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Seasons of the Void

June 24, 2014, 11:12 am
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2013
C-Type prints (1000mm x 1000mm), diagram (620mm x 620mm), model (150mm)
In collaboration with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Andrew Stellitano

If humans went on a long-term mission to Mars, would they be taking along all the provisions needed or cultivate the food needed to sustain themselves along the way? Seasons of the Void reacts to proposals by NASA and others to use synthetic biology as a means of producing food in space by designing organisms that are able to perform electrosynthesis rather than photosynthesis.

Electricity flows through a dark tank that is connected to the solar panels of the spaceship. Inside, two symbiotic cultures of modified yeast are feeding on it, forming spherical fruit-like shapes in microgravity – a radical departure from how most life on Earth converts energy. 

Cut open, a harvested fruit reveals a structure that resembles the growth rings of a tree. It represents a record of the 377 days of the journey and the diminishing power of the Sun. The magnetic field within the tank, distorted by spikes in the solar weather, a brief moment in the shadow of Venus that momentarily halted the growth and small streaks in the fruit, left by cosmic rays. 

Growing food on a trip to Mars, astronauts would become farmers of the void as much as its explorers – their ship constituting a celestial body in its own right as the artificial ecosystem it harbors performs an orbit around the Sun.









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The Golden Institute

June 24, 2014, 11:12 am
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2009
HD video (6:19min), architectural models, C-Type print (1200mm x 800mm)

For every future that happens, many others are being foregone. The world which we live in is the result of countless choices in the past. Many aspects of our world would potentially look very different if, at crucial moments, other paths had been chosen.The 1980 US presidential election represents such a crucial moment in regard to energy technologies. While Jimmy Carter had a declared interest in renewable energy sources the victorious Ronald Ragean quickly rolled back such efforts and embraced a future based on fossil fuels.

The Golden Institute is situated in an alternate past where president Carter won the election and used his second term to advance renewable energy efforts on a scale comparable to the Apollo program. Headed by Douglas Arnd, the controversial chief strategist of the Institute, various efforts are advanced to harness unusual energy sourcres order make the country independent from fossil fuels by 1985.

Project Quartz declares the State of Nevada a Weather Experimentation Zone where thunderstorms are being artificially seeded to draw electricity from lightning. Infrastructural efforts are being made to equip freeway off-ramps with induction coils to save the energy usually lost when a vehicle slows down, the small profits being shared between a Chuck's Diner franchise and the driver. In individual level, people modify their cars to become mobile lightning rods, hoping to catch lightning in an artificial thunderstorm in order to sell off the electricity at market value of about $400.

While many of these fictitious efforts were later found to have counterparts in the reality of cold-war America, The Golden Institute as a scenario of massive technological change aims to reflect on the relationship between state, individual and nature in in the age of the Anthropocene. Told across various media and scales it plays ironically yet deliberately on the land-use and the entrepreneurial spirit commonly associated with the United States.

On a higher level, the project introduces the past as a means to talk about both the present and the future, challenging the scenario technique that has been dominating the discourse since its introduction by think tanks such as the one that The Golden Institute was modeled after.





















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Camera Futura

June 24, 2014, 11:12 am
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2013
Trampoline, camera, custom software, flash (dimensions variable)

In the abundance of energy that is the new order, we will no longer be bound by the force that is keeping us on the bottom of Earth’s gravity well. We may be be floating around freely, our bodies suspended by extremely powerful electromagnetic fields. Or we could be far away, living in the brilliant sunlight of a space colony after having left our planet in the exuberant spectacle of a rocket launch.

Many elaborate experiments were developed in order to investigate how man would move in microgravity before Armstrong and Aldrin finally walked on the Moon in July 1969. They were not just simulations but In a sense pre-enactments of a new set of rules that we were about to enter, providing a window into the future through which NASA researchers collected not only data but also visual impressions. Camera Futura aims to create a similar pre-enactment, taking inspiration from one such experiment conducted at Stanford University in the mid-1960s by applied mechanics professor Thomas R. Kane.

Like the original setup, the installation consists of a trampoline as a simple anti-gravity device and a camera rig. The energy stored in the trampoline’s springs amplifies the power of our muscles, so that we can briefly launch ourselves and experience an instant of relative weightlessness when falling back to Earth. Camera Futura captures images from that very instant. These photos allow for a glimpse of our brief moment in a post-gravity world. In a sense, they are impressions of ourselves from one of many futures.

Part of New Order at Mediamatic Fabriek, curated by Katja Novitskova and Rory Hyde. Camera software: Konstantin Leonenko, thank you Jennifer Morone & Julijonas Urbonas.











