Multipart Exhibition, Denmark:
Phenomena of Interference — Carlos Katastrofsky
Interferences are sources of mistakes, if imagined within the microcosm of the mutual influence of language. However, the focal point of the exhibition series interference by the media artist carlos katastrofsky, who lives in Vienna, is not the disturbance, but that space of transition, where these interferences appear and which they constitute themselves at the same time. But interferences not only describe defects, they also designate a global phenomenon: these are the natural processes of transformation, which language systems are subjected to in the course of time. Thus, they realize themselves in the nowhere “in between”, they are process and state of an “overlapping” at the same time, a grey area and a blackbox, continually opened and closed by the artist.
The artist is not at all interested in separating the media tools from this perception in the Internet based artworks, that have been produced between 2005 and 2008, and the accompanying adaptations for the exhibition space. Basics like software, interface designs and code are worked on just as much as the social mechanisms that their employment goes hand in hand with. carlos katastrofsky takes the viewers by way of new technologies into an area, in which content and medium are mutually dependent and a feedback of expression and form is possible. Without explaining his personal reason, he allows the viewers to participate in those issues that are his driving force as an artist. These are personal perceptions translated into reduced picture worlds and objects, which challenge the viewer to confront him- or herself both with the single works and the underlying economic and political mechanisms of a globalized world.
carlos katastrofsky does not utilize code and the principles of its calculability for the glorification of media structures, but for a visualization of processes that are not immediately intelligible for media consumers. His awareness of the material results from his past career as classical sculptor, while the purist aesthetics of his works are based on his conceptual background. He performs his institutional criticism of the ghettos of the Media Art business, of the artistic production- and distribution processes in and with the new media as well as of the role of contemporary media consumers in this circle, by abstaining from effective performances. With the tools of Minimalism, he creates a new language of form and content that takes its structure from continuous appearances of overlapping and becomes itself a process of transformation, thus an interference.
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SERIAL PORN (2005)
Series of 5 C-prints on dibond
On a first fleeting glance, the viewer could easily assume that the so called wallpapers of serial porn (2005) were developed by way of generative procedures of the picture production: floral patterns, geometrical figures and three-dimensional effects. On a closer look, you discover in the montages, however, extracts from pornographic pictures, derived from the sheer endless fund of the World Wide Web. They are arranged in a serial way so that their original figurativeness dissolves in favour of “decorative” patterns. The subject is sex and the reduction to the essentials. With this photographic work series, carlos katastrofsky not only alludes to one of the most significant economic branches of the Internet, but he also refers to working methods of artists in the Internet. The remix, the processing and the defamiliarization of existing materials as well as their employment as readymades is pursued up to the point where the original function of the pornographic images loses its stimulating effect. Through the détournement, that is its use for different purposes and its reinterpretation, the stimulus is cancelled in a new meaning, in order to re-constitute itself on a different level of perception.
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OBJECTS OF DESIRE (2005-2008)
Custom-made computer, shell-script
In short intervals, a text sequence appears on the screen of a transparent object with the promising title objects of desire (2005-2008): white standard typography on black background, sentence by sentence, second by second, with each new beginning a new number and thus, a new piece of art, that is concluded by the words you own me now until you forget about me. With objects of desire, carlos katastrofsky looks for the determining parameters for digital art, for their role in the art business and — even more general — for the authorship of artistic works: Is it necessary to touch it and own it at first, in order to define art as such, or is a consecutive number sufficient in order to speak of an original: 1101, 1102, 1103? objects of desire is the further development of the originally purely Internet based work the original (2005) for the exhibition space. The self-constructed computer — thus, the transparent object (of desire) — contributes on a formal level its share to the transfer of text-based and ephemeral characteristics of net-art into real space.
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ENTROPY (2006)
Series of 5 C-prints on dibond
In the five-part work series entropy (2006), carlos katastrofsky utilizes pictures taken by surveillance cameras readily retrievable in the Internet and installed in New York, Mexico City, Moscow, London and Tokyo. The choice of the title applies both information-theoretical as well as physical parameters of thermodynamics and takes hold of the respective places exclusively through the principle of movement: nothing immovable exists, houses are only created through the shadow of passing clouds, streets through driving cars and a zebra crossing through the pedestrians who use it. In this way, five photographic works condensed to single pictures through computer-assisted procedures generate themselves — eventually leading to socio-political questions about collective transparency in the Internet, as well as to art-theoretical questions about process-oriented phenomena. The themes time and space are newly arranged in the context of globalized metropolises and result in contemplative pictures, whose density of information — both in the literal as well as in the metaphorical sense — has the view of the visitor oscillate between catching familiar patterns and rediscovering coincidental structures.
