Info

Measuring, rendering the Earth as accurately as possibly on the map, which centuries ago supplanted territory in efforts to shape the collective imaginary of the world, or describing the known worlds anew, New Cartographies features seven artworks in which the artists turn into geodesists of the post-digital age.

Hajime Narukawa (JP) AuthaGraph
AuthaGraph grows out of protest against the traditional perception of the Earth, which has been promoted by Gerardus Mercator’s map for over five hundred years now. With its explicit attribution of centrality to Europe, the Mercatorian map distorted both the sizes and the shapes of areas projected onto a flat surface. In Narukawa’s project, the map is based on ninety-six triangles and re-casts our ideas of the center and the periphery as well as showing that the Earth, as a matter of fact, has no midpoint other than that charted by our own position.

WROcenter Group (PL) Tessel v. 2.0
The ways of visualizing the shape of the Earth affect the general public’s representation of it. Specifically, the iconic sphericity is implicated in the narrative of the universality and singularity of our planet, even though it consists of several strata which can be rendered in a variety of geometrical modes. As an interactive installation, Tessel enables its users to build their own image of the Earth by manipulating the size parameters and rotating it at will.

David Bowen (US) tele-present water
David Bowen’s rippling kinetic sculpture brings together two spaces – that in which it is exhibited and that from which the data that set it in motion are sourced. Conveying the experience of a buoy tossed about by water, tele-present water replicates the waves of the Pacific Ocean in a stable and unperturbed environment.

Chi-Tsung Wu (TW) Crystal City 002
Some time ago, the immersive game of Second Life marched triumphantly across the world (vigorously inspiring new-media artists, such as Roy Ascott), and the whole of Denmark was virtually recreated at a 1:1 scale in Minecraft. Although, with these processes in place, virtual cartographies and worlds were legitimized, their statuses are still subject to negotiations. Crystal City 002 represents another new reality which, crystallized out of data and information, continues to develop and transform.

Stanza (GB) The Nemesis Machine: From Metropolis to Megalopolis to Ecumenopolis
Stanza’s installation is a large-format, enormous electrical city based on componentry, computer chips, integrated circuits, and energy conductors. Its constant evolution powered by the audience coming within the range of its sensors, the urban environment operates as a survey of various concepts of the city, culminating in the vision of an ecumenopolis – a huge, co-existing city, a zone of permanent control and supervision, and an ultimate severance of the human-populated world from anecumena, i.e., permanently uninhabited areas.

Jeffrey Shaw (AU) Legible City
Jeffrey Shaw’s pioneering interactive installation stages a journey across a city built of letters and messages. When a visitor mounts the bike and starts cycling, the computer begins to generate routes. Paths start to shoot up and unfold, with buildings replaced by sentences, as Shaw anticipates contemporary forms of semiocapitalism, the commodification of the word, and communications which, ubiquitous in the public space, persuasively encourage an incessant exchange of capital for objects.

Lynn Cazabon (US) Junkspace
An astronomic cartography of the colonization of space – remnants of the earthly electronic gear navigate the debris of satellite probes, remainders of launched rockets, and orbital cosmic waste circling the Earth.

 

MONDAY
WROcenter Group (PL)
Tessel v. 2.0
documentation of the installation
EEC Lab: Metabolism of the Anthropocene exhibition
13.07 – 04.12.2016
WRO Art Center

TUESDAY
Hajime Narukawa (JP)
AuthaGraph
documentation of the project and artist talk
Utopias exhibition
WRO Art Center
Eco Expanded City 2016

WEDNESDAY
Lynn Cazabon (US)
Junkspace
documentation of the installation and artist talk
May 2016
The White Stork Synagogue, Wroclaw
Eco Expanded City 2016

THURSDAY
David Bowen (US)
tele-present water
documentation of the installation and an artist talk
14th Media Art Biennale WRO 2011 Alternative Now

FRIDAY
Chi-Tsung Wu (TW)
Crystal City 002
documentation of the installation
The Rings of Saturn exhibition at former Ballestrem Palace in Wrocław
15th Media Art Biennale WRO 2013 Pioneering Values

SATURDAY
Stanza (GB)
The Nemesis Machine. From Metropolis to Megalopolis to Ecumenopolis
documentation of the installation and an artist talk
Mega-Lo-Polis exhibition
16.06 – 7.09.2017
WRO Art Center
17th Media Art Biennale WRO 2017 DRAFT SYSTEMS

SUNDAY
Jeffrey Shaw (AU)
Legible City
documentation of the installation
MultiMediale 5, ZKM, Karlsruhe