- Venue
- Ambika P3
- Location
- London
Kinetica Art Fair took place in London at the turn of the month, and one particular work that caught the attention of visitors was that of Jonty Hurwitz’s Generation Pi. Exhibited in public for the first time at the premier techno-art convention, the sculptures had been responsible for an online superstorm when they first surfaced online at This Is Colossal in January; attracting tens of millions of views overnight.
The collection of works use new-age algorithm’s to make anamorphic reality out of abstract ideas. They explore the contexts of image and object with both playfulness and dramatic visual effect. What is of course most crucial to these works is how the focal point and source of amazement exists in a reflective image that occupies absolutely no spatial reality. It is something that we as humans cannot access and (quite literally) cannot put our finger on.
This acts as an engaging launch-pad for Hurwitz’s ongoing vocal exploration of objective and abstractive reality in today’s world. It is one that basks in the wonder of technology and meta-data, something that has so rapidly become an integral pillar to human civilisation. Speaking at the fair, he states that ‘in the modern lives that we live, we’re leaving this gigantic resource of meta information out on the broader cloud, that represents in quite a way fundamental way who we are. The reality is that we do exist beyond ourselves, and we are the first generation that lives outside of our bodies.’
The meta-ego concept that Hurwitz introduces applies the Freudian model to the Twitter generation. It suggests that the modern individual is continuously imprinted into things like internet search history, messaging logs, card transactions, facebook statuses, geo-tags, music playlists and personalised advertising. It is about an infinite and fragmentary myriad of data that progressively forms an abstract portrait of yourself amid cyberspace, much like the image we see reflected in these sculptures. ‘Servers on the other side of the world can hold a piece of your intentions; that data is real and it exists as part of you.’
In his endeavours Hurwitz is aiming to open up a vital discourse on the developments of technology and its influence over the many fundamental questions of reality, that themselves go back for centuries. What he presents aims to re-energise and re-address many of these archaic philosophical conversations by vastly expanding horizons and re-defining the boundaries of human perception.
By asking so many questions of a technological terrain that is still expanding at exponential rates, Hurwitz’s greatest challenge lies in ever being able to answer them all.
