ooo is a digital platform for art and culture that emerged in 2022 from an initiative of cultural practitioners and artists. Through a changing pool of artists, writers and journalists from the field of art and beyond, ooo reflects and presents artworks, exhibitions and events through diverse approaches and forms of expression.

HeK: House of Electronic Arts, Blurred realities, 11/25/2023 – 12/31/2023

Q.U.I.C.H.E.

Now that art has fought for the right to every form of expression in every medium in the course of modernism and all the chaos that followed, with its countless prefixes to date, a single "work" can quickly knock the viewer off her foldable museum stool in terms of its content, media and aesthetic complexity. Perhaps this is precisely why it is the right time to ask how much it actually takes to say something in a work. Which material battles and high-tech fireworks are proportionate to what artists want to convey to us?

Immendorff's Gretchen question "Where do you stand with your art, comrade?" could perhaps be supplemented today with: "Did this video really need a sculptural setting?" or even "Why is there a QR code stuck here?" if not directly "And why is there straw here?"

Johanna Mangold's work "Palm and Cheek" is a perfect example of how a work can be to the point without getting lost in multi-faceted escapades. After almost two million memes and articles about AI's inability to create sensible hands (when creating Q.U.I.C.H.E. graphics, by the way), it turned out that the same applies to forks. Forks are effectively the hands of cutlery. Don't tell anyone high on mushrooms...), Mangold manages to make the uncanniness of AI content tangible in a sensual way with ultimate aesthetic precision. In her video, hands from the black box of neural networks touch, knot, merge, distort, fight and caress each other in a cosmic dance. Veins drawn too hard on the backs of the hands give these generated scraps of bodies an almost tangible presence. You stand there half disgusted and half fascinated and sink into the projected hand mandala while you feel the need to run out of the museum to strangle Sam Altmann with hands of flesh and blood, as well as to somehow become part of this fusion of digital affection.

Take and embrace me now, creepy cyber-hand! Let me become one with you in these waves of becoming and passing away! Touch me everywhere at once with your constantly changing number of recognisable fingers! And don't tell my mum!

[TL]