Salon Digital – Verena Friedrich
Salon Digital - Verena Friedrich
Lecture series / 16.01.2024
Within the Salon Digital Verena Friedrich introduces herself and her work.
Verena Friedrich - SORTING THINGS OUT
To sort something out
1. Fig. to study a problem and figure it out; to find an answer or solution for (something)
2. Lit. to sort something; to separat and arrange something according to certain properties, class, or category.
Verena Friedrich is an artist and assistant professor at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM). Her time-based installations blend organic, electronic, and sculptural media, and explore the possibilities and limits of technological intervention and control.
At Salon Digital, she will talk about her research and process of developing and designing artifacts, adressing earlier works (2008–2020) and more recent projects (2020¬–) that take the task of „sorting things out“ either literally or figuratively.
Since 2020, she has been working on her current project – ERBSENZÄHLER – a system consisting of several stations in which a large quantity of pea seeds are analyzed and sorted. The project explores the increasing quantification of life through mathematical-technical procedures and systems – from counting and sorting to statistics, to computer-aided processes – and the worldview that goes along with it.
Verena’s works have been featured in exhibitions, media art festivals, and conferences around the world. She has received several awards and grants for her projects, including an EMARE grant, a work stipend from Kunstfonds Foundation, and the International Media Award for Science and Art from ZKM Karlsruhe.
16.01.2024, 6 pm
Auditorium, Am Speicher XI 8, 28217 Bremen
---
The program for Digital Media at the University of the Arts Bremen launched a regular series of salon-style gatherings titled “Spectacle: Reenactments in the Arts, Design, Science and Technology.” The events have an open format and provide a forum for experiments, presentations and performances from a range of different fields, but with a common focus on old and new media, as well as technologies. The salon thereby enables a practice of reenactment as a way to make things past and hidden visible, present and also questionable.
Contemporary new technologies and media seem to cover knowledge with complex layers of materials, code/sign systems and history/organization. Reenacting can translate obscured knowledge, ideas and theories into bodies and actions. At the heart of this conceptual approach is a desire to turn past events into present experiences—although the very nature of the past prohibits such an endeavor.
The salon pursues the primary goal of opening closed systems and constructions (black boxes). Global power structures, as well as complex processes in development and production—leading to hermetic constructs—have made it even harder to understand science, economy and contemporary media, as well as new technologies. Recipients therefore tend to mostly grasp only their superficial level. The spectacle is a way to condense actions and processes. Reenactment, on the other hand, builds on repetition and history. But the spectacle is a moment in the here and now where everything flows together and culminates.
Organized by: Andrea Sick, Ralf Baecker und Dennis Paul
www.salon-digital.com
