Waking Up in a World - Essay
Akasha, 2019
An excerpt from the beautiful essay by Peggy Schoenegge for Waking Up in a World exhibition, on view until the 12.11.2022 at Artemis Gallery in Lisbon.
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"New technologies create expanded realities that reveal new possibilities of the current time. Our everyday life, culture and society are digitally transformed and technologized. We hold meetings online while sharing memories on social media and algorithms recognize our individual needs. Digital media such as smartphones, tablets, or VR headsets lead to a shift into the virtual, providing an alternative space for action. We constantly oscillate between both worlds, which are permanently being reconstituted and developed. In the dissolution of boundaries, the physical and virtual spheres merge into each other, shaping an altered reality. This influences the way we behave, think and interact as humans within society. A culture of the (post) digital emerges, opening up a new world in which we are waking up, becoming aware of the digital turn.
This technologized reality is the central topic of the group exhibition Waking up in a World. Demonstrating the significance of today’s technologies, seven international artists explore different aspects and effects of digitalization. They reveal a complex network between technology and humankind. The artworks refer to utopian ideas of post-humanism, illustrate the potential of applications such as artificial intelligence, and investigate human’s perception in its technological extension. In this context, the view is always reflexively directed to the humans themselves.
(...) In their multi-channel video installation AKASHA (2019), Distante and Frederico Pimpão explore the idea of Akasha – a compendium that contains an all-encompassing world memory. It includes all the human events, thoughts, words, emotions, and intentions that have ever occurred in the past, present, and future. The artists translate this concept digitally into a generative, audiovisual work. Influenced by algorithms that respond to the visitors, the artist's archive thus becomes a kind of memory that is constantly being expanded and recombined.
This results in a supersensory experience, illustrating the complexity of possibilities in the post-digital age. (...)
- Waking Up in a World, Peggy Schoenegge, 2022
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www.distante.org/works/akasha
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