Photographic Objects Thomas Ruff, Wade Guyton, Seth Price, Kelley Walker, Spiros Hadjidjanos
Text: Markus Kramer
Kehrer, Heidelberg, 144 pages, Deutsch/English, Dec 2012 ISBN 978-3-86828-378-5

Displacement Map I, 2012
40 x 27 x 5.2 cm
3D Print, Alumide

Displacement Map III, 2012
65 x 90.3 cm
UV Print on Carbon Fiber Plate, 18 Digital Images (72kB) on 18 Microchips

Displacement Map I, 2012
65 x 90.3 cm
UV Print on Carbon Fiber Plate, 18 Digital Images (72kB) on 18 Microchips

Displacement Maps (video still), 2012
Full HD Animation
3:03 min

Displacement Maps, Installation view
von cirne, Cologne

Displacement Map II, 2012
40 x 27 x 5.2 cm
3D Print, Alumide

Dataspace.ocp I, 2012
45 x 65 cm
Ultraviolet(UV) print on carbon fiber plate, 17 digital images (85kB) on 17 microchips

Group Show
Yes we’re open, curated by Petra Heck, Nimk, Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst, Amsterdam
On view 02 Jun – 30 Sept 2012
Opening 01 Jun 17-19:00hrs

Participating Artists: !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Dus Architects, Martijn Engelbregt, Spiros Hadjidjanos, Elín Hansdóttir, Wayne Horse, INTK, Hamid el Kanbouhi, Caleb Larsen, Moniker, Baden Pailthorpe

Group Show
dotcom
Centre d’Art Bastille, Grenoble
07 April – 10 June 2012
Opening 07 April 2012, 19hrs

Network Time at the Future Gallery, Berlin

Network Time at the Import Projects, Berlin

Network Time
Wireless router,custom router firmware,fiber optic light,electronics
Dimensions variable
2011

(german version below)

In 1998, in the wake of unchecked dotcom euphoria, the Swatch company joined forces with MIT’s Media Lab to research and promote a concept of chronometry that would “provoke the world into the third millenium.” The two defining features of this “ultimate time” were the decimal division of the mean solar day into 1000 @.beats rather than 24 hours and, even more importantly, the abolishment of time zones. According to Swatch, the advantages were obvious: “if a New York web-supporter makes a date for a chat with a cyber friend in Rome, they can simply agree to meet at an “@ time” – because internet time is the same all over the world.” While Swatch began to market a line of futuresque wristwatches capable of displaying @.beat time and even convinced prestigious websites like CNN.com to adopt the idea, internet time never managed to gain traction on a larger scale. One explanation is that the idea had been ahead of its time, too revolutionary to seem useful to web-pioneers, whose days were still constrained by the analog structure of day and night and not yet sufficiently affected by the internet’s insomniac imperative. A few point-0s later, however, as we begin to spend the majority of our waking hours online, it appears that the idea of introducing merely a new unit of time may simply not have gone far enough.

Underlying Swatch’s endeavor was the assumption that new means of visualizing time can not only reflect, but also change, our understanding of it. Network Time, a new installation proposed by Spiros Hadjidjanos, is driven by similar beliefs about how the instruments at our disposal change the way we think about what is being measured. Network Time consists of several wifi routers set up in an exhibition space to be freely accessed by any mobile internet device. Attached to each router is a slender fiber optic cable, aligned to absorb and magnify the incessant flicker of its traffic LED. The visualized data exchange creates a space viewers can interact with not only physically, but also informationally. Any email sent and every website checked on a smartphone logged in to the routers’ signals modifies the frequency in which the fiber optics light up, ranging from occasional, idle blinks to a frenetic flicker.

Of course, time has not always been thought of as something linear and unchanging, but could only be imagined that way after Enlightenment thinkers had gained access to accurate pendulum clocks that ran independently of perpetual maintenance or weather conditions. Seen as a kind of walk-in clock, Network Time could have a similar power to shape our experience and understanding of temporality. In contrast to our idea of time as progressing in unflinching lockstep, the network time proposed by Hadjidjanos is so susceptible to individual touch that a growing number of single alterations can eventually cancel out each other’s visible effects. The more data is exchanged, the faster the blinking gets, and the harder it becomes to differentiate between individual illuminations.
By suggesting that the fourth dimension is dramatically pliable, Hadjidjanos ventures to evoke a concept of time compatible with the internet’s paradoxical ability to at once empower and efface the individual. In Network Time, time seems to be on each and everyone’s side all at once.

