Ape-x

GALERIA NT

exhibition title: Ape-x

artist: André Sier

curator: Michał Brzeziński

vernissage date: 18/06/2010

the exhibition will be open from 18/06/2010 to 30/07/2010

http://postvideoart.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/ape-x-andre-sier-galeria-nt-en/

Biographic entry
Andre Sier works as an intermedia artist and a programmer. He is educated in philosophy, painting and sculpture. He creates objects, which need application of audiovisual programming languages. While creating them, he cooperates with visual artists, performers and musicians. He has been teaching audiovisual programming and organizing workshops since 2002.

Description of the exhibition
Contemporary art opens to a subject as a creator. Contemporary artist, being familiar with the art of internet and software, does not offer ready products, but delivers easy-to-use creative platforms, which live independently afterwards. Consequently, we can say, that we have moved to 2.0 culture whose manifestation is also Gallery NT. Artists such as Ben Fry (creator of the processing - platform used also by Andre Sier) create artworks presenting infinite opportunities of transforming into unlimited number of subsequent artworks. These are not only the tools, although artists treat them as such. These works constitute one organism, enabling proliferation of subsequent, interrelated artworks - collective, but expressing the ideas or expression of certain people. Contemporary art tries to establish interpersonal and social bonds, but respects freedom and expression of individual, since the individual is a condition of its existence.
Such situation is visible in the works of Andre Sier, which become a rhizome of such dialogue, at the same time visualizing data brought from our presence in the gallery. It is not us, who decide about the final shape of the artwork, but our body, which speaks for ourselves. Entering a gallery, we do not intend to interfere with the artwork, since we have no readiness for the artwork in our consciousness. Next, observing its reaction to our behaviour, we pay attention to the way we function in that particular space and we learn its (artwork’s) language. The artwork is our partner, subject which has its own logics, coupled to our body and, thus, to our mind. In his other works, Sier creates worlds closed in the glass ball of computer monitor. He produces simple subjects, which he puts to evolution and sets up laws, which will rule these worlds:

„Now I’m a network of cells 2,5. My state depends on 1,4, 2,4, 3,4, 1,5, 3,5, 1,5, 2,5, 3,5 and we will be adding these values to check the current map of rules and to check if I’m dead or alive. I’m alive. Now, I’m a network of cells 3,3. My state depends on 2,2, 3,2, 4,2, 2,3, 4,3, 2,4, 3,4, 4,4 and we will be adding these values to check the current map of rules and to check if I’m dead or alive. I’m dead. Now I’m a network of cells 7,3. My state depends on 6,2, 7,2, 8,2, 6,3, 8,3, 7,4, 8,4, 9,4 and we will be adding these values to check the current map of rules and to check if I’m dead or alive. I’m alive.” (Andre Sier)

The work of Andre Sier refers to the cubism aesthetically and visually, but, being interactive, it does not evoke either broken mirror reflecting our face, or typical cubist painting, which usually presents the picture spread on geometric solid figures. It is the art of multitude of parallel information, which are procured by different, not necessary visual channels and subsequently visualized by the computer. Computer is an instance creating a picture, based on rules established by the artist. Gained information splits on the figures of algorithms. His works also struggle with the understanding of physical and evolutionary mechanisms or the chaos theory and use simulation for that. These are not ready artworks, but processes or sometimes records of particular spaciotemporal relations. Processualism and peformativity of his works, as well as the temporality of final effects is the fugitive artifact for the work of art. Graphics produced by the speakers splashing ink, which makes random patterns on paper, is only a conscious, fetishistic record of what happened in gallery on a particular day, since the sources of sound are the movement and the sound detected by the system. However, it has nothing to do with the artist’s expression or the search for chance in the painting, it is not an action painting either. The essence of his art is algorithm - structure, which lays at the basis of picture produced by the machine, it is a programming language game, emerging at the meeting point of human and machine languages. It is possible to find it if we look at his works with tenderness which characterizes the way human being looks at the other human being in action.

Michał Brzeziński