THE WOODPECKER FROM THE DATABLASE
Floating Utopias Exhibition
nGbK, neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin 2018
In their work “The Woodpecker from the Datablase”, artists Marco Barotti and Plastique Fantastique create an urban intervention in the middle of Oranienstraße in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Robotic woodpeckers above the entrance to the nGbK gallery transform, in real time, the invisible radiation used for mobile communication and wireless technology into audible and visible acoustic drumming patterns. An inflatable bubble popping out of the gallery window shelters a sensor that feeds the birds with the invisible radiation. “The Woodpecker from the Datablase” refers to the 1940s “Radome” antenna by US engineer Walter Bird and makes the electromagnetic radiation surrounding us audible and visible.
Artist
Marco Canevacci and Yena Young (Plastique Fantastique), Marco Barotti
Plastique Fantastique Team
Carsten Reith, Daniel Felgendreher
Floating Utopias Exhibition Participant
Ahmet Öğüt, Ant Farm, Anna Hoetjes, Anika Schwarzlose, Artúr van Balen, Eventstructure Research Group, Franco Mazzucchelli, Graham Stevens, Huw Wahl, Marco Barotti and Plastique Fantastique, The Yes Men, Tomás Saraceno, Tools for Action, UFO
nGbK project group:
Artúr van Balen, Fabiola Bierhoff, Alexander Dunst, Anna Hoetjes, Jantien Roozenburg, Hannah Zindel
Ever since the first hot-air balloon ascended in 1783, inflatable objects have inspired the imagination of alternative worlds. In the nineteenth century, aerial towns colonized the skies and floating labs surveyed the world. Flying cameras popularized the view from above. Starting in the 1930s, gigantic floats attracted attention to socialist and capitalist mass parades. Along with the ideals of the generation of 1968, inflatable spaces and performances entered into architecture and tested new forms of coexistence.
‘Floating Utopias’ presents the broad range of pneumatic media in an exhibition and accompanying interventions in urban space. The project juxtaposes historical and contemporary works and raises questions as to their potential for artistic and activist practices. Until today, inflatable objects serve as tools for aesthetic and political interventions: artists and activists situate their works between surreality and functionality, fiction and fact. Inflatables invite us to be playful and disobedient, they forge communities and prompt participation, generate attention and agency.