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LANDSCAPES (2007)
Series of 3 prints on paper
In order to guarantee the data transfer between two or more computers and to be able to identify the receivers explicitly, the network nodes of the Internet consist of so called IP-addresses. The seemingly accidental arrangement of this combination of numbers and the resulting — partly even extremely conflicting — virtual neighborhoods are examined by carlos katastrofsky in landscapes (2007). In the course of this further development of the two Internet based works neighbourhood research (2004) and area research (2004), IP-adresses were brought to paper by means of printing transfer, in order to provide the viewers with an extract of the virtual in real space. The artist works on the net as cartographic concept and copies the context, in which websites like Google, CNN or Wikipedia are anchored. Translated into the gallery space, the viewer eventually finds him- or herself vis-à-vis works on paper whose aesthetics remind of conceptual, text-based strategies of design. In this way, the context of the shown IP-addresses is also reflected formally: in a landscape open downwards and upwards, consisting of numbers, letters and signs.
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TIMESTAMP (2008)
Custom-made computer, monitors, webcam
Space, time and light are those factors that enable the viewers of timestamp (2008) to take a stroll into the immediate past. A camera above the place of the installation follows the constantly changing qualities of light at the sky. Passing clouds, the sunset or the blackness of night are rendered in the form of monochrome colour areas on five monitors altogether. While the first picture point still shows an extract from the present play of lights, the viewers reach during their path to the other screens, sometimes lasting only for fractions of seconds, impressions from the past. But it is not only a journey into the past of the varied light qualities, but also a trip into the past of your own perception, your own memory and contemplation. The installation timestamp is a further development of the purely Internet based work remote impressionist artwork (2006) and does not only play with the working techniques of Impressionism, but also with the concept of interaction in a digital surrounding: Even though the viewers cannot generate special effects or open up hypertextual worlds, interaction with the artwork consists in the act of conscious seeing.
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ALL YOU CAN SEE (2008)
Custom-made computer, videoprogram (11185 min)
With common video formats, almost 17 million different colours can theoretically be represented on the screen today. If these are shown all at once, a condensation in pure white is generated in the digital picture production. While carlos katastrofsky with the internet-based precursor to all you can see (2008) entitled opus magnum (2008) was still concerned about the subject of mass production as one of the last taboos in the art market, he plays in this video with the time-based representation of structures of the digital art production, that are inherent in the system, and the processes attendant to it. The visitor gets to see all that is possible: Countless different colours are lined up linearly with a rate of 25 pictures per second in single frames and result in an 8-days-long changing process from black to white und thus from colourlessness to absolute condensation. The artist establishes through the extension of the material, perceptible for the viewer as monochrome representation, references to the colour field painting of Abstract Expressionism. In his video production, the artist dispenses with the subject and employs colour purely for its own sake. He continues in the digital medium reflections and theories that have been known for a long time from art history about the end of painting. His method: restriction, reduction and concentration in the form of extension.
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INTERFERENCE (2008)
Interactive website
Always and everywhere … as long as a computer with network connection is ready, many users can view at the same time one and the same Internet artwork; they can interact or play with it. But still, alone in front of the computer, the art experience remains personal. interference (2008) stresses this fact through the terms and conditions set up by carlos katastrofsky for the use of his website: not all recipients at the same time, but only one after the other can view this Internet based work and can then be sure of a receptive exclusivity. If a link is clicked on for a second time, a placeholder page is activated and the viewer has to wait. Interferences are phenomena that can be attributed to highly different scientific fields at the same time. Thus, in physics, they describe the effect caused by the concurrence of waves, in linguistics, they are the transformation processes of natural languages, and in pharmacy, they serve to characterize interactions — therefore, a phenomenon of simultaneous overlapping, always and everywhere.
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