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Vertiginous Data (MMCA Seoul, 2019)

Vertiginous Data, in Korean 불온한 데이터, was an exhibition at the Seoul branch of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, from 23 March to 28 July 2019. It was curated by Deoksun Park. The museum announced it as "the acclaimed international exhibition of media art", made of works "using the medium of data—the fundamental unit of digital technology" (press release). The artists were SUPERFLEX, Cao Fei, Forensic Architecture, Zach Blas, Simon Denny, Rachel Ara, Chris Shen, Sylbee Kim, Woonghyun Kim and Harm van den Dorpel, who showed works from Nested Exchange.

Four square framed prints in a row on a dark blue wall, each lit by a spotlight: a red and green composition with orange lozenges, an orange and red banded one, an orange and violet repeated pattern, and a pink and grey one with spheres
Installation view, Vertiginous Data, MMCA Seoul, 2019

From left to right: Sensualist, C. C. Rashes, Seul and R. Electrotype, each 100 × 100 cm in a white frame, hung far apart on a wall painted dark blue and lit one by one.

How the museum placed the work

The press release sorts the artists by what they do with data. Rachel Ara "collects and reflects data in real time"; Zach Blas, Forensic Architecture and SUPERFLEX "collect, analyze, and redefine data in an attempt to liberate the rights of free citizens from the clutches of global corporations and governments"; Cao Fei and Chris Shen work with robot vacuum cleaners; Sylbee Kim and Woonghyun Kim show new videos. The last pairing is van den Dorpel's:

Likewise, using blockchain technology, Harm van den Dorpel and Simon Denny try to reconstruct artistic values based on an anti-authoritarian system, while testing the limits of innovative freedom in art.

The pairing follows Proof of Work, the blockchain exhibition Denny had curated in Berlin six months earlier with van den Dorpel as one of its curatorial "nodes" (→ Proof of Work). The prints on the wall were paper. What tied Nested Exchange to the chain was the registration of the works as Ethereum tokens, sold through his 2018 token shop (→ Protocol, Taste, and Systems); the population's history, which the series text compares to a ledger ("The system records its changes between states as 'snapshots', leaving a complete history of itself in a manner similar to a blockchain ledger"); and the explainer that ran beside them.

The works

Each print is described on Nested Exchange. On the MMCA wall the symmetrical Sensualist, two red rounded bars of orange lozenges over a green diamond, came first. The banded C. C. Rashes followed, orange ruled lines over red and yellow cells. Third was Seul, one module of orange bars, circles and a green lozenge repeated three by three over a violet disc, and last R. Electrotype, violet and pink spheres and a gold double sphere among ruled pink bars, printed in UltraChrome inks on Hahnemühle paper. The catalogue of E-State Realisms gives three of them three-word names, Windbags Disfrocked Sensualist, Colonialists Criminate Rashes and Readjusted Electrotype, which harm.work shortens (→ E-State Realisms).

All four are specimens of one population. In the series text "the specimens are configured in nested recursive 'tree' structures similar to those used in the first iterations of Chomskyan linguistics", they "'communicate' by the flipping of a node within the structure", and "each specimen is driven to be as different as it can be from those around it". The tree is visible as shapes inside shapes. In Seul it is also visible as a three-by-three repetition of one branch, a grid made by a tree, and in 2022 the artist filed Seul in an are.na channel on alternating grids (→ The Grid, under From nesting to the grid).

The four framed prints seen along the blue wall at an angle; beyond, in a dark room, two wall screens: one with pale blue triangles and grey shapes, the other with hand-drawn white words on a maroon ground and subtitles
Installation view, Vertiginous Data, MMCA Seoul, 2019, with the software and the explainer

Past the prints, in a darkened room, two screens hang on the wall. The left runs the Nested Exchange software, here showing a pale blue specimen with a large triangle and grey blocks. The right plays an animation drawn in white lines on a maroon ground: the words "Chromosome : file", "object" and "token", each circled, joined by arrows. The visible subtitle reads "manifestations, such as documentation, photography or texts about the work", with a Korean line below it, and a small green parallelogram sits in the corner. The drawing style, the colours and the green mark match the stills of the Left gallery token explainer reproduced in the E-State Realisms catalogue (2018), and the animated left gallery Explainer shown at the Schinkel Pavillon the same year; harm.work does not list the animation for this show.

The diagram joins the chromosome, which it writes as a file, to an object and a token, and the subtitle adds documentation, photography and texts as further "manifestations" of a work. That is the artist's formula The Work = The Work + Its Documentation (992) drawn as a chain (→ Mediation and the Archive).

The three shows of Nested Exchange

Three of the four prints had been in Miami Beach the summer before, where C. C. Rashes, Sensualist and R. Electrotype hung with the software and the token explainer at E-State Realisms. In Berlin, at Proof of Work, the same population had appeared as layered acrylic panels. Seoul was the last of the three. The wiki dates his turn from nesting to the grid to 2019, the year he began collecting grids and modular systems on are.na (→ The Grid).

See also