RISE OF GIANTS - Banz and Bowinkel - PRISKA PASQUER VIRTUAL GALLERY

RISE OF GIANTS

Artists: Banz & Bowinkel

Curator: Tina Sauerlaender (peer to space)

Opening: Thursday, November 25, 2021, 6 - 8 pm CET

Here at PRISKA PASQUER VIRTUAL GALLERY

Accompanying Program:
InstaLive Artist Talk: Dec 2, 2021, 6 pm CET
Virtual Happy Hour Drop Party, Jan 20, 2022, 6-8 pm CET
Soft Opening in Cologne at PRISKA PASQUER Gallery, Saturday, January 29, 12 - 6 pm

The invisible bots and algorithms which govern our online behavior and collect our data every day, adopt visual forms in the series Bots by the artist duo Banz & Bowinkel. They occupy the virtual world of the PRISKA PASQUER gallery as giant cyborgs. The island, transformed into an all-encompassing coordinate system, becomes a symbol for the Internet. As visitors, we find ourselves in the middle of an experimental field of algorithms.

The Internet is a training ground for artificial intelligence to study, evaluate, and learn to anticipate human behavior. In doing so, they make our lives easier as we use map apps, talk to Alexa, or when Siri sets our alarm clock. Their knowledge helps drive our connection to technology and keeps it running as frictionless as possible. In the 1990s, we deliberately dialed into the Internet using routers and now we are connected to the internet automatically. We still push buttons and give voice commands today, but tomorrow we will control our actions with eye movements, hand movements, or even brain waves. The blurring of the boundary between humans and technology results in our gradual transformation into a technological giant. The visitors as cyborgs in the PRISKA PASQUER virtual gallery also attain formidable sizes. The gallery lies at their feet like Lilliput, the fictional island in Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels.

Banz and Bowinkel's series Primitives also addresses the issue of scale in virtual reality. Primitives are simple basic graphical forms that are used as a foundation for the creation of more complex structures. Triangles, polygons or point clouds are important primitive forms for digital 3D objects. These shapes have no size and are arbitrarily scalable without loss of quality, since their existence is defined by the relationship of the individual parts to each other. Size is relative here as well, just like in the PRISKA PASQUER virtual gallery. Banz and Bowinkel's Primitives play with the various proportions of size that exist in the gallery space. 

With a virtual reality headset, we have the opportunity to experience what is denied to us on the computer screen. We dive into the dimensions of virtual space and experience a new perspective. With ease, we fly over the miniature version of the virtual gallery and explore the gigantic bots and primitives. The exact size of our own avatars is unclear. However, thanks to an increasingly frictionless connection with technology, we too grow into cyborg giants with extraordinary powers.

Exhibition Catalog of RESONANT REALITIES is out !

The exhibition RESONANT REALITIES- Exhibition of the VR ART PRIZE by DKB in Cooperation with CAA Berlin took place from April 16 to July 4, 2021 at Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin and showed the VR works and installations of the grant winners of the VR ART PRIZE, Banz & Bowinkel, Evelyn Bencicova, Patricia Detmering, Armin Keplinger and Lauren Moffatt, and was curated by Tina Sauerlaender Artistic Director of the VR ART PRIZE.

>> Learn more about the exhibition here <<

>> Learn more about the VR ART PRIZE here <<

>> Download the catalog here <<

SIGHT + SOUND International Digital Art Festival curated by Erandy Vergara and Tina Sauerlaender

Eastern Bloc presents its 11th edition of SIGHT + SOUND FESTIVAL virtually this summer.

Some Universe : Internet Spaces in a Postdigital World

June 29 to August 31st, 2021

At the forefront of the experimental digital art scene in Quebec since 2007, Eastern Bloc presents the 11th edition of the SIGHT + SOUND International Digital Art Festival this summer. Titled Some Universe : Internet Spaces in a Postdigital World, this year’s festival will be held completely online between June 29th and August 31st. Running for two months, the audience will have the opportunity to participate in Eastern Bloc’s main annual event and join the reflections of 16 artists from Canada and abroad. 

The online exhibition will take place on the purpose build website [www.sightandsound.online] and access will be free, however the audience will be encouraged to make a suggested donation to support Eastern Bloc’s mandate of promoting emerging artists - with all proceeds going towards funding the artist fee’s of the next edition of SIGHT + SOUND Festival, in 2022. 

The 2021 edition of SIGHT + SOUND Festival takes advantage of the immobility we have all been forced into to propose a reflection about the aesthetics and politics of space and representation. Curated by Erandy Vergara and Tina Sauerlaender, the artworks help us imagine and speculate on what “space” really means in a post-internet and post-pandemic world. The exhibition invites online users to delve into the worlds produced by contemporary artists, provoking us to think about what kind of spaces we want to inhabit in the years to come. The curators selected net art, videos, and videogames exploring spaces beyond perspective and cartesian referentes. The artists move away from realism, or engage with it critically. They ask questions, not attempting to provide linear solutions. Most of all, they virtually hold the visitors’ hands during immersive, multidimensional experiences to reconfigure the “fourth wall” to which we are mostly submitted to during our day to day lives facing flat screens. 

