One month after its debut, HOLON celebrates the launch of LOOM by ATELIER-E on the occasion of Vorspiel 2023 CTM/Transmediale. The Berlin-based creative studio for experimental and electronic media ATELIER-E was founded by artists and creative technologists Christian Losert and Daniel Dalfovo. Both work and teach at the intersection of art, technology, and science. In their artistic practice, they create multimedia spaces, and audio-visual narratives and collaborate with international artists and research institutions. Originally commissioned for TextilWerk Bocholt, LOOM is an expansive light and sound installation in which phosphorescent threads store information as light and transform a loom into a never-ending weaving machine of algorithmic patterns and sounds.
From Jan 21 until Feb 3, 2023, LOOM is presented by HOLON, an interdisciplinary format for research and play initiated by Berlin-based experience design company MONOMANGO. Through solo shows and collaborative exhibitions, HOLON brings together artists from different fields, shedding light on new technologies and their environmental and social impact. “ATELIER-E have been on our radar for a while. We admired their work as engineers and multidisciplinary artists and were aware of their artwork LOOM. We invited ATELIER-E to participate in Vorspiel 2023 CTM/Transmediale with the piece, as we thought it would be a perfect match for our exhibition space, including our programmable light installation and 8- channel sound system. It also meets our concept of a hybrid analog/digital work that offers a socio-historical touchpoint”, they reflect.
LOOM pays homage to the punch card system invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801. His revolutionary invention stored and replaced human craftsmanship and labor into a machine-readable data format and is known as one of the first signs of data-driven aesthetics and authorship. “Our work LOOM draws great inspiration from the mechanical beauty and inventiveness of the textile industry. Translating motifs and images into rows and columns, storing this information in binary punch cards, and having machines mass-reproduce these patterns identically are the first signs of industrialized automation and data-driven aesthetics. It’s a historical path that ultimately led to what we now consider the first computer—the ‘Analytical Engine’— from Charles Babbage: a mechanical calculating apparatus that references many engineering details and functionalities found in Jacquard’s loom,” Atelier-E explain, before quoting the English mathematician and writer Ada Lovelace: “We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
The underlying principle of pattern generation, encoding, and decoding, forms a surprising bridge to our digital age. “The binary principle of the medium—reducing information to a series of two possible states—still has a disruptive power today and has become the essence of our accelerated world. The installation accompanies the current process of autonomous systems that leave predetermined solution spaces and reformulate our understanding of automation. Following this thought, we programmed a ruleset of experimental algorithms for the interplay of sound, light, and kinetic movements,” ATELIER-E tell Collide24.
As LOOM enters new contexts through time, our relationship to the industry and its machinery is continuously renegotiated. “Together with the audience, we watch these patterns unfold in the exhibition space, creating a notion of machinery anima. As an analogy, we can observe that the boundaries of creation and curation blur more and more with every new machine-learning architecture on the market,” ATELIER-E explain. “We hope our ephemeral installation of light, sound, and darkness evokes a resonating room filled with structured information and floating patterns. Like entering an engine room and encountering a sort of mechanical anima that perpetually draws on its canvas of glowing particles. Ideally, this environment emits a certain beauty to the visitors, which exists only at that moment, exclusively for them.”
After its opening on Saturday 21st, LOOM will be presented on Feb 2 and 3, 2023. Each exhibition date is split into two public viewing sessions. Please RSVP to reserve your time slot.
