STUDIO

What is waiting out there.The title of the exhibition “what is waiting out there” specifies the direction of its view: from within the art realm outward, at reality – a reality which simple explanatory models of the world no longer suffice to describe. Technological developments as well as global economic, political and social crises of the present have caused cracks in our reality, widened the gap between the world we talk about and the world that is really there. 

The works presented in the show reject the tendency – increasingly observable in art – to turn away from reality and toward art-immanent and formal problems. They counter this tendency by insisting on a stringent view of our present and its reality. 

With the selection of drawings and gouaches by the great nineteenth-century Realist Adolph Menzel, on display in the Alte Nationalgalerie|Old National Gallery, the contemporary works are juxtaposed with a historical approach intended to contextualize the direction of view taken by the 6th Berlin Biennale – outward, at what is waiting out there.

Infinite Stream Loop is an audio stream traveling through the world wide web since the 1st of july 2010

The field of research “Laps” focuses on generating sensible representations of Internet by using it as a broadcasting space. The spatial and geographic properties of the Network are highlighted by broadcasting audio streams that travel and reverberate trough the web. Listening to these audio streams by using specific processes* allows to make audible an infinity of transformations that modify the sound as it circulates on the web. These alterations are comparable to a form of erosion caused by the network space - they are a key to allow different mental representations of this digital topography. 
*Very low buffers and no error corrections

PROCESS | A sound is sent out over the network and goes through several locations on the web. Captured at the end of a loop by the original transmitter, the sound is played and then resent out with no additional modification through the web.

SOUND MATERIAL | To emphasize the changes caused by the network, the sound used for the startup is deliberately very simple - pure silence.

SPACE | Similar to a physical & resonant space, the Internet network is here used as a broadcasting space where sound gets more elaborated. The audio signal is modified by the inner properties of the network and becomes an acoustic signature of this space.

ERRORS | The audio transmission process used here allows to keep all the distortions of the original material that occurred during the process (artefacts, transmission errors, missing data…).

TOPOLOGY | The geography of the network is in perpetual motion. Web user’s actions have a direct impact on the features of this “resonant space” - the sound that one can hear through Laps constantly crystallises the activity of part of the web.

EROSION | As a block of raw material subjected to an erosion, the back-and-forth of the sound on the network gradually shape the original material. The audio stream becomes a real-time sculpture - a potential acoustic portrait of the network.