“Stretch out your arm to touch the operating system.”

Thus visitors were instructed by SomoS Artist-in-Residence Corinna Berndt (AUS/DE) at the entry of her solo exhibition, beckoning them to reach out to their technologies, and across the blurred lines between the physical and virtual world. Her solo exhibition Streaming Data is the Ultimate Trust Exercise with the Moon culminated her three-month residency at SomoS, proposing a set of well-articulated, science-fiction-inspired artistic comments on the imbrication of digital technology into everyday life.

As the exhibition’s title may suggest, the interaction with a device or with outer space may grapple with a dimension that is just as vast as one another. Indeed, as lonely rovers are sent by states to explore the planet Mars, so too do individuals on Earth gesture towards touch-screens at exponential rates. Perhaps our digital technologies have become more than just an extended limb. They construct how we may understand and navigate both the computer-generated and also the physical realm. Streaming Data is the Ultimate Trust Exercise with the Moon presents a mixed media array of video, digital art, sculpture and text that punctuate SomoS’ gallery space, providing an intimate commentary on the complex workings of technology on the everyday, the (dis)embodied yet bodied facets of human life and the imaginaries that may emerge through our daily interactions with digital technologies.

Nevertheless, despite the vast universes conjured by technology, digitalization is an act of translation that never entirely reproduces the physical reality of its subject. Glitches, mishaps, and mismatches are inevitable when information is transformed into the virtual realm, yet they are not repelled but rather embraced by the works presented by Berndt in her solo exhibition. One prominent example is her participatory art project Silent Museum, an online series of digital paintings (or sculptures?) that were developed from 3D scanned everyday objects. In their often clunky, awkward reconstruction, these objects may barely resemble their physical form. Instead, glitches in translation mean that the objects appear closer to fossils and ornaments. We may marvel at these glitches, wondering how to understand them, how they are produced, and what may happen if they were in fact representing a reality or truth of their own. In this sense, Berndt’s solo exhibition approaches physical-digital mistranslation, not as a failure. Instead, Bendt considers mistranslation as an opportunity for reflection and as a means to re-imagine what kinds of data-bodies might emerge when tangible and seemingly intangible systems of information meet.

Streaming Data suggests a reflection on the historically embodied relationship to our devices. Berndt’s video, her self-devised punch code sculpture referencing the first computer, and her partially bot-generated writings all return to the same original, embodied command – stretch out your arm to touch the operating system. Disembodiment is only an arm’s reach away.
 

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Corinna Berndt’s Silent Museum

For the duration of the exhibition, visitors were invited to bring a small object carrying personal meaning or a story. Both the object and its story were translated into digital information by the artist and added to the Silent Museum. The transcribed data was viewable both in the gallery space and online. In exchange for their engagement, participants received a video file of their 3D object via email.

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About Corinna Berndt

Corinna Berndt is a Melbourne-based multi media artist working predominantly with digital media. Her installations, sculptures and videos trace the tension between corporeal and digital experience, exploring moments of convergence and mis-alignment that occur between object and representation, body and technology, the physical and the intangible.

Her art is inspired by a fascination for cyber myths of the 1990s and the ongoing impact of historical techno-narratives on the (pop)cultural imagination. Specifically, she is interested in the way these tropes might still influence and shape contemporary hopes and fears concerning communication, technology, subjectivity and the limits of the body in the 21st century.

A current PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, Australia, Berndt received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and recently completed her Master of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne.

Berndt regularly exhibits in Melbourne and interstate. Her work was featured as part of MCA ARTBAR at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney and it was included in the 2017 Hobiennale in Hobart, Tasmania. Other selected exhibitions include Our selves, Ctrl+Shft Collective, Oakland, USA (curated by Frances Fleetwood, 2017), Five Cents Cinema, Melbourne Fringe Festival, Melbourne Town Hall (curated by Paula van Beek, 2016), and Topographic Resolutions, Kuiper Projects, Brisbane (curated by Kyle Weise, forthcoming). Her work can be found in public and private collections in Australia.

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Streaming Data is the Ultimate Trust Exercise with the Moon
Solo Exhibition by Corinna Berndt (AUS/DE)
Opening: Tuesday, August 27, 6-9pm
Duration​ – August 28-31, Tuesday-Saturday 2-7 or by appointment

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Corinna Berndt’s artist residency at SomoS has been kindly supported by The University of Melbourne, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music.

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