment: Trondheim, Daniel Palacios installed climate sensors around the Norwegian city—and there was a lot of climate to sense: snow, rain, sunshine, and little pilly things that swirled in the wind like tiny styrofoam balls (but must have been hail of some superlight variety, or maybe they were buckyballs for all I know ). The sensors then reported findings to a laser engraver that the artist programmed, by algorithm, again, to burn tree- and root-like laser engravings on thin wood panels. Each panel represents a day except for a large panels that compile the data for the whole two weeks period Palacios kept data in Trondheim. The results are remarkably detailed botanical images that resemble trees silhouetted against sepia skies by the 19th century Parisian photographer Atget.

Hydrogeny by Evelina Domnitch and Dmitri Gelfand

Onward to Russian-born, Netherlands-based artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitri Gelfand, who, if I remember right, mentioned buckyballs in the context of their stunning and highly technical work called Hydrogeny in the Babel Art Space. It’s worth mentioning the stylish couple’s looks, since they sometimes appear with matching commas of hair shaved into the sides of their heads and strange and elegantly customized clothing that could have come from the Mars Uniqlo.

The pair says they’ve dismissed the use of recording media and that they simply offer phenomena for observation, asking us to take the installation entirely for itself. This is something like the thing-in-itself thinking of minimalist sculptors of the Sixties like Donald Judd and Carl Andre, whose work was meant to eschew metaphor and shed art history.

Enter the blackened room and what you see are tiny bubbles rising in a tank of water illuminated by a slowly sweeping ray of light. When the light reaches the tiny silver spheres, they refract the beam into psychedelic hues, and you are suddenly aware of the volume of water in a way you’ve never seen. So much for appearances. The actual phenomenon: hydrogen bubbles forming and rising from electrified wires at the bottom of a tank of purified water, illuminated by a slowly scanning laser. The metaphor: the origin of life, since, according to their statement again, the action of sunlight on Earth’s seas—or solar splitting—“was among the primordial initiators of living matter.”

Sandbox by Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen

Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen’s Sandbox resembles an ordinary children’s sandbox, but it’s covered, raised on legs, enclosed in an elegantly riveted but slightly foreboding black box the size of a double-wide coffin, and fitted with computer-controlled interior fans and a long horizontal peephole through which you can see the forces of eternity. It’s little windblown desert-in-a-box that, according to the artists, is a “generative system” that mimics the forces of nature by way of fans and sand.

Sandbox reminds viewers that the Infinite may be big, but it’s made up of minute particles and effable forces like wind and gravity. In at least one way, the enclosure is necessary to the action (as death is to life), since the sand would simply blow to the floor without it. The grim enclosure reminds us to appreciate, in writer Paul Bowles’ phrase, the sheltering sky, our only protection from the desolation of outer space.

Piet on Ice by Christian Blom

The Norwegian composer and artist Christian Blom’s Piet on Ice (at Babel Art Space) is a contraption that uses “the growing and melting of ice-roses as its material.” Water on a horizontal mirror freezes and melts, surrounded by soldered joints, copper wires, tiny fans, all in assembled in a skewed, offhand jumble that is peculiarly expressive.

His other piece at the Rake Showroom, al Khowarizmis Mekaniske Orkesters, is an automated composition machine that relies on software and limited input from the audience that includes pushing a button that rolls dice that set the whole thing off. Again, Blom’s way with the physical assembly of his components is winning and lends a pleasing melancholy air to the herky-jerky mechanical proceedings. Sonically, it is halting and tinkling, but we are advised to note that the composition is different with each deployment. Blom says, “I can tell it when to start but not what to do. I can tell it where to go, but not which way to take.” And this could serve for the motto for much of the show.

Moving Objects | no. 1239 – 1247 by Pe Lang

Pe Lang is perhaps the most conventional artist of this far-out group, since his work relies on visual kick. But he’s still pretty far-out. When I heard his artist’s talk, I discovered that he’s created kinetic sculptures that convulse, pirouette, and reverse directions over the course of his career. They make motions that somehow evoke animal life and even human feelings.

Lang makes magnets, cables, servos, and stainless steel move in ways you assumed had no mechanical equivalent: decision making, dreaming, influence, panic. He makes these witty works by the most repetitive, formalized, and regimented means. Mechanical movements become metaphors, shifting diagrams for shifting feelings. After studying his work, it’s a little easier to conceive of the brain as an electrochemical device that produces thoughts and feelings by purely mechanical or computational means.

At the main venue, Lang presented a large abacus-looking wall piece across which little O’s hung on a spinning cable skittered across the white background in a game of telephone, each black circle rushing to to collide and advance its next-door cousin. The illusion was a of a continuous news feed of O’s streaming across a white field when in fact each O moved only a few inches. The piece seems to offer philosophical insight into how information is communicated while at the same time making some sort of slippery joke. His new piece, Moving Objects | No. 1239–1247, presents overlapping gray spinning disks that, because they are polarized Lucite, change hue as they slowly rotate. The effect is of smoothly shifting tones that could also be the moment your vision fades and swarms before you black out.

The Blackest Black by Frederik de Wilde

I was sorry to say that somehow I missed seeing Belgian artist Frederik de Wilde’s The Blackest Black in the main gallery—until I realized how appropriate it was to have not seen a piece whose whole point is to be unseeable. Together with scientists from NASA and Rice University, de Wilde developed a black material involving nanotechnology that reflects very little light. He is on a modernist’s quest for purity, like that of one of his heroes, Yves Klein, who developed his famous color Klein International Blue along with some chemists. Luckily, you can find an interview with de Wilde and The Creators Project here.

Netropolis by Michael Najjar

In dramatic conclusion, German artist Michael Najjar literally climbed the highest buildings he could find in several cities and found perches from which to photograph, subsequently snapping wide-angle views and compressing them together to for his series Netropolis. The series portrays a city of the future wherein human density and human interconnectedness have each somehow merged into a vast overlapping cubist panorama.

The series of twelve images, a portion of which appear in Trondheim, becomes, as the artist puts it, “a completely unprecedented and imaginary form of urbanity—the telematic netropolis.” The works, from 2003-06, reportedly involved some derring-do with building management, and are notable in the context of this biennial for providing a lush visual equivalent to the more conceptual works in the show about the city. Najjar also plans to be “the first artist in outer space” on a future Branson-fueled flight and has produced images of sublime mountain tops reimagined as the peaks and valleys of the Dow Jones financial index, among other recent projects.

Editor's Note: Pelle Cass, the author of this article, is a highly-talented photographer and shared worked from his series 'Selected People' at Meta.Morf. This past fall, The Creators Project made a documentary on Cass' stunning-yet-funny timelapse photos which you can watch above. See more of his work at his website here: http://www.pellecass.com/

Meta.Morf is on view in Norway until June 1st. For more information on the festival, visit its website here: http://metamorf.no/

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