Addie Wagenknecht’s first solo exhibition in the United States is currently on view at bitforms gallery in NYC. It runs Nov 2 to Dec 7, 2014. In her work, a critical space between lived experience and sculpture emerges, as she plays with the contemporary anxieties of post-Snowden information culture.
Data and Dragons is a series of sculptures that intercepts and logs anonymous live data captured from surrounding WiFi signals. An assembly of custom printed circuit boards and Ethernet cabling, each work is dark and austere, manifesting “the cloud”, social networks, data, leaks, and that which forms social capital into a single object. In the exhibition, two new pieces are featured: Cloud Farming, a ceiling-suspended sculpture; and XXXX.XXX, a multi-panel wall-mounted sculpture. Passively interactive, the behavior of these pieces is driven by custom hardware and packet sniffers, which capture all the live data passing through the area. The information is then visualized via surface mounted LEDs, through a series of blinking patterns.