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.

ONE TO ONE #4 - We Are All Under The Same Sky

We Are All Under the Same Sky

Gabriella Torres-Ferrer (artist)

Mara-Johanna Kölmel (curator) 

GRAND OPENING Friday, 14th of May, 2021 from 7 to 9 PM CEST

PRISKA PASQUER VIRTUAL GALLERY

hubs.mozilla.com/2ZBNWda/PRISKA_PASQUER_VIRTUAL_GALLERY/

We Are All Under the Same Sky questions the significance of the body in our technological present by addressing both our physical and virtual realities within networked, globalized, and data-driven worlds. How are we still connected to each other regardless of our physical locations? What do these different kinds of connections involve? How do such connections maintain traditional power relations or give them new forms? 

Gabriella Torres-Ferrer's transmedial practice strives to break down hegemonic narratives by challenging interfaces, modes of spectatorship, and materialities. By connecting references to net culture, neocolonial landscapes, ecologies, and globalization, their work seeks out the potential for the respective transformations of these phenomena. This artistic approach can be experienced sensually in the exhibition space, which has transported the Priska Pasquer Gallery onto a cloud. As crucial element of digital infrastructures, the cloud is an important concept for the artist and curator. It therefore becomes the central visual metaphor of the exhibition, through which power relations inscribed in the digital sphere are explored.

The show thus becomes a plea for alternative infrastructures to expose and counter oppressive regimes. Gabriella Torres-Ferrer’s solo show, curated by Mara-Johanna Kölmel, reminds us that we all live under the same sky. In doing so, the exhibition pleads for radical togetherness as an alternative to the feigned empathy implicit in our constant social connectedness.

We Are All Under the Same Sky is based on the title of one of Gabriella Torres-Ferrer’s works. The exhibition builds on the shared interests of the artist and the curator Mara-Johanna Kölmel, who met as fellows at Akademie Schloss Solitude. Mara-Johanna Kölmel’s curatorial projects regularly unite international scholars, curators, activists and practitioners to explore the digital sphere as a site for methodological experimentation, social activism and artistic intervention. Gabriella Torres-Ferrer considers the implications of existence within networked globalized life and explores their interest in the societal transformations of modern cybernetics. In essence, their works examine how our digital reality redefines nature. 

More information: Priskapasquer.art