The title of the 11th edition of SIGHT + SOUND Festival paraphrases Olia Lialina’s Some Universe (2002), a link-free site inspired by the popular star backgrounds on the early web. Like many of Lialina’s works, this net art piece functions as an archive of the aesthetics and vernacular roots of the internet. I like the vagueness and unpretentiousness implied in the title of Lialina’s piece. But I admire it even more for its archival impulse: to create it the artist extracted as many outer space backgrounds she could find on the web in 2002. The evocation of the infinite universe and the stars, which often stand for the future also resonates with this curatorship.

Participating Artists: AAA Collective (AU; AR; РФ/; DE; US; FR); Banz & Bowinkel (DE); Ronnie Clarke (CA); Mara Eagle (US/CA); Anna Eyler – Nicolas Lapointe (CA); Philippe Pasquier and Miles Thorogood (CA), Jiwon Ham (KR/ US); JakyuNG Lee (KR/ US); Olia Lialina (РФ/DE); Frances Adair McKenzie and Alisha Piercy (CA); Fallon Simard – Amery Sandford (CA); Timothy Thomasson

More information: sightandsound.online

ENVISIONING THE FUTURE – VR Art Exhibition in Washington D.C – co-curated by Tina Sauerlaender

Artists: A / A (Germany), Banz & Bowinkel (Germany), Scott Benesiinaabandan (Canada), Julian Bonequi (Mexico), Paloma Dawkins (Canada), Claudia Hart (USA), Jakob Kudsk Steensen (Denmark/USA)

Curators: Erandy Vergara and Tina Sauerlaender

Our future is constantly redefined and renegotiated in both real and virtual spaces in times of political tension between communities, countries, and cultures. Curiosity and the spirit of discovery juxtapose resentments and  fear towards the yet unknown or the so-called Other. Yet the Other struggles to create spaces and to envision a future she/he is actively a part of.

Seven artists from different geographic locations and backgrounds discuss worldviews in utopian or apocalyptic, cultural or natural contexts in their virtual artworks. They are hypothetical imaginations that reflect about possible states for worlds. Together, they ask what is the future we would like to live in and how can we get there? They call us to rethink the present in order to envision the future.

The artists take us to parallel worlds: apocalytpic moments (A / A, Germany); archipelagos removed from physical laws (Banz & Bowinkel, Germany); native Canadian history and future visions (Scott Benesiinaabandan, Canada); human birth and death on Earth and on Mars (Julian Bonequi, Mexico); journey into the fabled unknown (Paloma Dawkins, Canada); liminal and mythological wonderlands (Claudia Hart, USA); tourism and technology facing climate change (Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Denmark/USA). All artists use Virtual Reality, the new medium in art, as their tool of expression. This medium creates a blank space for new visions. In virtual reality, the viewers are in the center and  surrounded entirely. They decide where to look and where to go; they co-shape the world they are in. Viewers are assigned the active role of the user. Just like the virtual artwork is complete through the actions of the users, these users are also are able to rethink and reshape their own physical reality.

This selection of current VR projects combines the passion and expertise of two curators: Erandy Vergara's engagement with postcolonial and feminist perspectives on media art and theory (Mexico/Montreal) and Tina Sauerlaender's curatorial engagement with digital technologies and Virtual Reality (Berlin).

Invited by the Goethe-Institut and Studio XX in Montréal, they developed the concept for their exhibition series “Critical Approaches in Virtual Reality Art”, where this exhibition Envisioning the Future is part of.

October 24 to 28, 2018 at Halcyon Arts Lab, Washington D.C

LInk to the Facebook Event

Link to the announcement on the Goethe-Institute’s website

Exhibition on Virtual Reality at HeK Basel

The Unframed World
Virtual Reality As Artistic Medium For The 21st Century

Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Portrait of Elizabeth Mputu, 3D scanned data, custom software, 2016

Artists: Li Alin (CAN/DE), Banz & Bowinkel (DE), Fragment.In (CH), Martha Hipley (US), Rindon Johnson (US), Marc Lee (CH), Mélodie Mousset & Naëm Baron (FR/CH), Rachel Rossin (US), Alfredo Salazar-Caro (US)

Curated by: Tina Sauerländer (peer to space)

Opening: 18.01.2017 at 6 pm with an artist talk and a performance by Li Alin

Rindon Johnson, “Photographed Still from Meet in the Corner (Publishing House, 2016)”

Duration: 19.01.2017 - 05.03.2017

At: HeK - House of Electronic Arts Basel, Freilager-Platz 9, 4142 Münchenstein/Basel, Switzerland

(c) Li Alin

With the market launch of technologies suitable for the masses, Virtual Reality experiences a first time large-scale popularity as artistic medium. By means of a headset, the viewer enters a three-dimensional world devoid of the limiting edges of a screen, projection sheet or room. The Unframed World is the first extensive presentation of artistic exploration of the VR medium at the HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel). The international group exhibit shows works, which bind the virtual environment together with the physical exhibition space.

More Information here.