DANIEL CANOGAR, *1964

Born in Madrid to an American mother and Spanish father, Daniel Canogar’s life and career have bridged between Spain and the U.S. Photography was his earliest medium of choice, receiving a M.A. from NYU at the International Center of photography in 1990. He soon became interested in the possibilities of the projected image and installation art.

The epistemological challenges of the shift from Gutenberg’s printing press to the ever-expanding liquid-like libraries that hold knowledge are profound – ones that we are only beginning to understand. Canogar’s dataworks are an attempt to capture, and cognitively process, the implications of these dramatic changes through examining the position occupied by the individual in a technologically interconnected age.

His artworks are generative and driven by algorithms coded and developed in the studio. They react in real-time to different data sets, including climate-change information, the barrage of 24/7 news cycles, or trending searches on Google. The data works are also an attempt to insert generative art into the history of art, exploring unsuspected aesthetic influences including postwar Abstract Expressionism, Performance Art, and Op-art from the 1960s.

PRESENTED WORKS BY DANIEL CANOGAR

Chyron is rendered with the chyrons of news channels, that is, the information superimposed over the lower part of a screen. The tickers intertwine like a large frayed fabric, a tangle that evokes the fragile and at times unstable balance of an information ecosystem created from disparate and even conflicting sources. Updated in real time, this algorithmic artwork features chyrons of major international news channels, including CNN, Fox News, MSNBC News, Bloomberg, BBC News, Reuters, CNBC, Al Jazeera and Le Monde.

Chyron belongs to the Pixelweaver series, which draws on textiles as a metaphor for the social fabric created, and sometimes destroyed, by data. These artworks pay tribute to the close relationship between information technology and textiles, beginning with the jacquard’s loom in the early nineteenth century, considered by many historians to be the first computer. For this new series, Studio Daniel Canogar has developed a virtual loom based on craft techniques. This algorithmic tool enables the creation of a wide range of patterns from different sources or „spools“.

4K HDR screen, generative custom software, computer.

In Surge Daniel Canogar explores how the world of data negotiates its relationship with the physical world. The project emerges from the artist’s preoccupation with the intangible – and invisible – nature of one of the main driving forces of our economy and society: the data-sphere. This “crisis of visibility” makes it very difficult for most of the population to comprehend how big data is impacting their lives. To materialize the world of data is an attempt to help us cognitively incorporate this new reality.

The screens become conduits of data related to real-time Google Trends searches, a service that provides interest over time of different topics. The artwork displays the relative percentual interest between 4 topics, rather than feature the absolute number of queries around a specific topic. The artwork is interactive: viewers can introduce their own topics via a wireless keyboard.

The flow of information is represented via particles that leave trails behind them, creating abstract forms that take the pulse of the searches. Each topic is represented by a color, and the size of each particle varies according to the interest in the topic. Data is pulled from the last week of activity: the faster the particle moves along the screen, the more recent the data is. The screens become conduits of data related to 4 real-time Google searches.

Flexible LED screen, computer, generative custom software, real-time data, metal structure

PETER WEIBEL, *1944; † 2023 

Peter Weibel’s work can mostly be categorized as conceptual art, performance, experimental film, video art, computer art, and media art in general.

Based on semiotic and linguistic considerations (Austin, Jakobson, Peirce, Wittgenstein, and others), Peter Weibel develops an artistic language that leads him from experimental literature to performance starting in 1964. In his performative actions, he explores not only the „media“ of language and the body, but also film, video, tape, and interactive electronic environments. He critically analyzes their function for the construction of reality. In addition to actions with representatives of the Vienna Group and Viennese Actionism – to which he gave his name – (Oswald Wiener, Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler), from 1966 he worked (together with VALIE EXPORT, Ernst Schmidt jr. and Hans Scheugl) on an „expanded cinema“ that deconstructed the ideological and technical conditions of cinematic representation. The term „Expanded Cinema“ was used by Weibel and his circle only from 1968 onwards: in the summer of 1968, Weibel had discovered George Maciunas‘ Expanded Arts Diagram in Sweden, where he worked for a few weeks each year in different factories, and which had appeared in the journal film culture nr. 43 (winter 1966).

Peter Weibel consistently developed these considerations further in his videotapes as well as video installations from 1969 on. With his television actions, the teleaktionen, which Austrian Television (ORF) broadcasts in 1972 as part of the Impulse program, he transcends the boundaries of the gallery space and explores video technology in its application to the mass medium of television.

Peter Weibel pursues his artistic problems in a wide variety of materials, forms and techniques: in texts, sculptures, installations, films and videos. In 1978 he also turned to music. Together with Loys Egg, he founded the band Hotel Morphila Orchester. In the mid-1980s, he explores the possibilities of computer-assisted editing of video. In the early 1990s he realized his first interactive computer-based installations, with which he again addressed the relationship between media and the construction of reality.

Born on March 5, 1944 in Odessa, raised in Upper Austria, Peter Weibel first studied French and French literature for a year in Paris, then began studying medicine in Vienna in 1964, until he switched to mathematics with a focus on logic. Peter Weibel teaches at numerous universities from 1976, including the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada and the Gesamthochschule Kassel. In 1984, he was appointed Associate Professor for Video and Digital Arts at the Department for Media Study at the State University of New York at Bualo, N. Y. for five years, where he established the Digital Arts Laboratory. In the same year, 1984 he receives the professorship for Visual Media Design (Vis.Med) at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, which he holds until 2017. In 1989, he is entrusted with the establishment of the „Institute for New Media“ at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, which he leads as director until 1994. Since January 1999, he has been a board member of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and, since 2017, director of the Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Prix Ars Electronica (computer animation), award for Time as Code: Chronocracy; 1993 Generali Sculpture Prize; Prix Ars Electronica (Interactive Art), recognition for Virtual Worlds; 1997 Siemens Media Art Award; 2002 Grand Decoration of Honor for Services to the Republic of Austria; 2004 Käthe Kollwitz Prize; 2007 Honorary doctorate from the University of Art and Design Helsinki; 2008 Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; 2009 Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge Prize for unconventional art education, Medal of Merit of the State of Baden-Württemberg, Appointment as full member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts Munich, European Culture Project Award of the European Cultural Foundation; 2010 Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art 1st Class; 2013 Appointment as member of the European Academy of Science and Arts, Honorary doctorate of the University of Pécs; 2014 Oskar Kokoschka Prize; 2017 Award of the Austrian Art Prize – Media Art; 2020 Lovis Corinth Prize; 2021Trebbia Prize.

PRESENTED WORKS BY PETER WEIBEL

MEDIA MAY REWIND REALITY, a video installation conceived in 1970 and realized shortly before Peter Weibel’s death in 2023. The title itself reflects the interest the artist, scientist, researcher, author, mediator and great pioneer of media art pursued during his lifetime. The completion of this work, which briefly compresses 50 years of his work in one „picture“, needs no additional comment: a candle burns in a monitor for over 8 hours and grows to the edge of the screen, while several real candles burn down on the case during this time. The work reads as a metaphor of a life that has been unconditionally and passionately devoted to new media in art and science.