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Forever Future

June 24, 2014, 11:12 am
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What happens to technological visions when they do not come true? Do they just disappear or is there a place where they live on until they eventually may be materialized? Or are there phantom futures that might forever stay at a certain distance from us and can we even feel nostalgia for them?

Robert Walker is a fictitious character who remembers the visions of space that dominated the American public imagination until well into the 1980s. He expected to follow the Voyager probes into the unknown and spend part of his life in space. Fifteen years later, he realized that this future is unlikely to happen and he started a space program of his own. He starts to collects technological predictions that had been made for the present year and conserves the ones that didn't come true. In an annual ritual that mimics the trip to one of envisioned space colonies, he visits a storage facility in which he keeps his 'ship', a semi-autonomous archive that will travel through time until it gets recovered and the mission ends.

Played by Martin Marlow, Walker explores the psychological effects of technological promises, many of which are bound to not, at least immediately, materialize. Like many of the early pioneers of a new technologies, in his mind the lines between scientific thinking and fiction are not as clearly drawn. What underlies his imaginary space ship, however, is the realization that narratives of the future in every form are an integral part of what scholar Norman M. Klein calls 'fantastic infrastructure' and therefore is as important as every other resource at our disposal.










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Growth Assembly

June 24, 2014, 11:12 am
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2009
Watercolor illustrations (720mm x 320mm, 380mm x 320mm)
In collaboration with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, illustrations by Sion Ap Tomos

The Growth Assembly is a collection of seven natural history illustrations from a future where plants are being genetically engineered to grow objects.

These illustrations form a conscious reference to the scientific tradition of botanical drawings by artists like Ernst Haeckel, who, before the backdrop of industrialization and before the dawn of Darwin, were cataloging the natural world as if it consisted of intricate living machines.

Contrary to this belief, the future use of biology for the production as living machines may fundamentally alter our idea of industrialization, introducing diversity and softness into a realm that is now dominated by standardization.

Once assembled, parts from the seven plants form a herbicide sprayer. It is an essential commodity used to protect these delicate, engineered horticultural machines from the older, more established nature.






















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A History of Speculation

June 24, 2014, 11:12 am
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2012
Computer simulations, C-Type prints 1200mm x 800mm
In collaboration with Chris Woebken

Experiments are conducted inside a featureless virtual laboratory, a space that is as controlled as it is surreal. Simulations that range from events of the recent past to such that are predicted to happen at the end of the Universe, a time when the existence of a subjective observer will have long be impossible.

Shaped by our abstraction of nature and the synthetic randomness of the computer, the visual result of each run is unique. Employing mathematical modeling as a medium, A History of Speculation generates images which in their unworldliness beg to stake their own claim to reality.

Dollar bills scatter in the flow of simulated wind after being ejected from a black Volvo vehicle by an invisible bank robber in a reductionist re-enactment of a police chase through Los Angeles in September 2012. Scenes are chosen in regard to their relevance to our practices of predicting the future, our histories of speculation. In the case of the black Volvo it is the efforts to map the future course of the perpetrators throughout the city in ways that strikingly resemble the work of early theoretical physicists.

The inherent process asks questions about where our world sits on a gradient between determinism and randomness. Is it that we can not know the future because we are oversimplifying reality in our models or is the world indeed constantly emerging, ultimately giving rise to human agency itself, as Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine points out?













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Export to World

June 24, 2014, 11:12 am
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Export to World aims to ‘steal’ items from walled economies of simulated scarcity, seeking to ironically comment on the design and production of commodities in virtual universes.

We export objects into the real world by transforming them into life-size papercraft models leading to paper representations of digital representations of real objects, bearing all the flaws that copying entails.

The true collision of worlds, however, occurs in photos. The exported items have a bizarre, almost manipulated appearance. We tend to attribute this to the loop they have passed through – from real object to virtual representation back to real object.

In collaboration with Linda Kostowski












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Buttons

June 24, 2014, 11:12 am
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Between Blinks & Buttons is a twofold thesis project about the camera as a networked object. Through making their photos public on the Internet, individuals create traces of themselves. In addition to their value as a memory, each image contains a multitude of information about the context of its creation.

Through this meta-information, every image is linked to the precise moment in time when it was taken, making it possible to see what happened simultaneously in the world at that instant. This work tries to focus the user's imagination on that other, to create narratives that run between one's own memory and a stranger's moment which happened to coincide in time.










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Situated Sampling Set

January 26, 2015, 7:26 am
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2015
Location-specific computer simulations, unique inkjet prints (400mm x 400mm)
In collaboration with Chris Woebken

Situated Sampling Set is a highly site-specific series of works which show the results of unique computer simulations. Within the depicted scene, an assembly of objects at first appears random, yet each item relates to a practice of measuring, surveying, documenting.

