Pauline Niedermayer

The Exponential Anything group exhibition is on at Berlin’s Museum für Fotografie, opening November 26 and running to January 10, 2016.

The show is the fifth of a series from a collaborative project between the Staatliche Museen’s Kunstbibliothek and the Universität der Künste Berlin titled SEEN BY, inviting guest curators to exhibit the work of students at the UdK Berlin.

Curated by Vera Tollmann, Exponential Anything reflects on an IBM brochure from 1979 called ‘The Information Machine’ and its notion of computers. “Are the ‘intelligent machines’ we know as A.I. and robots again being assigned uncanny properties?” it asks, pre-empting the radical development of intelligent technology into the out of control ‘monsters’ of classic robot stories through the opaque mechanisms of the internet.

Exploring the complexity of virtual networks and the misguided ‘solutionism’ of Silicon Valley, participating artists Alex Chalmers/Bob van der Wal, Alice Dalgalarrondo, Petja Ivanova, BMC, Pauline Niedermayer, Harry Sanderson, Maximilian Schmoetzer, Andres Villarreal and Dan Ward aim to demystify the mechanisms leading to a destructive trajectory creating “more users, more computers – more raw materials, more electronic waste”.

See the Museum für Fotografie website for details.**

Harry Sanderson, ‘F_R (flexibledisplay)’ (2013.) Still from documentation. Video installation.

Header image: Maximilian Schmoetzer, ‘Preliminary Material for 2022’ (2015). Video Still.

As part of group exhibition IMAGE IS A VIRUS // ON ACTIVISM, running at Berlin’s ACUD MACHT NEU from September 11 to 24, Auto Italia will be leading a panel discussion along with Paul Feigelfeld at the ACUD Studio on September 18.

The London-based artist-run space organisers Kate Cooper, Marianne Forrest and Marleen Boschen will speak with Feigelfeld, academic coordinator of the Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University Lüneburg, on questions raised by the exhibition theme inspired by art pioneers General Idea. The Canadian collective’s work preempted the viral dimension of the hypercirculating image in contemporary culture by decades, most famously with their Imagevirus series.

Th exhibition features work by the Lensbased class of Hito Steyerl, including Pauline Niedermayer, Bruno Siegrist and Till Wittwer among others, and follows ideas of anarchic images in the digital era, their circulation and representation and the “activist potential of the image in a contemporary discourse of hyper circulation”.

See the ACUD MACHT NEU exhibition page for details. **

Exponential Anything @ Museum für Fotografie, Nov 26 – Jan 10

Header image: Maximilian Schmoetzer, ‘Preliminary Material for 2022’ (2015). Video Still.

IMAGE IS A VIRUS // ON ACTIVISM @ ACUD, Sep 18