Text: Gregor Quack

Network Time
Wireless router,custom router firmware,fiber optic light,electronics
Dimensions variable
2011

In 1998, beflügelt von noch nicht geplatzten Dotcom-Träumen, verbündete sich der Schweizerische Plastikuhrengigant Swatch mit dem Media Lab des MIT und entwickelte ein Zeitmessungssystem, dass “die Welt hinein ins dritte Millenium” provozieren sollte. Die beiden wichtigsten Merkmale der hiermit etablierten “Ultimativzeit” waren die Aufspaltung eines Tages in 1000 @.beats anstatt in Stunden oder Minuten, sowie die restlose Abschaffung unterschiedlicher Zeitzonen. Die Vorteile lagen für Swatch-Marketingstrategen auf der Hand: “Wenn sich ein New Yorker Web-Supporter mit einem Freund aus Rom für einen Chat verabreden will, dann können sich die beiden jetzt auf die gleiche “@ time” einigen – denn Internetzeit ist überall auf der Welt die selbe.” Obwohl einflussreiche Websites wie CNN.com zur Nutzung der neuen Zeit überredet werden konnten und sogar eine eigene Reihe von .beat-Armbanduhren weltweit auf den Markt kam, setzte sich das neue Konzept nie in größerem Umfang durch. Die Idee schien ihrer Zeit schlicht zu weit voraus um von einer Öffentlichkeit verstanden zu werden, die gerade erst begann, wackelige Schritte hinein ins Internetzeitalter und hin zu damit verbundenen Schlaflosigkeitsimperativ zu wagen. Heute jedoch, einige Punkt-Nulls später, hat sich die Lage offenbar um 180° gedreht. Vielleicht, so möchte man angesichts der massiven Umwälzungen in unseren Alltagsleben meinen, war Swatch im Gegenteil mit dem Konzept einer neuen Zeit nicht radikal genug.

Als treibend für die unternommenen Versuche erscheint in jedem Fall die Überzeugung, neue Visualisierungsmöglichkeiten könnten unseren Zeitbegriff nicht nur reflektieren, sondern ihn aktiv verändern. Auch Network Time, eine neuen Installation von Spiros Hadjidjanos, gründet in der Einsicht, dass die zur Verfügung stehenden Messgeräte unser Verständnis des Gemessenen fundamental beeinflussen können. Durch den Titel als eine Art begehbare Uhr identifiziert, besteht Network Time aus mehreren, im Ausstellungsraum frei zugänglich installierten WLAN-Routern. Angebracht an jedem dieser Router sind Fiberglaskabel, die das beständige Blinken des Traffic-LEDs aufnehmen und so vergrößern. Der visualisierte Datenverkehrs definiert einen Raum, mit dem Besucher nicht nur physisch, sondern auch informationell in Dialog treten können, denn jede von einem in die Router eingeloggten Smartphone gesandte Email, jede angesehene Website verändert die Flicker-Frequenz der LEDs und der den Raum durchspannenden Kabel.

Zeit ist nicht immer als stetiges, geradeliniges Vorwärtsschreiten verstanden worden, sondern erst seitdem die Wissenschaftler der Aufklärung Zugang zu exakten, unabhängig von Pflege und Wetterbedingungen funktionierenden Pendeluhren erlangt hatten. Akzeptiert man Network Time als Vorschlag für eine quer zu Ideen von Linearität und Unveränderlichkeit stehende Art der Zeitmessung, dann zeigt sich hier Potential, unsere Erfahrung und unser Verständnis von Zeit zu formen. Indem er die vierte Dimension als nicht hart und stetig, sondern geschmeidig und biegsam präsentiert, schlägt Hadjidjanos ein Zeitkonzept vor, dass unserer durch die radikalen Umwälzungen der digitalen Revolution veränderten Lebenswirklichkeit Rechnung tragen kann. Network Time teilt die Zeit nicht in sturen Gleichschritt vergehende Stundenpakete, sondern in flexibel beeinflussbare Datenmengen. Die von Hadjidjanos vorgeschlagene Netzwerkzeit vergeht bei hoher individueller Aktivität schneller als bei geringer und begibt sich so in logische Verwandschaft zu der paradoxen Fähigkeit des Internets, zugleich Hochaltar individueller Selbstdarstellung und größter Gleichmacher der Gegenwart zu sein.

