Langen Foundation 01.09.2024 – 16.03.2025
www.kunstforum.de / Bd. 301 Zukunftsraum Urbanität / 14.02.25

’Anima Atman’, 2024
Silicon, thistles, LED lights and custom electro-mechanical, Dimensions variable,
in ‘Pink Noise’, Langen Foundation, 2024
Photo: Dirk Tacke

We find ourselves in the technosphere of late capitalism.
Tentatively, some thistles sway in their brittle, blue-green beauty, almost unreal, atop a large heap of silvery gleaming silicon rock that stretches out in the half-darkness of the exhibition space, while a mysterious, metallic soundscape underscores the scene. The work Anima Atman poetically illustrates the relationship between humans and nature, and their search for knowledge through technology, by which social realities are created. These realities unfold here like a science fiction scenario. Does the growth of the thorny plants signify the overcoming of the hard rock, or are they swaying in their final breaths? The installation, not least due to the glaring green-blue light that shines through from the adjacent room, resembles an otherworldly landscape formation from another star. The already, in itself, somewhat detached site of the Langen Foundation, the grounds of a former NATO rocket station, which you reach after passing the bizarre architecture of a ski hall in the midst of the Lower Rhine countryside, gains an additional sense of being outside time and space with the PINK NOISE exhibition by the German-French artist collective Troika.

Troika, founded in 2003 by Eva Rucki (*1976, Germany), Conny Freyer (*1976, Germany), and Sébastien Noël (*1977, France), has transformed the distinctive glass-concrete building by Japanese architect Tadao Ando into an atmospherically dense, unfamiliar, and somewhat disturbing universe. Through painting, installations, and sound, the trio—who work collaboratively and always with profound scientific research—explores our relationships between perception, environment, and technology, connecting them in an extraordinarily impressive exhibition that creates a total cosmos, oscillating somewhere between utopia and dystopia.

Beginning with large-scale paintings that appear to consist entirely of pixels, we dive into PINK NOISE (an acoustic state that contains all frequencies of the audible spectrum) and are confronted with environmental scenarios that not only seem strangely familiar but also threatening due to their reduced color scheme – a palette of sixteen shades each of red, green, and blue – but also because the motifs were captured by environmental surveillance systems in the format of digital RAW images. These images were taken by surveillance cameras during natural disasters, such as Hurricane Irma in 2017 in the Caribbean or the wildfires in California in 2021. Attached as early warning systems for fires or illegal deforestation, these machines with their recordings of devastation became silent and indifferent witnesses to these destructive events, witnessing their last moments. We now look with our own eyes at the same scenes, though less indifferent and with greater responsibility, since we know or may have already experienced the consequences.

Troika’s pixel structure of the images caters to our visual habits, as the viewing of landscapes in digital images is by no means rare but rather a familiar routine. Technology, as the driving force and shaper of our societal reality, influences almost every aspect of our lives and our relationship to the world. It has become inseparable from our everyday life and thus now also shapes our understanding of nature.

Exhibition View, Troika. PINK
NOISE, 2024, Langen Foundation
Neuss,
Courtesy: Langen
Foundation, © Troika, Photo: Dirk Tacke

 

On the way down to the basement, flint stones are attached to silicon plates. Evolutionary Composite thus combines one of the oldest tools in human history with a material used to manufacture computers. Silicon is the most important element in semiconductors, and these, in turn, are the most widely produced components in history, forming the physical substrate for many technological developments, including artificial intelligence. The combination of these two seemingly distant materials not only forms an intersection in making visible the ongoing human pursuit of progress and technological advancements, but it also highlights the fundamental question posed by the artists about what has been lost in our digitized world and what has emerged in its place.

Upon reaching the basement, we arrive at the installation Limits of a Known Territory, a display-like, dark, glossy, almost mirrored water landscape, where one might think that drops are rising against gravity, and the entire surrounding area appears as the image of a gloomy, unknown underworld bathed in mystical light. In the midst of this are the boundary guardians—mythical creatures that guard thresholds, gates, or borders. These enigmatic beings are hybrids, composed of digitized objects from various museum collections—3D prints that here serve as new creations that remind us of the old, while simultaneously merging the randomness of data mixtures with the fantastical world of mythical creatures. The permeability of boundaries and transitions between different times, perceptions, and processes is also evident in the Obsolete Landscapes, which lean against the large windows on the ground floor like the remnants of collages.

‘Limits of a Known Territory’,
in ‘Pink Noise’, Langen Foundation, 2024
Photo: Dirk Tacke

In fact, they are cut-out fragments of skies taken from landscape images, those typically used as desktop backgrounds for iOS operating systems by Apple Inc. The sky, as an interchangeable, arbitrary cut-out, each labeled with a geographical name, pure surface, composed of data, condemned to decoration, after the mining of raw materials for the machines that later adorn them has created ecological voids in the landscape, where the traces of fragmentation are already glaringly evident.

Not only does the view through the large windows of Tadao Ando’s building acquire a new connotation, but the everyday gaze at the sky also takes on a different meaning, one that lingers long after the visit to the exhibition.

’Obsolete Landscapes’,
Dye sublimation print, aluminium, 2024,
in ‘Pink Noise’, Langen Foundation, 2024
Photo: Dirk Tacke

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www.kunstforum.de / Bd. 301 Zukunftsraum Urbanität / 14.02.25