Luleå biennial 2018
17 november 2018 – 17 february 2019
Digital Landscapes.
We communicate globally – a restrurant rating in Bangkok, a pair of designer shoes in Stockholm or an appartment on sale in Umeå are just a mouse click away. With four billion users in 2018, the Internet alters the way we percive place, landscape and distance. Our reality is merging with the virtual world in various ways, from immediately available realities, we constantly experience new combinations of the analog reality with digital information, harder to distinguish with every new generation of tech.
These virtual, almost infinite landscapes create a state of translocality, everything is just a fingertip away, yet remains a representation of reality in binary code, brought to us by the biggest machine mankind has ever created – the Internet.
The factories of this age are the datacenters, connection people and machines from around the globe, information the resource to be harvested and processed. Norrbotten is one of the industrial hubs of this intangible global complex, where the internet and the digital economy manifest in the physical world. Boden hosts bitcoin mines and Luleå one of the largest datacenters on the planet, both cities became a home för thriving startup scenes, while rural settlements in Norrbotten see new economic perspecitives at to cater for inhabitants employed in virtual offices, providing work that is possible to do from any given place with an internet connection. Regional authorites continue to attract data centers to Norrbotten, in the hope of strenghtening the cluster of digital industry that creates not only jobs in datacenters, but also attracts specialists and talents to the local digital sector.
More information can be found in the Folder.
About the artists
Erik Holmstedt.
The work of Erik Holmstedt is devoted to the (post)-industrial process and its manifestation in the landscape of Norrbotten. His approach a reflection of our time, an investigation of our increasingly man-made surroundings with decaying and newly developing structures.
EEEFFF
EEEFFF is a collaborative initiative of two people, Nicolay Spesivtsev (artist, computer scientist, researcher) and Dzina Zhuk (writer, artist, researcher), based in Moscow and Minsk. The group EEEFFF works with the emotional effects of the new economic regimes driven by computations. The group is in a permanent dialogue with science-fiction focusing on our present technological enviroment and near future imagniary scenarios. EEEFFF combines artistic practices with computer science, science fiction, software and hardware hacks.
Igor Samolet
Igor Samolet is a Russian artist, born 1984 in Kotlas, who graduated from Rodchenko Art School (Moscow) in 2013. In his works Samolet turns to the nature of human relationships refracting and wiecing them through social, political and digital filters. All his projects include complex dramaturgy: from comedy, reminicent of the sitcom, to the true dramatic personaliy, which is often marginal or considered as such in Russia due to the new social norms that have evolved after the short period of freedom of speech and self-expression in the post-soviet society. Samolet interperts the image of postmodern personality through emotional instability, showing comprehensive vulnerability in global information processes within the giant digital world space.
Susanne M. Winterling
Susanne M. Wingerling’s artistic practice is a negotiation between rerpresentation and reality. In her mainly time-based works, she plays with our expectations and preconceptions about what is organic and what is chemical, what is nature and what is culture. Over several years Winterling has studied dinoflagellates, a species of microscopic organism which are found in both lakes and in seas, some glowing all seasons particularly in tropical areas. When stimulated – for example by movement made by boats or swimmers skin – the dinoflagellates create a blue lominescence which is visible at night. Winterling is interested in this reflective effect of human touch, in relation to the surface of the sea as well as the digital screen, both movements of the hand generating reactions and light.