Text: Gregor Quack

Network Time Installation
Wireless routers, fiber optic lights, electronics
Dimensions variable
2011

Hybrid Landscape II(silicon valley), 2011
32 x 44.5 cm
Ultraviolet(UV) print on carbon fiber plate, 10 digital images(38kB) on 10 microchips

Hybrid Landscape III(silicon valley), 2011
32 x 44.5cm
Ultraviolet(UV) print on carbon fiber plate, 10 digital images(70kB) on 10 microchips

The Hybrid Landscapes are ultraviolet prints on carbon fiber plates depicting the landscape of Silicon Valley. Part of the plate has been cut out with a laser, freeing space to be subsequently occupied by microchips that contain fragments of the landscape as digital photos. The landscape of Silicon Valley–a term coined in 1971 referencing the region’s flourishing semiconductor industry-is combined with microchips, a medium invented and produced in the region.

Hybrid Landscape II(silicon valley) Detail, 2011
32 x 44.5 cm
Ultraviolet(UV) print on carbon fiber plate, 10 digital images(70kB) on 10 microchips

With Network Time, Hadjidjanos proposes the measurement of time in units of information or using a router as a clock. A minute is a gigabyte and a terabyte an hour. Time is measured based on the information received. It is a concept relevant to “radical network empiricism” as described by the new media theorist Adrian Mackenzie. In our contemporary networked condition the amount of information we receive changes our perception of temporality. The emergence of the Internet stretched across time and space and revealed that clock time is not an absolute milieu against which we synchronize and quantify time, but rather a human construction that has very little to do with time other than serving as an inflexible way of measuring duration. In this case, the routers, as technological objects suggest a technical yet subjective and non-isochronic time measurement.

In addition to Network Time, Hadjidjanos presents Information Painting and Hybrid Landscape (Silicon Valley). The latter is an ultraviolet print on a carbon-fiber plate depicting the landscape of Silicon Valley. Part of the plate has been cut out with a laser, freeing space to be subsequently occupied by microchips that contain fragments of the landscape in digital form. In this work, the landscape of Silicon Valley–a term coined in 1971 by Don Hoefler referencing the region’s flourishing semiconductor industry–is combined with microchips. In the Information Painting the artist is interested in the spatial arrangement of digital information, locating it precisely within physical coordinates thus posing questions about the materiality of the digital image.

The title Actual Possibility is drawn from the writings of William James, specifically in his ideas of radical empiricism, what really exists are not things as such but transitions and relationships and any relationship experienced is as real as anything else in a system. Networks are precisely concerned with those relationships, moreover the gaps between possibility and actuality.

Catalog, Udk, Berlin. Text: Gregor Quack (dt/engl). Edition of 225. 20 pages

Group show: Non-Stop Infinity

Participating artists: Spiros Hadjidjanos, Lindsay Lawson, Niko Princen, Rafaël Rozendaal, Swyndle & Hawks, Lance Wakeling

Future Gallery, Berlin
Opening: Friday, September 23, 7 – 10 pm, Mansteinstraße 3, Berlin
On view: September 24 – October 1

peer to space, Munich
Opening: October 11, 7 pm, Sonnenstraße 22, Munich
On view: October  12 – 15 / 4 pm – 7 pm daily

Anne de Vries, Aleksandra Domanovic, Spiros Hadjidjanos, Keller/Kosmas (Aids-3d), Wojciech Kosma, Oliver Laric, Mike Ruiz, Timur Si-Qin

2. July – 6. August 2011
von cirne gallery
Lütticher Straße 8, 50674 Köln
von cirne

Group Show
February 18 – March 5, 2011
opening Friday February 18, 19:30, Invalidenstrasse 115, 10115, Berlin, Germany
jointly presented by Future Gallery and PROGRAM

Displacement (video still)
digital video
3:20 min
2010

View video

Group show
ERROR, AUTOCENTER ,Berlin (DE)
02 Dec 2010 – 05 Dec 2010
Opening 02 Dec 2010 20:00hrs
Eldenaer Strasse 34a 10247 Berlin (DE)

Participating Artists:
Caroline Kryzecki | Patrick Alt | Fabian Fobbe | Spiros Hadjidjanos | Clara Brörmann | Martina Friedrich