SPIROS HADJIDJANOS

Actual Possibility

29. Oct – 03. Dec 2011

01


For his show Actual possibility at KWADRAT Hadjidjanos presents a network-specific installation and works on carbon-fiber plates. His new installation Network Time consists of several Wi-Fi routers arranged in the gallery space providing free Internet access to visitors. The LED that reflects the data-traffic of each router is extended along a fiber optic cable magnifying its flicker. Although the devices look only physically modified, the artist has altered the operating system of each router, to manipulate the fluctuation of the fiber optics. The installation is a network architecture installed in a physical setting, framing information as situated, temporal and contextual, constructing a permeable interactive and extended space.

With Network Time, Hadjidjanos proposes the measurement of time in units of information or using a router as a clock. A minute is a gigabyte and a terabyte an hour. Time is measured based on the information received. It is a concept relevant to "radical network empiricism" as described by the new media theorist Adrian Mackenzie. In our contemporary Post-Network condition the amount of information we receive changes our perception of temporality. The emergence of the Internet stretched across time and space and revealed that clock time is not an absolute milieu against which we synchronize and quantify time, but rather a human construction that has very little to do with time other than serving as an inflexible way of measuring duration. In this case, the routers, as technological objects suggest a technical yet subjective and non-isochronic time measurement.

In addition to Network Time, Hadjidjanos presents Information Painting and Hybrid Landscape (Silicon Valley). The latter is an ultraviolet print on a carbon-fiber plate depicting the landscape of Silicon Valley. Part of the plate has been cut out with a laser, freeing space to be subsequently occupied by microchips that contain fragments of the landscape in digital form. In this work, the landscape of Silicon Valley?a term coined in 1971 by Don Hoefler referencing the region`s flourishing semiconductor industry?is combined with microchips. In the Information Painting IV the artist is interested in the spatial arrangement of digital information, locating it precisely within physical coordinates thus posing questions about the materiality of the digital image.

The title Actual Possibility is drawn from the writings of William James, specifically in his ideas of radical empiricism, what really exists are not things as such but transitions and relationships and any relationship experienced is as real as anything else in a system. Networks are precisely concerned those relationships, moreover the gaps between possibility and actuality.