< > Trails of the Hive Mind - Exhibition overview

For Information on the interests and intentions behind this solo exhibition, this show comes with an essay published in 2002 by Francis Heylighen "The Global Brain as a New Utopia"

Read it here:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/GB-Utopia.pdf


1) 'Trance Tracks'

The sculpted totem poles of 'Trance Tracks' are made from a mixture of sand and an epoxy clay that has been marked by the tread of various sneakers. The imprints forged by ergonomic footwear, designed to augment the body, remain as traces forming future terrains.
In their profusion the individual prints join and become a pattern across a mutable landscape - as if a multitude of solitary runners meet one another in a collective space, traversing the poles in a direct attempt at transcendence.
One reference might be Brancusi's monumental Infinite Column, built as a WW1 memorial for those who died defending the Romanian city of Targu-Jiu, was created as a means of symbolic ascension to heaven. Through these similar gestures we are presented with different notions of what enhanced realities could be.

2) 'Katanga Bub'

The extreme ends of the mobile device industry are brought together in 'Katanga Bub'. It is based on a press image depicting the landscape and workers of Katanga, in The Democratic Republic of Congo - an area mined for many minerals like tungsten and coltan, which have been crucial for the manufacture of mobile devices.
For this work the press image of the Katanga mines has been re-photographed underwater and set within a freestanding display unit. as water ripples and bubbles float over the surface, distorting the scene underneath, the screens of numerous mobile phones show clearer details of the same view of the Katanga mine. The elemental earthy origins of the mines are (re)connected with the liquefied luxuriance of global technology commodities and their marketing aesthetics, to express the easy exchange of information through these devices.
This work fuses two opposing but connected ends of the story: on one hand the mobile devices help spread knowledge and raise global awareness, with the false promise of engendering a better world. On the other hand, while the economy of "rare earths" props up the problematic social and political infrastructures of the Democratic Republic of Congo, it also reveals the recursive relationships between matter and information underwritten by the move from production to product; from raw material to data generation.


3) 'Banana, Apple and Pear Image Transfer'
and
'Avocado, Apple and Lemon Image Transfer'

These two digital prints present their own production tear down. starting as a still-life of supermarket fruit captured by a digital camera, the image travels through the lens, chip, wire, computer components, software, etc. all the way to the printer, until its materialization as ink on paper that is hung with hooks and clips to the wall. The deceptive simplicity of this arrangement is over- coded by an immense informational panorama that renders visible the circumstances and locations of the chain of production in relation to which the fruit are the end-product eventuations. The inscriptions include the name and address of the retailer and the first responsible production companies involved and are superimposed in small type over the still-life image. [lining up the dynamic roots of an art piece in todays global economy.]