Anybody Who Is Disturbed by Flow of Information

The issue about creating a conjunction between any kinds of spheres is usually finding the right tools through or with which associations can be made. Depending on what these spheres are, different networking and communication systems come in handy to enable a flow of information. Presupposing that the idea of the network aligns with Bruno Latour’s conception of the network, who makes use of the word “not simply to designate things in the world that have the shape of a net, but mainly to designate a mode of inquiry that learns to list, at the occasion of a trial, the unexpected beings necessary for any entity to exist. A network, in this second meaning of the word, is more like what you record through a Geiger counter that clicks every time a new element, invisible before, has been made visible to the inquirer.”1

Picking on this mode of inquiry, although this has been practiced since time immemorial, it is still worth reflecting on natural and social sciences as spheres, as well as it is still worth venturing to posit artistic practice as a kind of network that enables the flow of energy and information between these spheres. Whereby, the intentionality is not necessarily primary, but rather the fortuitousness of these spheres that make the “Geiger counter” click – facilitated by art. And this is the point Latour makes when he says “a network is defined by the series of little jolts that allow the inquirer to register around any given substance the vast deployment of its attributes. Or, rather, what takes any substance that had seemed at first self-contained and transforms it into what it needs to subsist through a complex ecology of tributaries, allies, accomplices, and helpers”2

To this end, the exhibition project Anybody Who Is Disturbed by Flow of Information aims at exploring how art can actuate or serve as such little jolts that provoke the spheres of sciences to vastly deploy their attributes, especially the attributes that are not accessible to those without the specific field in question. Hereby, art can also serve as a wave that transforms information not only between the spheres of social and natural sciences but also to the spectator in an art context, thereby bracing the otherwise self-contained sciences to cope within a more complex environment. Since the 20th century, as Latour argues, was the “golden age of the laboratory”3, when scientific insights and knowledge were mostly produced in isolated realms, inaccessible to the public, and guarded by a group of selected people, the 21st century is proving to be an age where scientific and technological experimentation has migrated from the laboratories into artists’ studios and galleries and vice versa. I.e. a dwindling of the gap between experts and non-experts; scientific experimentation and non-scientific experience can be observed more and more.

In this framework, the exhibition Anybody Who Is Disturbed by Flow of Information will shed a spotlight on the status quo of the interface of the aforementioned network and spheres i.e. the brokering between the arts, sciences and technologies, question the mechanisms through which they communicate with each other, reflect on the interests as well as aversions towards creating synergies between these spheres, and deliberate on the role of art in the transformation of scientific and technological processes into immediate experiences. Furthermore, without necessarily aiming at answering but rather at posing questions, a bird’s eye view will be thrown on how these processes are reflected and treated within different cultures in the West and non-West and how this is anchored in the trans- and hyper-culture of contemporary art.

For this exhibition at SAVVY Contemporary, the curator Jung Me Chai invited artists Yunchul Kim and Jan Peter E. R. Sonntag, whose practices are already situated within these discourse, to engage in a visual communication. The artists will miniaturize or take excerpts of existing art pieces from different series or installations, which will be juxtaposed in pairs with each other in the exhibition, and thereby enabling a dialogue of things.

Anybody Who Is Disturbed by Flow of Information
Notes on Networks between Spheres
Yunchul Kim / Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag
curator: Jung Me Chai