The digital realm offers us the perfect space in which to explore our limitless imagination. A place to expand our perspective, free from physical constraints and accepted convention. ‘Surveyors of Magic’, our new exhibition opening in Berlin, taps into this potential, connecting work inspired by memories, dreams and experiences refracted through the digital lens.
The show is curated by artist Tabitha Swanson, a true visionary of digital. Working across mediums as diverse as VR, fashion, filters and fine art, her surreal, fantasy aesthetic feeds into her selections. Bringing together artists that explore the natural and geological worlds, unexpected glitch and non-human intelligence. Fuelled by irreverence, playfulness and humour, ‘Surveyors of Magic’ offers a space to explore and rebuild. We chat with Tabitha about what she has in store and learn more about a show that has the power to open minds.
To select the artworks I sifted through a few hundred pieces by people from within the Refraction community. Something that I loved seeing within all of those pieces was a sense of magic or playfulness and a little bit of humor. Magic is a super important part of my own practice and also how I choose to live my life. I’d describe it as trying to see the magic of everyday moments. When I'm able to have the perspective to appreciate the randomness and the unpredictability of life it brings a lot of joy. Whatever someone believes, whether it's in God, or astrology, or science there are always these things that we can never predict. With all of these pieces, playing with that little bit of unpredictability and magic and being able to see the humor was really important.
Yeah, I think often with humor, you can't explain why it's funny. It very much transcends being able to write a thought piece on it and I find that quite magical. I've included one of Coco Magnusson’s works called ‘Buy Pant DISCOTHEQUE’. They go through so many mediums, but this is from an aesthetic that they use kind of like pixel art. They have this pair of pants rotating around. It's a riff they've been going off of for probably over a year now. It’s just been this whirlwind of mimetics for such a long time and it's gotten to the point where it's just really funny. I think humor is one of the greatest forms of art. Just to be able to make people laugh I think is a type of magic.
One in particular that I really like is from Chepertom. They have two artworks in the show and they're both called the same thing ‘Crossing the street of Singapore’. I like them both pretty equally, but one of them really gets me. It’s essentially people crossing a street but they've data moshed it a little bit so the longer the video progresses, the more muddled and moshed it gets. People are still crossing the street but it just becomes kind of indiscernible with all the different pixels as people. It's this kind of inability to distinguish what things are anymore but still knowing that the entities are moving on the screen that I thought was quite interesting.
Absolutely. I mean, I think that that's one of the most exciting things about digital art is the fact that we can do so many things that we can’t do in the physical world. Whether that's playing with physics in a different way or anything like that, I think the possibilities are really endless. It's nice to see that expressed by so many different artists in everyone's own unique and individual way. Within the curation, I tried to include many different expressions of it and many different file types. I’ve included artist Auriea Harvey’s work ‘Apollo running faster’, for example. It’s actually a poem that they uploaded as a JPEG. It very much references medieval scrolls and literature and so I thought it was nice taking that juxtaposition of old archaic stuff and historical references and kind of flipping it on its head by minting it as an NFT.
I definitely think I'll take some learnings from it. I think also just watching Refraction grow has been really interesting and also really inspiring for me. Yeah, they really just practice what they preach and I feel a sense of trust when I'm working with them. I think just seeing how something can start quite grassroots and grow steadily but also organically at the same time has been thought provoking and definitely educational in a way.
“Surveyors of Magic’ opens at despace berlin from 13 - 20 October 2022. RSVP here.
Refraction and The Department of Decentralization are presenting the art programming at this year’s ETHBerlin from May 24-26. The exhibition is curated through an Open Call. Interested artists can submit their artwork from April 10th to May 10th.
We asked Brazilian-American artist Rick Silva a few questions ahead of his Refraction artwork drop—a reflection on the solar eclipse. The work is available exclusively for Refract Pass holders and exhibited for the first time at our New York event at Public Records on April 4th.
