2011
Installation (objects for projection; data-visualization)
Susanna Schoenberg
Supported by: Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KhM)
As far as we are not seeing the blind spots in our eyes, we tend to understand ourselves as clearly separated from our environment, and we have confidence in our view of it. The installation Blind Spots is about self-awareness and the knowing to be–constructed with data. In terms of the subject-object problem, the idea is to represent an environment becoming aware of its own being subject. As installation objects, the Blind Spots are allegories of the “bodiless eye of techno-seeing” (Martin Jay). Data detected by the sensors of the Weather Tunnel nodes are used as parameters for the playback of video-footage projected on spherical screens, the readability of the picture–brightness, temperature, frame-rate, persistency given by environmental data referring to selected urban locations. The structure of the images is the product of an algorithm representing “awareness” developing over time. All the monitored variables (CO2, CO, NO2, LUX, temperature, tVOC, dB) are used for a multidimensional data analysis, “operationalizing” the constructivist idea of cognition/recognition as “computation of reality” (Heinz von Foerster).
Artist bio:
Susanna Schoenberg (Italy, 1967) studied political sciences at the Universitá degli Studi di Milano and cinematrographic techniques at the Civica Scuola del Cinema di Milano). She then completed a PhD in sociology (Universitá degli Studi di Milano) and post-graduate studies in media arts at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Since 1990, she has been involved in artistic production mainly in the fields of video, photography, installation and performance. She has been producing and performing also under the label arte-e-parte and is a founder and member of the artists group re-active platform.Since 2004, she is an assistant professor at the KhM in charge of the Atelier for Multimedia and Performance. khm.de/export/re-active
