ENCODED REALMS

Anni Albers described the act of “beginning”, that moment when the fog of uncertainty still obscures potential possibilities, as “exploration, selection, development, a strong vitality that is not yet limited, not yet defined by the tried and tested and the traditional.” For Albers, who was one of the most important voices of Bauhaus and a pioneer of European textile art, every beginning was like an “adventure of discovery” in which the process itself, rather than the result, becomes central. When working with machinery and tools to create art, this rings especially true. Often, artists find unique ways of engaging new technology through innovation and errors, in which the medium becomes central to the artwork created. The Jacquard weaving loom was one of the defining inventions of the industrial age, and its binary programming later inspired the mathematician Ada Lovelace to write the first ever code in 1843, before computers had even been invented. 

With the exhibition Encoded Realms, Kang Contemporary highlights the historical connection between analog and digital worlds. The artists featured in the exhibition are distinguished by their unique and innovative collaboration with their respective materials. From computer collages woven on Jacquard looms over photographs where the material is as much a subject as the image, to interweaving materials in digital space that make familiar societal fabrics unrecognizable. In this exhibition, the gallery space becomes an interplay of textures and materials. The fluorescent lights of the New Media artworks are absorbed into the deep interwoven folds of haptic techniques, emphasizing the digital space – which often appears two-dimensional and infallible – as three-dimensional and alive. After all, programming, like weaving, is an adventure of exploration. Both weaving and coding, in their early stages, require repeated “listening” to the material and embracing unexpected glitches that disrupt the fabric’s uniformity. What is at stake when we see our world as a textile where fibers weave back and forth and around each other? The artists in this exhibition show us that history, memory, and human relationships –  often imagined as linear progressions – can be embraced in all their complexities and intersections.