Paul Kolling at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof

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Visualization might be the shared space of science, art, and ad agencies. The ability to use information to affect. Tufte's Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, etc. For art the importance is that "hardly any conclusions can be drawn" and that "What remains are questions."  Affect.

Tishan Hsu at Hammer Museum

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Obvious forebear and yet something else entirely; today's surrealist melting icons are kept distinctly separate from our biomorphic goop. Hsu's technology acquires a bulge; the inanimate congeal a Cronenbergian "new flesh." For years smartphones pressed to be seamless, this was the pinnacle of technologic interface, to lack the orifice that Hsu keeps pressing. A phone shouldn't look like it might drool, Instagram icons shouldn't look like a dank bathroom. Like Thek, or Lynch, the campiness is part of the grotesque. You take your phone away from face, a smear of your human grease marring its perfect black pool. We don't like our tech to feel like us. The more we interact with it, the more it becomes us, the most we want it not resemble us.

John Knight at REDCAT

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Compare Knight to Bacher, two for whom the sign's circumcision opens it as an affectual and metaphorical possibility, snip its end so that it can't complete the power it was meant to effect. Space photocopied to empty its intent, remove us from it. Its signified sort of just floating away.


See too: John Knight at Greene Naftali, John Knight at Cabinet, Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst