EMAP SHOWCASE

Discarded, Unseen, Unheard
Every technology through which we perceive the world also decides what we do not perceive. Images frame the landscape, sensors select the sky, headphones separate signal from noise. This exhibition at Galéria Tabačka brings together three works created within the residency programme of the European Media Art Platform (EMAP) and returns to what the technological mediation of perception pushes to the margins. What is usually filtered out here becomes the object of attention.

In the interactive installation Discarded Sound, Leon van Oldenborgh and Róbert Rampáček work with custom-altered noise-cancelling headphones that capture precisely the sound they are designed to erase. Through a game in which the only way to win is to listen closely, the noise of public space, which more and more people choose to ignore, becomes a sound worth attending to. The work asks who can afford silence, how the mass adoption of this everyday technology shapes our collective social behaviour, and what we lose when we treat the sounds of shared space as mere noise.

In the film installation Land before Last, whose text he developed with the artist ANOHNI, Benedikt Terwiel turns to Rotterdam and its port, one of the world’s most engineered landscapes. The black-and-white film is shot in a digital terrain model built from land-survey data of the western Netherlands, from which all buildings and facilities have been removed, leaving only their imprint on the topography. This field of nameless traces may read as the ruins of a dystopian future or as an archaeological site of a distant past. The line between the natural and the artificial dissolves, and the land appears as a product of technology, an image of the Anthropocene from which its history has vanished.

Luiz Zanotello, in collaboration with Ricardo Vieira, starts from the double meaning of the Portuguese word tempo, which signifies both chronological time and nonlinear weather. Tempo-imagem: Arquivo draws on a live archive of open-access weather cameras. A printed score reveals the gaps and asymmetries of global climate observation, while the visitor’s hand, moving a phone, meets skies, seas and glaciers across the globe in real time.

What connects the three works is mediated perception: erased sound, erased land and the hidden gaze of the machine. Moving in scale from the individual body and its hearing, through territory and landscape, to the planetary climate, they invite us to pause at the crossroads between the private and the common, the individual and the planetary. Each slows down and makes visible a process that otherwise runs automatically and beyond our awareness, returning to the viewer the role of an active observer. Rather than offering a single view of the world, they open a space in which many worlds can be perceived at once.

Selected from within EMAP, of which CIKE is a member, the works represent three distinct modes of contemporary media art: an interactive sound installation, a film installation and a transmedia installation working with live climate imagery. The transformation of land by industry and technology resonates particularly in Košice, a city with a strong industrial heritage, and in Tabačka, a former tobacco factory. Combining interactive and contemplative works, the exhibition addresses both the professional community and visitors encountering media art for the first time.
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“Funded by the European Union. However, the views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the body providing assistance can be held responsible for them.”