Critters

"It is interesting to see how works emerging from the sphere of the mathematical can take on the face of the natural! How fascinating, after all, when coincidence takes over and digitally programmed processes are suddenly determined by paradigms of disturbance, deviation and error. However, apart from the data centers and server batteries that clock our everyday lives, Simone Carneiro makes such phenomena visually manifest. Her operating field is located at the periphery of large data transfer points.

 

The foundation for her latest work comes from the endogenous zones of the digital laboratory. Here algorithmically based movements assume an experimental and investigative character. In doing so, the artist focuses on disruptions at the interface between computational processes and physically tangible materiality. As part of calibrating a home-printing test run for the production of small-format 3D prints, she discovered, by chance, the fantastic beauty of inadequately shaped print results.

 

The myth of unrestrained serial production via 3D print, the narrative of continual repetition of the same, was soon undermined by the materialization of singular objects of significant individuality. Far from their originally intended appearance, structures emerged that resemble isolated fossils or marine creatures, reminiscent of alluvial material from the technological world.

 

Fascinated by the shimmering fragile artifacts, the artist began to probe her prints and examine their visual qualities. Since then, they have undergone several imaging processes: from their generation on the computer using abstract algorithms, to recording them using a smartphone, to their transfer to the medium of lithography.

 

In fact, they are schematic images of found objects, at the same time chimeras of the hyperreal. The dimension of the post-medial in contemporary art could hardly be described more clearly: a thoroughly digital production method is reflected in an old, downright classical method of depiction.

 

Simone Carneiro deepens a discourse she started as early as the late 1990s where, in the context of techno visuals, she integrated technical disruptions due to hardware imperfections. At the time, the glitch movement consciously used the technical faulty circuit as an aesthetic design element. Glitch Art transformed audio file stutter and cut screen information into minimalistic geometries. She continues using this approach and digital concepts on the level of 3D prints.

 

Down the sign system vortext, however, the concept of error begins to lose its contours. At the very latest since Fluxus media machines are recoded. Already early information age devices such as the radio or the telephone were valued for their function but even more so for the free operation of interests they represented. Even the non-functional is a dimension of production.

 

Simone Carneiro always maintains a noticeably critical distance to the respective technology and its myths of progress. Still her works maintain a dash of irony. In fact, her current work tries to reinterpret the medium of lithography by blurring different visual layers from different ages. Still, she names her motives - far less serious – after the cuddly monsters from a decades-old B-movie series for teenagers".

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Text by Roland Schöny