Deep vision – immersive exhibition

©Christian Kain

The development of digital imaging technologies has unquestionably altered and expanded our perception of the world. New scope for transforming abstract concepts into information that can be presented and communicated has essentially redefined our understanding of the world. DEEP VISION is a multifunctional media space for innovative forms of education, training and entertainment, as well as for new means of presentation and artistic forms of expression. DEEP VISION serves as a prototype for navigating the convergence of emergent possibilities, unique forms of representation and accompanying technical and societal challenges. Its technical equipment and content orientation are designed to explore this intersection. Drawing inspiration from the immersive DEEP SPACE concept at the Ars Electronica Center, DEEP VISION showcases three captivating projects: Made to Measure as well as Gigapixel Editions and Pulse of the EPO, two digital EPO commissions.

Pulse of the EPO

Quadrature (DE)

©Christian Kain

Curatorial Context

Pulse of the EPO is inspired by the EPO’s vast databases. It visualises the evolution of patent data over the past 50 years by giving expression to technology trends and the direction of innovation in Europe and beyond. In several short stories of one or two minutes each, Pulse of the EPO reflects upon the European Patent Office’s profound impact on processes of global transformation.

Artwork Statement

Pulse of the EPO foregrounds the transformative power of creativity in science and technology. Its raw material: the vast amounts of technical information and documents that the EPO safeguards as part of the organisation’s mission to foster innovation, competitiveness and economic growth.

This artwork presents a series of narratives reflecting the EPO’s global impact. True-to-data approaches mix with subjective speculation and poetic freedom. The immense volume of data provides the primary inspiration, detached from any underlying background — naked data to be processed, refined or mixed.
Various parameters from the EPO's databases shape the work’s aesthetics and dramaturgy, including for example the patent application’s date of filing and country/place of origin, the applicant themselves, the time between filing and grant/refusal, the number of citations of a patent application, technical fields, application titles, status events, patent families and many more. In each individual narrative, sound and image are generated simultaneously, all based on the EPO’s data sets. These data sets convey further patent intelligence too, including on the hundreds of thousands of innovations that are tagged as climate mitigation and adaptation technologies.

Artist Bios

Berlin-based artist duo Quadrature focuses on the use of data and technology to read and write realities. Their transdisciplinary approach spans time-based performance, installations, classical sculpture and two-dimensional works. They explore the world and cosmos, employing various methods and narratives. The members Juliane Götz and Sebastian Neitsch (formerly together with Jan Bernstein until 2016) have received recognition from Prix Ars Electronica, Kunstfonds Bonn, Akademie Schloss Solitude, LaBecque, PODIUM Esslingen, and Hertz-lab at the ZKM Karlsruhe.

Artwork Credits & Acknowledgement

• Original Artwork: Quadrature
• Commissioned by the European Patent Organisation in the framework of the Ars Electronica exhibition Catalyst Lab 2023

Gigapixel Editions - the EPO's high-resolution digitalised art archive

Ars Electronica

©Christian Kain

Curatorial Context

Artworks from the EPO art collection were digitally archived with the use of very high-resolution photography and digital image mosaics. For each artwork, this enabled multiple high-resolution images to be arranged in a single digital representation of the work, revealing details that would previously have gone unnoticed. Paul Leitner’s Sucrologist (2016), Afra Eisma’s Noonday Sun (2019) and Ivan Šuletić’s CFRP Cityscape XI (2019) are the first three artworks from the collection that can be experienced here in this way.

Artwork Statement

The initial offering of Gigapixel Editions explores the aesthetics of collecting, weaving and painting as captured in a digital archive, with each of the three artworks reproduced in around a billion pixels. This level of detail only emerged in digital photography during the last decade, opening up new territory for curators and art scholars as well as the general public, who thanks to this new technology can now view selected artworks online in greater detail than in most traditional exhibition spaces.

The glorious detail of the sugar sachets in Paul Leitner’s artwork Sucrologist (350 x 200 cm), which are adorned with a tremendous variety of designs and alphabetic scripts, is revealed as never before. Afra Eisma’s loving and spontaneous tapestry is the next largest work of the three and by far the most colourful, suggesting a street-art aesthetic in woven form. Ivan Šuletić’s slightly smaller oil painting (200 x 180 cm) completes the cycle. Using a found digital image of a place he never visited as his point of departure, the artist experiments with an almost mechanical, depersonalised way of painting and drawing cityscapes in an age dominated by endless digital odysseys and social media feeds.  

Artist Bios

Paul Leitner (AT) lives and works in Vienna, where he graduated from the University of Applied Arts in 2011. He turns everyday objects and apparatus into subtle and sophisticated artworks, which often take the form of multidimensional installations.

Afra Eisma (NL) studied fine art at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague and at Central Saint Martins in London. She mainly works with textiles and ceramics to create bright, colourful, immersive installations, complete with hidden messages and a distinctive emotion.

Ivan Šuletić (RS) lives and works in Belgrade, where he received a Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts in 2015. As well as working and exhibiting widely as a visual artist, he is an assistant professor at the city’s Faculty of Architecture.

Artwork Credits & Acknowledgement

• Production and editing: Ars Electronica
• Gigapixel photography: Florian Voggeneder
• Sound and music: Karl Julian Schmidinger
• Original artworks: Paul Leitner Sucrologist (2016), Afra Eisma Noonday sun (2019), Ivan Šuletić CFRP Cityscape XI (2019)
• Commissioned by the European Patent Organisation in the framework of the Ars Electronica exhibition Catalyst Lab 2023

Made to Measure

Laokoon: Cosima Terrasse (FR), Moritz Riesewieck (DE) and Hans Block (DE)

Curatorial Context

Knowledge is power. And today, as data equals knowledge, data is power. Every day we leave significant traces of personal information on the internet. Laokoon has taken on the challenge of reconstructing a person solely based on these traces, by using their Google search data. The result is a three-channel video installation that encourages viewers to reflect on their online behaviour and consider the use of tools to protect their privacy. 

Artwork Statement

As part of an artistic data experiment, Laokoon created a doppelganger solely by using the personal Google data of an unknown person. Five years of that person’s life were meticulously reconstructed and filmed on a theatre stage. Months later, the person met her ‘datafied’ double. This spectacular, one-of-a-kind experiment is brought to life in a film and interactive storytelling website. Here, visitors can experience just how far-reaching the insights into our inner lives and most intimate secrets are, which we ourselves enable Google, Facebook and other online platforms to acquire every day.

Tapping into an innovative and intricate digital narrative format, the cross-media project Made to Measure, which also includes a TV documentary, sheds light on how tech companies exploit data collected from billions of people, including to turn their weaknesses, insecurities, illnesses and susceptibility to addiction into profit.

Artist Bios

Laokoon, which consists of Cosima Terrasse (FR), Hans Block (DE) and Moritz Riesewieck (DE), is an Emmy-nominated cross-media group based in Berlin and Vienna. They are renowned for their immersive experiences and TV documentaries, which explore the intersection of technology and society.

Artwork Credits & Acknowledgement

• Direction: Cosima Terrasse, Moritz Riesewieck, Hans Block
• Development: Gruppe Laokoon, Kulturstiftung des Bundes
• In coproduction with: WDR, SRG SSR, OSZE RfOM, Docmine and rbb
• In cooperation with: PACT Zollverein
• With support from: Kulturhaus Brotfabrik, vorAnker, Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien, Starts in Motion and with kind support of the German Embassy.