Rituals of Wasted Technology

An exhibition as part of the series Speaking to Ancestors

Artist: Marco Barotti
Curators: Pauline Doutreluingne, Keumhwa Kim

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 electronic 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 silent green's Kuppelhalle, 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 Kuppelhalle. Two sound sources - a bass frequency and human breath - streaming through brass instru- ments give them their voice and set them in motion.


Lectures & Roundtable
Speakers: aLifveForms (cared for by JP Raether), Dr. Asia J. Biega, Prof. Dr. Dorothea von. Hantelmann
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.
 

Marco Barotti is a media artist living in Berlin. In his installations, audio technology and e-waste form kinetic sculptures triggered by data inputs, which are analyzed and translated into sound. His works creates a „tech ecosystem“ that plays with technology’s similarities to animals and plants. In minimalist bodies, data transcends the boundaries of visibility and manifests itself in alien yet somehow familiar kinetic beings.
After studying music at the Siena Jazz Academy, he connects sound with visual art. Barotti has received various grants (including BIFOLD Artist in Residence at TU Berlin, BBK, Stiftung Kunstfonds, Emap/ Emare, SACD and the Music Board Ber- lin). He has been awarded the NTU Global Digital Art Prize, the Tesla Award and the Delux Colour Award. His work has been exhibited internationally including at Ars Electronica (Linz), Saatchi Gallery (London), Futurium (Berlin), Polytech Festival (Moscow), Fact (Liverpool), Wro Art Center (Wroclaw), Picnic (Seoul), Isea (Montreal), Dutch Design Week (Eindhoven), NTU (Singapore), Würth Museum (La Rioja) Emaf (Osnabrück), Lisboa Soa (Lisbon), La Boral, (Gijón) Nuit Blanche (Brussels), Platoon (Mexico City), Urban Lights Ruhr (Hamm), List í Ljósi (Iceland) and New Holland (St. Petersburg). www.marcobarotti.com
 

Speaking to Ancestors
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 succes- sive artistic positions, whose works deal with the search for genealogies and ritual (image) practices that can be found bet- ween faded myths and traditional imagi- nation, creating a new performative space for action. The program cooperates with different places in Berlin that function as „memory spaces“; as places of worship, places of healing or places of devotion. In the his- tory of the exhibition site, the artists are invited to redevelop their works site-specifically. www.speakingtoancestors.de

The exhibition series Speaking to Ancestors is kindly supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.


January 12–15 I 12 pm –7 pm
Kuppelhalle
Opening: January 11, 6
pm
Lectures/Roundtable: January 14, 4 pm (in English)
Free admission