NOME presents the satellite work by Ingrid Burrington. The artist, writer and researcher shows a series of large-scale lenticular prints of politically and technologically significant sites – data centers, air bases, space stations, downlinks – captured by high-resolution aerial photography. The lenticulars show two different versions of a single location at different points in time, to reveal the instability and shifting realities of satellite views.
Referring back to the histories of looking from above, from the panoramic inventions of the nineteenth century to the aerial views we consult on our screens today, Reconnaissance challenges the idea of all-seeing omniscience. The fluctuations of the lenticular images, as the viewer moves in space, show how aerial maps are far from fixed — rather they are composite and digitally altered. In these images, building details are crystallized and camouflaged by filters, whole locations are blurred out in censorship, and we see sites before and after data centers’ construction. The visual representations, captured by machine eyes, are integrated with the infrastructures and processes that created them. We are again reminded that the map is not the territory — that what we see from above may not be the reality on the ground.
Ingrid Burrington’s practice focuses on mapping and documenting elements of network infrastructure; examining its geographic contexts and material realities to demystify technologies and their politics. She has been artist in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Eyebeam, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and a fellow at Data & Society. She writes for San Francisco Art Quarterly, Creative Time Reports, The Nation, and The Atlantic. She has given talks at FutureEverything, Eyeo, Dconstruct, and Theorizing the Web, and is a member of Deep Lab, a collective of researchers, artists, writers, and engineers that explores themes of control, power, technology and society. (from the press release)
Ingrid Burrington, Reconnaisance, 17.09 – 11.11.2016, NOME Gallery, Berlin
images
(cover 1) Edwards Air Force Base (34.8190015, -117.853113), 2015 – Ingrid Burrington. Lenticular print, 100 x 100 cm (2) Lithia Springs (33.749734,-84.5870278), 2015. Ingrid Burrington. Lenticular print, 100 x 100 cm (3) Title: Stennis Space Station (30.386088, -89.628402), 2015. Ingrid BurringtonLenticular print, 100 x 100 cm
