Max Wigram

David Jablonowski

09 Apr - 24 May 2014

DAVID JABLONOWSKI
Hello Prediction! / Still Life With Turkey Pie
9 April - 24 May 2014

Max Wigram Gallery announces the opening of Hello Prediction! / Still Life With Turkey Pie, by David Jablonowski.

In the exhibition Jablonowski combines a long-standing interest in the sculptural qualities of communication technologies with new research into online advertising. The exhibition’s title refers to use of data mining in corporate marketing: ‘Hello Prediction!’ is the greeting found on the webpage of the Google Prediction API, used to develop ‘smart’ applications capable of tracking users’ preferences and predict their future behaviour as consumers.

Two large sculptures made up of stacked clear plastic boxes, glass and LED panels, contain a selection of texts and objects chosen via digital search algorithms, reflecting how information is dispersed and found online. These sculptures form a literally transparent display, a physical marketplace in which the ephemeral and non-dimensional digital flow of information is materialised into three-dimensional space.

The information Jablonowski disseminates throughout the space is only partially readable, replicating the complex ways in which the Internet simultaneously distributes and withholds information. The large sculptures are physical obstacles the viewer has to circumvent. Meandering through the exhibition, the viewer physically performs the act of hyperlinking the organised disorder of the installation.

Jablonowski is interested our role as users of communication technologies, and in the videoProsumer he rethinks our position in the digital markets. Prosumer juxtaposes images documenting the production of the microchips used in digital cameras and the test videos that users post online to showcase these products’ capabilities. Although these images are purely functional, the information they reproduce is linked to the individuals who shot them. These users are thus simultaneously producers and consumers: ‘prosumers’.

The exhibition is set against a large print reproduction of the titular Dutch painting, Still Life With Turkey Pie by Pieter Claesz (1627). While researching this painting online, Jablonowski followed some of the pop-up advertisements, purchasing the products and displaying them inside the stacked plastic cubes. Jablonowski thus embodies the ‘prosumer’: he is an active consumer who uses his own, targeted advertising as a material for artistic production. He embodies the prediction according to which, in the future, users will be able to actively trade with their own data, becoming increasingly involved in the economy of their personal information.

Hello Prediction! / Still Life With Turkey Pie is a physically hyperlinked total installation, in which the browsing is performed by a sensing body in three-dimensional space. In David Jablonowski’s work, the total meaning adds up to much more than the sum of its parts.

David Jablonowski (b. 1982, Bochum, Germany) lives and works in Amsterdam. Jablonowski’s solo exhibitions include: Prosumer, Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag (2013); Tools and Orientations, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2013); Blue Greens, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2012); Many to Many (Stone Carving High Performance), Dallas Contemporary (2011); Comma 30, Bloomberg Space, London (2011). Group exhibitions include:Living in the Material World, Museen Haus Lange (2014); Material World, Nest, Den Haag (2013); Material Kontingenz, SMBA, Amsterdam (2012); The Global Contemporary Art Worlds After 1989, ZKM, Karlsruhe (2011);Monumentalism, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2010); and After Architects, Kunsthalle Basel (2010). Jablonowski has completed residencies at De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2009) and ISCP New York (2011).
 

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