unREAL. The Algorithmic Present in Shanghai

Date October 27th, 2017

From November 2017 to January 2018, CAC Shanghai and and HeK Basel present unREAL. The Algorithmic Present, a comprehensive group exhibition which examines the impact of digital devices on conceptions of the real.

The devices with which we share and manage our lives have become increasingly numerous, smaller in size and varied in interface. They are handheld, wrist-wrapping or vision-altering portals to complex digital universes - and at the same time, to vast corporate efforts to track our actions and feed them into new products.

In this exhibition, artists examine the ways in which apps, algorithms and interfaces have changed the way we interact, and consequently the way we understand reality. Computational logic now influences many day-to-day processes, leading to temporal, spatial and conceptual dissonances. These dissonances cause much confusion and distress, causing long-standing social, political and economic constructs to become unstable. At the same time this instability leads to opportunities for change and thought; the artists in unREAL are working with these opportunities.

The twenty three works on display have been chosen by curators Zhang Ga and Sabine Himmelsbach; they show some of the many facets and contradictions of digital reality. The works explore, among other things, the materiality and kinetic force of algorithms, new relationships between individual and multiple, and the involvement of the body in the collection of data and the production of new devices.

Several artists whose works are on the Sedition platform – AES+F, Claudia Hart, Eva Papamargariti, Nicolas Sassoon & Rick Silva – present their work as part of unREAL. Other exhibiting artists are aaajiao, Ralf Baecker, Daniel Canogar, Cod.Act, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Kerstin Ergenzinger, Pe Lang, Zahra Poonawala, LaTurbo Avedon, Rollin Leonard, Rosa Menkman, Lorna Mills, Harvey Moon, Sabrina Ratté, Fito Segrera, Phillip David Stearns, Daniel Temkin and WANG Yuyang. The exhibition is accompanied by TRANSFER Download, a project designed by TRANSFER Gallery in New York which displays algorithmically generated, web based and virtual reality artworks in an immersive installation.