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DAMJANSKI

Never Not There

2022

Using various scanning processes, recent art history research has revealed that there are at least two other compositions underneath Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 version of his Black Square. Therefore, it is no coincidence that an exhibition copy of the painting serves as a spatial tag and entry point to the exhibition app. Just as there are many layers behind digital images, there are other layers of material underneath the Black Square’s uppermost painted surface, the sum of which may be regarded as a protocol of the resources and ideas that went into the painting.

A smartphone camera reveals a web of interwoven cables, servers, and electrical devices that extend through the entire environment. This overlapping layer is automatically generated from images found on the internet. Here a dimension of the supposedly immaterial digital space is brought to the surface that would otherwise remain hidden in high performance data centers or server farms – a gigantic volume of hardware without which digitality or a augmented reality could not be perceived, let alone thought of.

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