Hyper Digital Forces
Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey
This exhibition, drawn from the Borusan Contemporary Art collection and curated by Dr. Necmi Sonmez, features work that use experimental approaches to producing New Media art framed by the possibilities afforded by digital processes. Hyper Digital Forces explores the “New Visuality” underscored by the qualities of images emergent in digital culture. Comparing the digital to previous technological forms, like video art and neon sculpture, then with canvases, collages, and manipulated forms informed by classical technique. The exhibition contrasts the “moving” and “standing” images from this.
Digital techniques have allowed artists to reshape their mythologies from those of classical gods and goddesses to that of democratized data, stripping the sanctity of the work, replacing it with spaces of contemporary thought and affect from neon and the electrified image to the spaces of the digital and hyperreal. This is evidenced in beginning with the work of transmedia artist Brigitte Kowanz to the neon of Sonnier, creating a narrative stretching between the two. The narrative points to a space involving still, moving, electric, and digital forms that follow the Borusan’s mission of questioning artistic and institutional narratives.
The body of work in Hyper Digital Forces oscillates between the image, form, and digital and light, with several floors’ themes featuring a given artist. Kowanz’s lightwork, 1234567890, transitions to Ayse Erkmen’s Colorful, a ceramic walkway calling attention between Borusan’s Haunted Mansion and the Bosporus. In video, John Gerrard’s Endling, an uncanny aviary specter, counterpoints Jennifer Steinkamp’s Daisy Chain, and Chul Hyun Ahn’s Mirror Drawings counterpoint Erwin Riedl’s Meandering, both working with the visual nature of space. Yağız Özgen‘s 8 Bit Color Palette Inputs also interrogate color in the post-Classical area of New Visuality. On floor 4, Leo Villareal’s Particle Field (Triptych) stands opposite Ellen Kooi’s haunting C-Prints. On the Mezzanine, Michael Kenna’s stark silver prints show stark images of Aisa, while Morellet’s Neon references Kowanz and Sonnier. The seventh floor is dedicated to Claudia Hart’s Dream, and on the 9th Floor, Andrew Roger’s Unfurling and Beat Zoderer’s Patchball #3 reveal sculptural notions of the exhibition’s ideas of the visual.
Hyper Digital Forces creates a space for discussing the show’s “The New Visuality” ideas by laying out sets of parameters and then exploring the continuums between them. With the works spanning roughly the past two decades, Hyper Digital Forces suggests that this visual space has emerged since the turn of the millennium. Unlike ideas like Bridle’s “New Aesthetic” and its emphasis on an operational/machine aesthetic, this exhibition moves between more historical forces. It moves forward in the contemporary notions of deeply framing new media in history. Sonmez’s concept of visuality in terms of the democratized data space of digital culture reveals the deep temporal connections between contemporary media art and the art historical tradition.
