04.03.2022
Start Time:
17:00
End Date:
26.03.2022
Matthias Sildnik „Development Fever”
04—26.03
Opening: 04.03 at 5 pm
EKA Gallery, Kotzebue 1, Tue-Sat 12—6 pm
Join us for the opening of „Development Fever“ by Matthias Sildnik on March 4, at 5 pm at EKA Gallery! The exhibition is part of the Art and Design PhD curriculum studies and runs until March 26.
The feeling like you’re downloading a new app. Anticipation, tension, satisfaction. The new information is without taste, smell and brightly coloured. Sometimes causing anxiety, sometimes joy, surprise or anger. Consuming digital information has become as natural as eating. Forgetting to eat results in hunger. Information hunger causes anxiety.
Human consciousness as a knowledge-consuming system is limited. Memory, sense and attention are setting limitations not only to the volume but also to the functions of the information. Human consciousness is critical and paranoid, it doesn’t draw conclusions only from facts. Speculation and critical analysis have become dangerous in the era of post-truth. We can only draw one conclusion if we take these threats seriously.
Having evolved through evolution, human consciousness now limits social and economic development. Only radical innovation and revolutionary technology can tame its dangers. If we could send the truth pass the consciousness directly to executive parts, we could call off the news channels. Disconnecting consciousness from executive autonomy is the hardest part. It would be separate, just an observer, without its harmfulness. From here, it’s just a matter of carrying it out. Do we identify parts in the brain causing consciousness to remove them? Or we could channel randomised noise, old news or audiobooks by Foucault straight to the consciousness. Then they have time to think “How to explain human nature to Foucault?”.
PS
This cyber-bolshevist brainstorm belongs to the artistic research project that probes similarities between technological capitalism and Leninism. Usually, digital developments are analyzed within the framework of criticism of capitalism. Nevertheless ideas such as digital Maoism (Jaron Lanier), Google Marxism (George Gilder), digital Gulag/Google archipelago, corporate socialism (Michael Rectenwald) and woke capitalism (Ross Douthat), describe tendencies within technological developments that are closer to socialist totalitarianism than to free-market economies. This exhibition consists of forms that emerge when these two opposing currents crossbreed and give life to entirely new existence.
Matthias Sildnik (b. 1987) has graduated from the Installation and Sculpture department BA (2010) and MA (2014) at the Estonian Academy of Arts. His work has been exhibited in Estonia and abroad in solo and group shows. Sildnik studies the impact of high technology on daily life. He uses mediums such as digital graphics, statistical analysis and installation as dissociative synthesis environment. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Art and Design at the Estonian Academy of Arts.
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.