A collective audiovisual efficiency, taped live at last year’s edition of Berlin Atonal.
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII, or Barcode, is an enigma. In an effort to shirk the character cults that can establish when an audience’s main tool for engagement with music is social media, the strange manufacturer and artist getsridof their character totally from the circulation procedure of their music. In an age where the prevalent adoption of streaming services hasactually gottenridof most worth for most artists launching their music in digital formats, artists have had to change themselves into the item, their music endingupbeing a indicates of signal increasing their individual brandname and in so doing imbuing their practice with worth. In a important gesture, Barcode collapses these differences, decreasing their identity to a visual marker of their imagination as item, a barcode, within which all the details relating to the possible worth of their artistry is included. In the lack of any recognizable artist, the listener is left just with the music, expressive and speculative percussive structures that defy any simple category meanings or business classifications. When it came time to equate the task into a live audiovisual efficiency for the 2021 edition of Berlin Atonal, it made sense that their partner, problem artist Thomas Collet, likewise had his mind on how inextricable modern art is from capital.
“This whole job began throughout the pandemic, when it was almost difficult to travel or record videos outdoors,” he discusses. “It’s in that specific context that I chose to checkout Google Earth, lookingfor brand-new images. During this long journey I established a fascination for commercial kinds. Gravitating around Google Earth throughout curfew made me understand how much our lives are elaborately associated with commercial culture. It took such an crucial part in our development throughout the last 2 centuries that we can hardly believe without it. This specific frameofmind led us to the anthropocene we live in today. This idea explains a brand-new geological epoch, where the human effect is more substantial in earth’s communities and geology than ever. Google Earth in itself stresses this concept of a world shaped by human activity.” A apparently boundless procession of god’s eye view images of commercial phenomena – supply chains, shipping dogcrates, megaports and shorelines dotted with oil tankers and supply ships – are provided in counterpoint with plains, mountains and seas, concurrently overemphasizing and collapsing the enormity of the huge, worldwide linked network of market that enrobes world earth. Through Collet’s pixel control these synthetic kinds fill, warp and shift into patterns that looklike natural types, as huge aerial images vehicle parks are duplicated, taking on the structure of a bursting ant nest, while 3D rendered shipping dogcrate plans problem and drip like fuel drifting throughout water.
“When Barcode called me for Berlin Atonal it was an amazing match inbetween the music and the videos. I can’t picture a muchbetter location than an old electrical factory to play this set.” Collet continues. “Destructive procedures ground my experimentations and I can feel this in Barcode’s work too. Glitch art has constantly been a method to produce a particular variation of truth. In this case it can remove information to the point where the landscapes are takenin and melted into other product. It provides the experience that time is spedup and we are takingatrip through the anthropocene period. It reaches a point where market endsupbeing a camouflage of nature, and the other method around. You might feel that you are gazing at romantic paintings, viewing these over-industrialized websites in their excellent appeal. In these experimentations I had this sensation that I was mining problem in Google Earth, utilizing the verysame procedures I might observe in market: beginning with raw products to problem into processed ones.” By liningup his art practice with industrialized procedures of production, Collet enacts Barcode’s depersonalised method to art in his visuals, mapping the extraction of worth from the earth onto the aestheticization of distortion provided in his work. Pixels are rendered as valuable ore or oil deposits in his excavative technique to problem art, the most standard systems of digital images coded as the most standard things of worth within the natural world.
“We live in the details age where information is a brand-new resource, it appears important that artists usage it as well,” Collet concludes. “In this regard problem art procedures open a brand-new narrative where digital doesn’t just produce concrete information, however likewise produces artifacts through its own damage. The concept that we can forever stock whatever online appears absurd to me, consequently I choose to program the fragilities and weakpoints of the medium I usage.” By penetrating at the tension points of digital images, Collet officially catches how hard it can be to believe on a planetary scale. He overemphasizes how overshadowed our customised viewpoint of the world is by worldwide market, twisting it into even more detailed and frustrating types. Capitalising on this inertia, he reproduces the sensation of standing in the bowels of Kraftwerk, the old power station and longstanding house of Berlin Atonal, an epiphanic circumstances of sensation at once impossibly little and extremely alive – unimportant on the scale of a supply chain, yet all effective on the scale of the customer.
You can discover IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII On Instagram and at Bandcamp. For more details about Thomas Collet and his work you can follow him on Instagram.
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII x Thomas Collet – Live at Berlin Atonal 2021