And The Seasons

That the geometry structuring our physical world also regulates time is astonishing, if not revelatory. But, if it also organizes human activity, as Armstrong claims, we would need to reconsider our entire philosophical tradition. For according to his model, free will and individual agency are no less predictable than the seasons; they are as calculable as any other measured value. Mathematical precision notwithstanding, the social and applied sciences have long dealt with the interrelationship between the physical world and that of our ideas. After all, building is an idea for living manifested materially. 

The effects of esoteric number-crunching on the part of a few bankers have had disastrous ramifications for architecture and urbanism. Felt most severely in the United States, where building development has come to a standstill – infrastructure in need of repair which continues to decay and entire neighborhoods that have since been evacuated, concretely testify to the effect of the world of numbers on the lived, and how little we in fact understand its abstractions. 

And the Seasons; They go Round and Round – the first line of Joni Mitchell’s refrain – is a pair of exhibitions that will present work by artists and architects investigating the nature of interconnected systems and the underlying symbiosis between disparate fields of knowledge.

And the Seasons – AIDS-3D’s first solo exhibition in Norway – will feature two installations that resonate Internet technology, money markets and clairvoyance into a mythic-past.

Will Be (2009) is best described as a live sculpture. During the gallery’s opening hours, an oracle – sitting in the exhibition space, in a haze of incense, draped only in a gauzy fabric – will divine the future by tapping into the hive-mind of the Internet instead of the Gods.

Alpha (2010), a piece developed expressly for the exhibition at 0047, confronts viewers with the arbitrary distinctions between the physical and the abstract. A mico-PC computer that is programmed to automatically trade stocks is inserted into a piece of weathered driftwood, conflating the immediacy and physicality of the wood with the digital computations performed by the computer. A LED light is inserted into the weathered driftwood; it signals blue when there are no current transactions; red when it’s losing money and green when making money.  

AIDS-3D is  Nik Kosmas (b. 1985 in Minneapolis, USA) and Daniel Keller (b. 1986 in Detroit, USA). After meeting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, they moved to Berlin and started collaborating in 2006. Their diverse multimedia practice employs the language of American PR to critically examine the history and future of technoscientific development, satirizing the hyperbolic claims of proponents of transcendental technology and their critics alike.

They have recently exhibited, to wide acclaim, in Younger Than Jesus at The New Museum in NYC, Galeria Stereo in Poznan, Dos de Mayo art Center in Madrid, Gallery Niklas Belenius in Stockholm with upcoming exhibitions at Gentili Apri in Berlin, Kunsthalle Athena in Athens and Portgual Arte 10 in Lisbon. And the Seasons, at 0047, will be their first solo exhibition in Norway.

Carson Chan is an architecture writer and curator. He is also the co-director of PROGRAM, a Berlin based, non-commercial initiative for art and architecture collaborations. He is a regular contributor to cultural publications including 032c (Berlin), where he is also an editor. He is an active advisor to several cultural institutions including DLD ’08 (Munich) and Europan Denmark ’10. In 2008, he organized an evening of panel discussions at the Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin) with leading artists, architects and curators to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Mies van der Rohe building.