Exhibits,
Corinna Berndt All my Chameleon Signals
Dates: 22 June - 17 July 2021
In the twenty-first century, the seemingly infinite capacity for digital data storage systems and the relatively easy access to personal archiving platforms has made it possible to shift private mementos that once were collected in physical form, into digital space. The storage of digital information in which personal files can be accessed in any given order implicitly suggests an archive or database. As Lev Manovich argues in his essay, ‘Database as Symbolic Form’ (1999), the concept of the database presents a new order in which one might structure and navigate the world. This idea of understanding the world as a “list of items”, however, stands in contrast to other culturally significant forms of meaning-making, such as narrative. In a narrative, information is organised in a ‘cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events).’ (1999, 85).
All my Chameleon Signals, 2021, is an ongoing interactive digital archive of small-scale 3D-scanned everyday objects that become meaningful through a collaborative text, written with USA-based poet Cynthia Arrieu-King and an artificial neural network.
Exploring myths surrounding the transformation from physical to intangible data, All my Chameleon Signals questions concepts of value, narrative, database and language produced by interactions with digital technology. Arguably, processes of digital hoarding— or the de-materialisation of physical possessions, and their transformation into digital assemblages—suggest implied narratives. The project reimagines these narratives that might emerge in digital record keeping through speculating upon their continuous relationship to the material world. All my Chameleon Signals explores the potential of digital scanning to enable a hybrid materialisation of bodied and disembodied information. By extension, this process also invites an examination of the kind of languages, grammars and poetics that potentially govern these hybrid forms.
'All my Chameleon signals'
Exhibition Catalogue
Corinna Berndt (she/her) lives and works in Naarm / Melbourne on unceded Wurundjeri land. Her practice incorporates digital media, video installation and collage. Influenced by her background in sculpture and spatial practice, her work addresses pre-conceived notions surrounding embodiment, materiality and disembodiment, when navigating the digital realm. Through experimenting with glitched media, poetics and fabulations, Berndt explores the various personal and often mythologised relationships that appear to continuously resurface between physical matter and seemingly intangible, digitalised information. Berndt is currently undertaking a PhD at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. Her research reflects upon generational perceptions of the potentialities and implications of digital technologies in the Western cultural imaginary.
Exhibitions and projects include:
Travel Plans, Sawtooth Ari, Launceston (2021), Not Born Digital, Verge Gallery, Sydney (2021), ‘Streaming data is the ultimate trust exercise with the moon’ Somos Arts House, Berlin, 2019; ‘Topographic Resolutions II’, Kuiper Projects, Brisbane, (curated by Kyle Wise 2019); ‘Our Selves’, Ctrl+Shft Collective, Oakland, USA (curated by Frances Fleetwood, 2017); ‘Elapse’ Rosney Schoolhouse Gallery, as part of Hobienniale 2017, Hobart, (curated by Kings Ari); MCA ARTBAR, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (curated by Julia Gorman, 2017); ‘Traveling the Alpha Layer’, with Youjia Lu and Kellie Wells, Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, Melbourne (2018), ‘Five Cents Cinema’ Melbourne Fringe Festival, Melbourne Town Hall (curated by Paula van Beek, 2016).
Corinna Berndt, All my Chameleon Signals, interactive digital work of 3D scanned personal items, 2019 – ongoing. Collaborative text, written with Cynthia Arrieu-King and an artificial neural network.