In market-driven cycles of planned obsolescence, technological communication products are regularly replaced by better, faster and smarter successors. TVs, satellite dishes, PCs, smartphones and antennas are produced and consumed before ending up in landfill mountains of abandoned tech waste. Marco Barotti disrupts this cycle by giving former satellite dishes and recycled Wi-Fi sector antennas a novel tech life. His kinetic sculptures create „technical ecosystems“ that resemble the behaviour and aesthetics of real animals and plants. He creates post-apocalyptic landscapes in which the animal world exists as an elec- tronic replica, as described by Philip K. Dick in his 1969 book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Rituals of Wasted Technology is Marco Barotti‘s first solo exhibition in Berlin. In the domed hall of silent green, he presents an expansive sound installation consisting of APES & SWANS. Both species symbiotically relate to each other: APES are sound sculptures made of recycled Wi-Fi sector antennas. They are driven by algorithms showing dynamic counters of data consumption and cyberattacks: from Facebook likes, Google searches, tinder swipes, internet energy consumed and emails sent, to the adverse cyber events happening in real-time.
In cooperation with scientists from the Cluster of Excellence CASA - Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Adversaries and the HGI Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at Ruhr University Bochum, these algorithms were encoded and give the tower-mounted APES the ability to generate specific behavioral patterns („quasi-rituals“). Barotti‘s SWANs, on the other hand, made of used satellite dishes, „float“ on an artificial pond in the domed hall. Two sound sources - a bass frequency and human breath - streaming through brass instruments give them their voice and set them in motion.
On January 14, Rituals of Wasted Technology will feature talks by aLifveForms (cared for by JP Raether), Asia J. Biega, and Dorothea von Hantelmann, followed by a roundtable discussion with artist Marco Barotti and curators Pauline Doutreluingne and Keumhwa Kim. They will ask how technologies affect rituals of our everyday life and how they influence artistic exhibition
practices.
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Rituals of Wasted Technology by Marco Barotti will take place as part of the exhibition series Speaking to Ancestors curated by Pauline Doutreluingne and Keumhwa Kim. The two-year program series forms a narrative of seven successive artistic positions, whose works deal with the search for genealogies and ritual (image) practices that can be found between faded myths and traditional imagination, creating a new performative space
for action.
The program cooperates with different places in Berlin that function as „memory spaces“; places of worship, places of healing, or places of devotion. In the site of the exhibition site, the artists are invited to redevelop their works site-specifically.
For more info HERE
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Image: Marco Barotti, APES, 2022, Loop Space Seoul. Photos: Marco Barotti.
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