DorkbotLex
Mischa Kuball
platon’s mirror
“Düsseldorf-based media artist Mischa Kuball is among the few artists who has consistently understood light’s (socio-)political dimensions and used the media accordingly in numerous works and installations. In his new exhibition project platon’s mirror, two additional aspects are included: a perception-aesthetics component, as well as the possibility of a novel type of image generation through computer tomography. This gives rise to highly topical issues within art, and for it. Within the project, light politics and media politics are re-negotiated.
The idea for platon’s mirror is based on one of the most influential stories within European literature: Plato’s cave allegory. In it, the philosopher draws a distinction between two forms of reality: the reality of the visible world and the (true) reality of ideas. For an artist such as Kuball, who is in a class of his own in his confrontation with the phenomenon of light in his work, the cave allegory necessarily became an artistic challenge. In simple and highly effective installations using projectors, silver foil, photographs and videos, Kuball creates spaces that can be considered analogous to the situation in Plato’s story about the cave. On the other hand, in his photographs and videos Kuball translates the complex relationships among light source, reflection, silhouettes, and representation into seemingly endless stages of mediation, within which reality is continually newly constituted as the reality of its reflection.
Kuball’s engagement with the cave allegory occurs in an era in which the problem of reality is viewed almost exclusively in sociological and political terms rather than philosophical ones. The talk of the “performativity” of everything real seems to render obsolete any question of what is truly real within reality. Kuball’s recourse to Plato is tied to the question of whether all reality can so simply be interpreted as a social construct, and whether human reason is still useful when it comes to comprehending a distinction between reality and apparition. In this sense, platon’s mirror can be seen as not only an attempt to problematize the timeliness of Plato, but moreover, to again question the classical linking of the metaphor of light and the idea of Enlightenment thought.
Supplementing the project, ca. forty black-and-white computer tomography images will be on display in the exhibition. The pictures are images of photographic equipment, which amounts to the computer tomographic penetration of cameras and video cameras. The redundancy of the medial process likewise brings up questions related to reality and its reproduction”
Stefani Bardin’s M2A™: The Fantastic Voyage “is an immersive installation that repurposes wireless gastroenterology devices (including the M2A™ capsule and SmartPill) that record images and information from the gastrointestinal tract in concert with artificial food scents, sound and behavioral neuroscience to re-imagine and re-contextualize our food systems within the influences of corporate culture and industrial food production. The project looks at the trajectory of Highly Processed Foods (transformed in a large-scale/industrial food processing facility including the addition of non-naturally occurring chemicals and compounds) versus Whole foods – minimal to no physical or chemical changes.”
The Social Collider “reveals cross-connections between conversations on Twitter.
With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.
This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that didn’t resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.
The Social Collider acts as a metaphorical instrument which can be used to make visible how memes get created and how they propagate. Ideally, it might catch the Zeitgeist at work.”
The Bladders Project
”The project is a model for the extension of London’s ailing water treatment cistern, and thus is a response to the classification of London as a city of ‘serious water stress’. The proposal looks towards the date 2031 when London’s reservoir cistern is expected to be unable to meet demand and when projected shifts in our climate will bring hotter, drier summers.
Inspired by natural membranes and tensile structures, the project envisages a municipal water treatment system located on the London Olympic Park. HOK/Peter Cook’s Olympic Stadium and the Aquatic Centre by Zaha Hadid Architects are given a purposeful and sustainable legacy. The stadium’s outer structure and seats are reused in the proposal and the remaining basin cradles a pair of giant bladders storing water of a similar quantity to the regular reservoirs further up the Lea Valley. The Aquatic Centre shelters an anaerobic digester stomach and other components of the water screening process.
The Bladders return a segment of the Lea Valley back to its role before the ‘Olympic invasion’, as a ‘backyard’ for Londoners. The valley acts as a void, dividing East London from the main body of the city, and has always been a place where the city’s utilities can be hidden away and one can escape the confines of the city streets. The spectacle of the Olympic Games is substituted for a performative utilitarian architecture to enhance the capital’s ‘life-support system’.
The Bladders lie bloated and endlessly reshaping depending on how much water is in them. The large membrane structures sag, fold, swell and flatulate. They are sustained by a set of instruments performing specific operations across the site. The instruments’ residual spaces and the watery bodies upon which they operate present a bizarre architecture where, alongside utilitarian function, performance and recreation can be sought.
Jonathan Walker”
The Bladders: General Arrangement Plan
The Bladders: Instrument No.4 - Retractors - used to spread open and grip onto skin for repair
The Bladders: Flacid Skins - aesthetical transformation of membranes through lack of water
The Bladders: General Arrangement Section
The Bladders: Instrument No.1 - Flank Buttresses - stabilizes the Bladders and controls the inflation and deflation of the inner chambers
