The exhibition “The Rules – Regelwerke als Gestaltungsmaterial” at Frankfurt’s Forum for Digital Arts tried to identify certain analogies within the context of a post-media narrative that oscillates between randomness and predictability: Rafaël Rozendaal’s wall piece Popular Screen Sizes, consisting of twelve rectangular mirrors of different sizes, corresponds with Aram Bartholl’s Graphic Arrays, layered sheets of paper in the formats of popular monitors, which was on view concurrently in Frankfurt, in the gallery of the German Architecture Museum (DAM). Ivo Schüssler’s piece About the Actual and the Virtual, also displayed in “The Rules,” which is made up of three serpentinite rocks digitized with a 3D scanner alongside avatar-like images of them hanging next to the rocks, relates in an almost congruent manner to the imaginary rocks of Tabor Robak’s rendered Rocks series, which were featured in the Berlin exhibition “In That Weird Age” (CTM Festival). The online trailer titled The Best Exhibitions That Never Took Place by Marcin Nowicki and Katarzyna Nestorowicz, which combines sounds and images from Mark Leckey’s video work Proposal for a Show, exhibits compelling parallels with the André-Malraux-inspired festival thread “The Imaginary Museum,” with which the Berlin Transmediale endeavored to summarize “contemporary culture’s culture of networking” (sic!) a good week before.

What indeed results is the impression of an overall narrative resulting from the inevitable effects exerted on current curatorial concepts by the debate that was subsumed in 2012 under the name “New Aesthetic”—a narrative that might be described as “a status report on the realities of life in a regulated world” (“The Rules” curator Eno Henze). For the NODE13 festival, which is in its third edition after being held in 2008 and 2010 (the second time at the Frankfurt Kunstverein) and includes an exhibition, a two-day symposium, as well as workshops, etc., this status report is of a very concrete nature, as the event is considered a meeting point for the global programming community focused on the graphical development environment vvvv.
Consequently, Henze, who also curated the symposium, emphasized on the very first day the connection between the socially transformative dynamics of programming and a “new grammar” that was made functional in the vvvv software. The host, Andreas Broeckmann, then continued to discuss the social and aesthetic aspects of software in light of the question of to what extent it is possible to break the rules. However, this topic was not what truly made this day of the symposium interesting; instead it was the realization that a discussion of the rules of the “New Aesthetic” no longer has to be of a fundamental nature. This was especially apparent in the presentations by the author Joanne McNeil and the theorist Philipp Kleinmichel. The former addressed James Bridle’s call for the production of “Land Art for the internet” as an option for reconceptualizing the Web, by presenting a collection of “de-realizing” networking applications (for example Real Time LA Riots on Twitter, 20 years after the “actual” riots). Kleinmichel elucidated how today the commodification of users’ desires makes self-surveillance appear fun. Rafaël Rozendaal entertainingly demonstrated this theory of commodification of desire as fun based on his own online works, by way of a productive short-circuit, while Gabriel Shalom, also taking part in the exhibition, proclaimed his Hypercubism manifesto, wherein the aesthetics of collapsed space are abandoned in favor of an aesthetic of time sequences that can be experienced simultaneously. According to this declaration, the “Post-New Aesthetic” is a debate not on space but on time—a useful theory for a festival that is built around real-time programming.

“NODE13 – Forum for Digital Arts,” February 11–17, 2013, Frankfurter Kunstverein; node13.vvvv.org

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor

 

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