9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 4.6.–18.9.2016, Alexandra Pirici, Installation view
Alexandra Pirici is a Romanian performance artist who’s previously shown at the Venice Biennale to critical acclaim. Currently she is mounting her performance “Signals” as part of the 9th Berlin Biennale, “The Present in Drag”. Here, visitors can choose which actions five performers, dressed in motion-capture suits, carry out from a preselected list on the Berlin Biennale website. Using mechanisms from Facebook’s and Google’s PageRank and EdgeRank respectively, actions include everything from “Kim Kardashian Breaks The Internet”, the “copyright macaque” and the announcement of the Antarctica Biennale.
SLEEK speaks to the artist, who will be taking her work to the opening of the Tate Modern extension later in the month.
SLEEK: Why choose EdgeRank and PageRank algorithms as starting point for a performance?
Alexandra Pirici: I’m interested in the protocols of the internet rather than the aesthetics. Only recently there has been a larger debate on how their relevance is constructed, and I wanted to use this format as a model to construct an algorithm of my own, to make the parameters visible so you can see according to what guidelines it ranks your interaction as a user.
So how does the user interaction work?
You can select content online from a pre-selected list on the Berlin Bienniale website, your interactions are then ranked by this content ranking algorithm. We selected which parameters to use, which are controversial, because I think they contain quite subjective political decisions. If you’re an iPhone or Android user, your geolocation, the time you spend on the website, all these factors. People assume that the algorithms perform these objective, neutral selections but that’s not the case.
In the exhibition space, there’s a screen with a full list, scrolling slowly, and the 30 most relevant enactments that are performed. On another screen, there are the guidelines for the parameters and also a rank log excerpt. So you can actually see how the selections are being made in real time. You can have a Coca Cola commercial after a song quote, a different dramaturgy appears each day.
How did you choose the pre-curated list?
The list again is a completely subjective choice of possible stories. I mostly refer to popular culture, and I’ve introduced situations, images, events that I think they should be a part of the popular collective history. For example, there is this photograph of soldiers arresting workers during the coup in Chile in 1973, September 11. And I think that is a really important historical event, the removal of the first democratically elected socialist government. Visual content is privileged on Facebook, so we’re privileging to textual content, including text, or a poetry excerpt.
“An online ranking algorithm performs on content–it doesn’t register meaning. It transforms everything into calculable input.”
9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 4.6.–18.9.2016, Alexandra Pirici, Installation view
9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 4.6.–18.9.2016, Alexandra Pirici, Installation view
“‘Hell you Talmbout’, a protest song by Janelle Monáe, was a popular choice.
What’s been the most popular choice been so far?
I’m not too sure, but “Hell you Talmbout”, a protest song by Janelle Monáe, was a popular choice. They shout the names of people of colour killed by the police, including Emmett Till’s. It’s not the usual fare – Drake’s “Hotline Bling” has only been on twice I think.
What about the motion-capture outfits?
While there is no motion-capture taking place, these costumes are a metaphor for the abstraction of concrete, material embodied presence into these geometrical movements, signals that become data. I think there is a similar process that an online ranking algorithm performs on content–it doesn’t register meaning. It transforms everything into calculable input. I wanted to play with the experience of the physical space of the exhibition, where the bodies are more than just images, shifting between points of light and people with features.
Another aspect of motion capture is that in the gaming industry it’s cheaper to use motion capture to animate a digital object rather than create it from scratch. People become cheap providers of life, or of animation, of something that can be reconstructed and is reusable.
Why choose performance as a medium?
Performance is usually understood as a reaction to the alienation from the body that the digital engenders. I wanted to use this tension but also to examine the connection between these realms.
The 9th Berlin Biennale takes place in Berlin until 18 September 2016