Hinged Collisions—Dormant Strain, 2018
Hinged Collisions—Why Humans Weep, 2018
Subsecond Flocks—When There Is No One Left and You Fly on in Proud Solitude, 2016
Hinged Collisions uses the shapes of medieval European altarpieces, framed in server racks, which also allude in their configuration to monitors on the desks of traders. The content of the cut reliefs represents various data visualizations, such as the spread of the plague in the Middle Ages or an unstable geologic crypto-depression in North Ethiopia.
In an important shift in the history of images, none of the motifs have been derived from illustrations, images, or photographs as we know them. Herregraven asks what actually constitutes an image today. Data can be converted into pixels so that we can see it. However, this visible form is completely arbitrary and serves to aid our better understanding. Nowadays, machines—such as satellites—gather data, which they stream to other machines. This data is neither meant for nor legible to the human eye. Although the Hinged Collisions are not predicated upon our reality, we still think that we can recognize landscapes or figurative elements. For Herregraven, the dominance of data collection over the image per se poses new questions: What is an image when it is no longer about what we see but rather about the value of the underlying data that we cannot see? Does this not mean that we are forcibly alienated from our own environment if we are no longer able to recognize it in images?
Subsecond Flocks is a series of works that explores extreme ultrafast financial events that take place. The artist hand-engraved all the transactions that occurred in one millisecond, resulting in over 30,000 dots, thereby creating a ritual that brings in time, flaws, meditative tedious process.
Courtesy of the Artist and Future Gallery, Berlin
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