Do we really want to live like this? The KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin is mounting two exhibitions that undertake an aesthetic investigation of digital society.
Visitors to the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin can currently experience digital culture on three floors. British artist Kate Cooper has perfect, digitally generated women's bodies appear in videos and billboard-sized photographs. American artist Ryan Trecartin presents a spectacle in a space-consuming film installation with six large screens that suggests a gigantic ADHD simulation: after being exposed to it for several minutes, one believes to understand how it feels to suffer from an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder triggered by the excessive consumption of video games and YouTube.
Rite of Initiation in an Abandoned Masonic Temple
In recent years, the artist (*1981) has attracted a great deal of attention with his films embedded in environments consisting of different kinds of seating and recliners. At the Venice Biennale, he presented a video installation in a room dedicated exclusively to him, and he was also recently represented in the group exhibition "Infinite Jest" at the Schirn. What Trecartin shows is essentially always the same: a group of wildly gesticulating, confusedly shouting young people--the artist himself and his friends. They wear blonde wigs, baseball caps, and sometimes even colored contact lenses that make them look like zombies. He uses hand-held cameras, and also attaches extreme sports cameras to the performers' bodies or mounts them on drones. Speakers reverberate with the sound of the protagonists' distorted, high-pitched voices, accompanied by a pumping pop bass. The rhythm of the film editing is dizzying and permeated with rapid changes of perspective and arbitrary leaps in time.
While Trecartin remains faithful to his artistic signature, he skillfully develops it in his installation "Site Visit." Visitors slip through heavy curtains into an antechamber, where they lower themselves into bulky, electronically controlled leather recliners and take in a sound installation. It seems a bit like a rite of initiation. It may be that this association is intended--this time, Trecartin did not shoot his film in a studio, which is otherwise the case, but in an abandoned Masonic temple. The group explores the gloomy and decayed interior accompanied by digitally generated fish and fantasy feline predators, which lie over what is taking place like a further layer. Viewers feel like they are in the middle of a set: Lizzie Fitch, who always selects the seating for Trecartin's film installations, placed camping chairs and patterned retro cinema seats in the hall of the KW Institute that also appear in the film.
Cool and Yet Blatantly Harmonious at the Same Time
The career of Kate Cooper (*1984 in Liverpool) is just taking off; she recently received the Ernst Schering Foundation Art Award, which is given to important newcomers. The show in Berlin is the artist's first institutional solo exhibition. In her work "Rigged" she examines the representation of the female body in digital visual media and in commercial contexts. For this purpose, she created a female avatar scantily dressed in a workout bra and shorts who jogs across the screen doing stomach muscle exercises, while off-camera, elf-like voices poetically reflect on the body as a place for coding and configuring meanings.
While Trecartin's interpretation of a generation driven by technology is informed by excessive demand and stress, for hers Cooper uses what is meanwhile essentially a classic aesthetic situated somewhere between science-fiction vision and corporate film, and is also somewhat reminiscent of the instructional films shown in airplanes, but in this case it is avatars and not flight attendants that explain the safety precautions. The atmosphere in these video and photographic works is cool and yet blatantly harmonious at the same time. The artificial manifests itself in numerous brief moments, for instance when the avatar's eyelid stiffly slides over her glistening eyeball. One occasionally believes to be in the outer office of a luxurious dental clinic, also because on one of the screens the avatar's perfect teeth are staged between lips held back by a plastic mouth retractor. Even though the two artists pursue a very individual approach, they share a basic dystopian tenor. They ask: do we really want to live like this? We have already answered the question: we have long since begun to do so.