Ranging from mineralogical reference cubes to calibration targets used in NASA’s space photography they are forensic markers, non-objects which provide the meta-data for a future use of the image.

In Situated Sampling Set, a set of those objects are dropped inside a virtual environment that precisely simulates them in accordance to the physical location, scale, orientation, gravity and lighting conditions of the chosen place.

Alluding to practices of divination, this process results in images whose indexicality, when printed and positioned in the simulated location, reaches beyond a conventional visual representation, transposing information its own situatedness in the world, through the objects, into any photo of itself.













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Island Physics

January 27, 2015, 11:09 am
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2014
Curatorial project in collaboration with Andreas N. Fischer and Chris Woebken at Eyebeam, New York City

At the heart of the history of the computer there has always been the dream that one day it would be able to mathematically simulate the physical world well enough to generate graphics which to our eyes would be indistinguishable from the real world.

As technological capabilities have been edging towards this absolute realism, there are visual artists working at the fringe of what is currently possible, creating short films for lively community on social media platforms, often accompanied by tutorials on how the simulations were achieved.

While these works originate from a place in between the conventional artistic and academic worlds and could be regarded as mere technical demos they often have a unique aesthetic – a sublime that emerges from the hyper-accurate rendering of scenes that are in fact surreal and dreamlike.

After developing an interest in this community while working with computer simulation and modelling in their own respective artistic practices, Andreas N. Fischer, Sascha Pohflepp and Chris Woebken conceived the exhibition presented here. The five selected artists were provided with video footage taken at Building 15 which constituted the basis of the elaborate simulations they each have created.

Island Physics is therefore an exploration of the aesthetics of computer simulation as well as a survey of a community. Most of all, it is the attempt to turn a former living room into a testing-ground for alternate realities and impossible happenings.

Participating Artists:
Kai Kostack: https://www.youtube.com/user/KaiKostack
Mohamad (Moby Motion) Zeina: https://www.youtube.com/user/moby1toby
Andreas Nicholas (ANF6000) Fischer: http://anf.nu
Gottfried (BlenderDiplom) Hofmann: https://www.youtube.com/user/BlenderDiplom
Tayfun (blazraidr) Ozdemir: https://www.youtube.com/user/blazraidr
















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Leibniz Cocktail Conjecture

January 17, 2016, 8:30 am
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2016
Computer simulations, inkjet prints (600mm x 800mm)
In collaboration with Chris Woebken

Limited edition available on Absolut Art, curated by Nadim Samman


Leibniz Cocktail Conjecture forms part of a larger piece called The House in the Sky, which revolves around a virtual reconstruction of a West Hollywood modernist home where a group of thinkers associated with the RAND Corporation would meet in the mid-1950s.

A book of one million random digits, crucial at the time for computing nuclear weapons, was conceived in the living room and many foundations of contemporary practices of computational knowledge and action were presumably laid.

For the simulation of a scene set in this room we employ those very digits, performing the prescribed rituals of picking values and setting with them the variables that govern the simulated laws of nature such as gravity or friction. Encoded in the way things tumble, each simulation also yields a random number in itself.

The results presented thus are windows into three unique worlds, aftermaths of cocktail parties in random universes that are looping back on themselves.













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The Greatest Show is Leaving

July 9, 2016, 8:10 am
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Taken July 2011 at Cape Canaveral, FL during the launch of Atlantis, the 135th and final mission of the American Space Shuttle program.

Available as limited edition prints.










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Yesterdays Today

July 9, 2016, 8:10 am
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2012
Room, weather forecast, air conditioning unit, experimenter
In collaboration with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Yesterday’s Today is the first instance of a series of works titled 'The Supertask' and focuses on one of the most common examples of modelling: the weather forecast. The product of a highly sophisticated, yet reductionist computational model of the climate, the forecast results in a representation of a slice of reality: a number on the scale of degrees Celsius.

To explore the deviation between model and reality we created an installation that would serve both as experiment in the scientific sense and experiential space in the artistic sense. It simulates the temperature for that moment and location, predicted on the previous day.

The visitor can thus experience the computational model and can compare any deviation from the reality surrounding it. This artificially-created alternate present—or rather any fluctuation between it and the actual outside environment—embodies the space between the model and reality.







