Esemplasticism: The Truth is a Compromise

blink v2, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

Blink is part of an exhibition curated by Hicham Khalidi, produced by Den Haag art space TAG, made for Club Transmediale that opens in Berlin today.

From the exhibition decription:
Our brains are esemplastic. They are perfectly evolved for pattern recognition, designed to shape disconnected elements, like the incomplete or ambiguous information we get from our senses, into the seamless whole of our experience. What we see, hear, touch and feel is folded into an amalgam of data, emotions and cultural baggage. And in the contemporary world, this esemplastic power is pushed to the limit in the sea of information that we are floating in: data-visualizations, scientific studies and computer analyses become increasingly abstract and disconnected from our normal experiences. Are we losing our sense of meaning as we fail to join the billions of dots? What compromises are we making when we try to settle on a particular interpretation?

The works in Esemplasticism – the truth is a compromise are mostly low-tech, using everyday objects and media. Employing sound, objects and synchronicity; relatively ‘old’ technologies like field recordings, music, video, and projection, each piece lifts the curtain on the perceptual tactics that our esemplastic/apophonic/pattern recognising brains employ to negotiate the world; with wit and irony, they have much to say about verisimilitude as each exposes a different fracture between our expectations, our perceptions and our compromises about the objective ‘truth’ that exists ‘out there’.

Participating artists
Artists: Edwin Deen, Daniël Dennis de Wit, Lucinda Dayhew, Anke Eckardt, HC Gilje, Terrence Haggerty, Yolande Harris, Alexis O’hara, Pascal Petzinger, Mike Rijnierse, Willem Marijs, Bram Vreven, Katarina Zdjelar, Valentin Heun, Sagarika Sundaram, Gijs Burgmeijer.

I will post links to the catalogue when that becomes available.

The exhibition will be on until the end of February.

For me this was an opportunity to improve the installation both esthetically and technically. I constructed a platform for the equipment using a laser cutter, which turned out quite nice. This greatly simplified the installation of the work. As mentioned in previous posts, the installation uses my dimsun lighting system, and the design for this will be made available shortly.

Due to other obligations I needed to set up my installation before everyone else. It was a strange experience to work alone in the 900m2 empty building in Spandauer Strasse, close to Alexanderplatz. My only companion was the stepladder which also became the model for my documentation.