We are living at the end of the Iconic Turn. We constantly disseminate, produce, generate, and receive images. It is a time in which events are even produced specifically for images, that are then disseminated and processed into new images.
The dissemination and reception of the digital image seems more important than its production.
It has never been so easy to produce a digital image.
No longer is the visual experience in the physical world transformed by the hand onto the surface, holding up a flat mirror for reflection as it dances away from the subject. The spell cast by depicting and tracing one's own shadow gave the individual a feeling of power over their own existence.
Today, it is the prompt for the LLM, it is the transfer of the lyrical, the poetic, the text, the thought, the concept, the code into image form, revealing a moment of power that has long been hidden in the text and especially in its performative form, the code as law or software.
Moving forward, backward, away from, and toward the easel or drawing board always gave painting a performative quality in the production of images. A magical dance that culminated in the trance-like pirouettes of Jackson Pollock. The magic of the entire movement of the body, especially the hands, is lost in coding. It is completely replaced by the feeling of omnipotence that arises in creation when the software executes the commands of its creator, i.e., performs. It is the software that performs, not the human being.
The programmer, or prompt engineer, can be understood as the Odysseus of dialectical enlightenment—he is capable of perceiving the most artful songs of the sirens, but he cannot respond to them because his body is chained to the mast. He sits almost lifelessly in front of his screen and must tirelessly prove that he is not a bot. This is then also the last remaining perception of his own being, since all other certainties blur in endless variations of everything ever thought, in the network with its billions of nodes.
Visual experiences in the world are no longer processed in order to take a position in the world, but concepts are (further) processed in order to contextualize oneself in the network, to determine relationships.
But even the last answer to the question “Are you human?” will soon fade away as a faint echo in uncertainty, because only bots will be real for bots.
Never before has it been so inevitable to take pictures. The endless floods that extend to every pocket device and are always at hand and before our eyes. They want to be scanned, interpreted, understood, and, especially today, read.
To tap into the power and beauty of the symbol, it took not only training and a trained eye, but also time to identify the symbol as such and classify it in a possible order that allowed for interpretation.
Today, image reception has mutated into image consumption; there is no longer any time for the performative scanning of the image surface—the reading of individual symbols, the diverse relationships between color, surface, and object. Under the conditions of attention economies, more and more text and conventional forms are being inscribed into images until they condense into so-called memes that can be grasped and devoured in an instant.
The works of the two artists exhibited here are quite different from that.
In her work, Ulrike Gabriel constructs a dynamic visual world by tracing the viewer's gaze with bundles of endless rays, which then create an image space out of nothing from the viewer's perspective, which the artist fills with textures from technical images (satellite images), thus transforming the non-space into a fully immersive 3D space. In doing so, she modifies the senses of sight and touch by means of the helmet and glove she has constructed. The visual experience and manual perception become the paradigms that make the visual world of the perceptual arena possible in the first place.
This work magnificently reflects the fundamental concept of technical images, which can only be generated from the performance of our perception and in interaction with the hardware and software that connects intimately with our bodies. Construction, reflection, perception, and cognition converge here in a single process for the user.
Perceptual Arena does not consist solely of the introspective perceptual aspect, but rather turns it outward and curves it into an arena, allowing other visitors to follow and observe the individual's image and world construction as a projection. Equipped with a helmet and gloves, the viewer/constructor thus became the classic user as early as 1992. The user who applies the software and does not merely use it. This fully equipped user already resembles today's content creator, while the outside observer still feels safe until they themselves have to enter the arena.
Rosa Menkman’s work The BLOB of im/possible images (in which BLOB stands for Binary Large OBject), asks where images become unrenderable. During her Arts at CERN residency, Menkman asked scientists to describe an “impossible” image, considering the limits of resolution, signal-to-noise, time, energy, cost, and hard physical limits. She abstracted recurring categories of impossibility and installed them inside the navigable, 3D, environment she named the BLOB.
The BLOB appears as a subtly interference-like texture, recalling Newton’s rings and moiré, cut by axes that model the trade-offs that govern imaging and the losses each render entails: every parameter that clarifies one feature occludes another. The BLOB is both catalogue and model: a collection of stated impossibilities and a toolkit for thinking through why images fail, are compromised, or are ruled out by physics. It reframes the “impossible image” not as a failure of imagination but as the outcome of stacked or coupled parameters and material limits, inviting viewers to explore the structure of those limits rather than look past them.
The flood of generated images presents an opportunity similar to that which painting experienced with the advent of photography, allowing it to reflect on its foundations. Today, it is possible to ask once again what an image is and what an image can achieve.
This exhibition features two artists who share not only an interest in exploring the limits of what is possible in an image. The exhibition also aims to convey the aesthetic similarities between their two approaches. For example, the graphic forms of the rays that cut through the pictorial space, dividing it up and at the same time constructing it.
The use of technical textures that fill and dynamize the pictorial space. Both artists also support the use of the hand, with the mouse or the VR glove, to navigate the pictorial space and truly unfold it.
Both artists develop a dynamic digital image space whose significance transcends the examination of its technical conditions and enables an aesthetic experience that provides insight into our times.