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The Tsiolkovsky Trick

July 9, 2016, 8:10 am
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2011/2013
Computer model, HD video (4:47 min), 3D print (3000mm x 30mm)


The Tsiolkovsky Trick assembles every freely available model of space rockets found on the Internet into one, chronologically ordered chain of our efforts to transcend gravity. Inspired by a conversation with one of the engineers of NASA's Voyager mission, the title relates to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation that first suggested a staged rocket as a trick to overcome one of the most basic constraints of life on Earth, conceived in the context of Russian Cosmism and its imperative of the ‘common task’. Constituting a historical meta-vehicle of sorts, the work aims to ask whether we are still involved in an effort to overcome those constraints and suggests the rocket as a key artifact while deliberately leaving open the question for contemporary ideological drivers.













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Seasons of the Void

July 9, 2016, 8:10 am
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2013
C-Type prints (1000mm x 1000mm), diagram (620mm x 620mm), model (150mm)
In collaboration with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Andrew Stellitano

If humans went on a long-term mission to Mars, would they be taking along all the provisions needed or cultivate the food needed to sustain themselves along the way? Seasons of the Void reacts to proposals by NASA and others to use synthetic biology as a means of producing food in space by designing organisms that are able to perform electrosynthesis rather than photosynthesis.

Electricity flows through a dark tank that is connected to the solar panels of the spaceship. Inside, two symbiotic cultures of modified yeast are feeding on it, forming spherical fruit-like shapes in microgravity – a radical departure from how most life on Earth converts energy. 

Cut open, a harvested fruit reveals a structure that resembles the growth rings of a tree. It represents a record of the 377 days of the journey and the diminishing power of the Sun. The magnetic field within the tank, distorted by spikes in the solar weather, a brief moment in the shadow of Venus that momentarily halted the growth and small streaks in the fruit, left by cosmic rays. 

Growing food on a trip to Mars, astronauts would become farmers of the void as much as its explorers – their ship constituting a celestial body in its own right as the artificial ecosystem it harbors performs an orbit around the Sun.









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The House in the Sky

July 24, 2016, 1:57 pm
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2015
Multi-channel stereoscopic 4K projection (dimensions variable)
In collaboration with Chris Woebken


The House in the Sky is a video installation of anaglyph stereoscopic projections that re-create the mid-century modern Los Angeles home of RAND Corporation strategists Alfred and Roberta Wohlstetter, which was the site of one of the earliest think tanks. An “atomic Villa Diodati,” as Geoff Manaugh noted, the house was where possible futures were discussed along with the end of the world. Occurring in the 1950s during the Cold War, these conversations dwelled on a future that seemed especially precarious.

Modeled on photographs of the residence taken by Julius Shulman and Leonard McCombe, the videos re-stage these interdisciplinary meetings. In the process, these videos become a virtual territory in which performances, readings, and a real-time simulation titled Leibniz Cocktail Conjecture aim to investigate relationships between architecture and critical inquiry, technological acceleration, and our place within history – both in regard to the past as well as our speculative future.

Conversation participants: Laura Ballantyne-Brodie (NYU), Lars Büsing (Google DeepMind), Claire Evans (YACHT), Jacob Gaboury (Stony Brook University/Max Planck Institute), Sam Hart (Avant.org/Sloan-Kettering), Janna Levin (Columbia University), Kate Marvel (NASA Goddard Institute), Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn College), Oliver Medvedik (Genspace), Gavin Schmidt (NASA Goddard Institute), Kevin Slavin (MIT Media Lab) and Roberta Wohlstetter read by Joan Wohlstetter-Hall as well as contributors Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG) and Phillip Stearns.

























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PowerPoints of the Far Future

July 24, 2016, 2:22 pm
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2016
Commissioned by The Photographers Gallery and Goethe Institut London
Software development by Sam Klitsner


PowerPoints of the Far Future turns the events from Wikipedia's Timeline of the Far Future — a list of ridiculously far-off cosmological events — into calls-to-action.

Algorithmically generated slides present imagery while statements about various fates are constructed as either futures, the present or modal statements.

Presenting a series of increasingly distant events, visions of extinction become farcical futures.

(Photo by Rachel Munoz)



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Recursion

August 8, 2016, 5:24 am
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2016
Custom trained recurrent neural network, HD video (2:00)
Performed by Erika Ostrander


The text being read in Recursion was created by a custom artificial intelligence system, more specifically a long short term memory recurrent neural network, which had been given a range of texts about humanity to learn and was then asked to 'hallucinate' a text that would start with the word "human".

In the video, a human individual reads those inferences, creating a functional feedback loop between the universal machines we are creating and the way they might be looking back at us.



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The Age of Something New

January 12, 2017, 4:42 am
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Pattern Agnosia

January 12, 2017, 4:54 am
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window.location = "http://www.pohflepp.net/Pattern-Agnosia";
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