μια κυκλική προοπτική #2 / curated by Hanns Lennart Wiesner
with: Manolis Daskalakis-Lemos, Hayal Pozanti, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Lou Cantor, Harm van den Dorpel, Ayami Awazuhara & Christopher Burman, Jonas Lund (in collaboration with Serapis) and Sascha Pohflepp (with contributions by Ariadne von Schirach, Joulia Strauss, Oliver Bulas, Julien Bismuth, Christophe Berhault and Jana Papenbroock)
April 8 – April 13
Agisilaou 36, Athens 10436
„ A house of Plastic
In an overpopulated area
Using natural light
Inhabited by friends and enemies“
(excerpt from the computer poem of Allison Knowles and James Tenney)
This exhibition curated by Hanns Wiesner is an extension of the ideas explored in his earlier project „uma perspectiva circular #1“. The essential principle of this ongoing investigation of cognitive and perceptual structures is the following: human endeavors both collude with and disrupt natural cycles-- but they also are inscribed with referential structures of their own, which, however anthropogenic in character ultimately submit to cyclical imperatives with regard to reference and association. The distinctions between “circularity” and “continuity” are key features of the exhibition’s fundamental concerns; perspectives that may initially appear disjoint may be characterized by deeper resonances obscured by surface properties. Such distinctions may simply be artifacts of cognitive regimes, or they may reflect deeper and more integral aspects of reality. The new chapter of my exhibition series aims to excavate the nature of these thought regimes, both in terms of their content and in terms of their origins.
Artificial intelligence projects, therefore, are the starting points for discussion. The exhibition seeks to explore the ways in which traditional human impulses, relations and needs are reimagined, recapitulated or deconstructed in a world increasingly defined by algorithmic and machine „learning“. The inverted commas around the final word in the preceding sentence are used to denote the skepticism about the identity of machine vs. human cognitive regimes. While it may be true that AI devices may perform functions that are similar to those of neurological circuits and the like, the underlying referential substrate on which such functions are based is largely, if not entirely, distinct. Apparent continuities may themselves mask profound differences and irresolvabilities. For this project, Hanns Wiesner brought together a group of artists whose works address this tension, teasing out the ruptures in apparently closed loops of behaviours, normativities and desires.
Particularly interesting is a potential future culture in which texts generated by AI „philosophers“--computers producing philosophical texts--serve similar roles to those produced by human philosophers in the present time. Incomplete understanding is broadly taken as a given with regard to anthropogenic philosophical texts; in a future culture characterized by increasingly machine-generated language, such aporias may have different meaning, but they may also perform an identical function: that of generating ruptures in perspectives or thought regimes which will, thus, provide spaces for modalities of alterity and novel creative forms to enter the world.
The works included focus on the technological aspects of this dynamic, but also the experiential, visual and sensory aspects as well. Artists included are: Manolis Daskalakis-Lemos, Hayal Pozanti, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Lou Cantor, Harm van den Dorpel, Ayami Awazuhara & Christopher Burman, Jonas Lund (in collaboration with Serapis) and Sascha Pohflepp (with contributions by Ariadne von Schirach, Joulia Strauss, Oliver Bulas, Julien Bismuth, Christophe Berhault and Jana Papenbroock)
The architectural intervention was, as in the first iteration of this exhibition series, built by Product designer Julius Lehniger and was inspired by a verse of the first computerized poem by Allison Knowles and James Tenney that is cited above.