LACK FINE POSE, 2019
Single-channel video, 12:49, digital transfer from B/W 16mm film and online found footage.Polyurethane “positives” from IKEA LACK series furniture, white LED’s. Variable number and dimensions. Narration by text-to-speech AI-voice.
Exhibition text
Close your right eye, can you spell for me… the fifth from the bottom word? ‘L-A-C-K’
Close your left eye, can you spell for me… the fourth from the bottom word? ‘F-I-N-E’
Close both eyes, can you spell for me what you see?
Part of group exhibition, Sickle & Code.
Participating artists: Maria Andreou, Raissa Angeli, Adonis Archontides, Helene Black & Yiannis Colakides, Zach Blas, Jenny Dunn, Nihaal Faizal, Veronika Georgiou, Olga Micińska, Bahar Noorizadeh, Angelo Plessas, Tabita Rezaire, Elena Savvidou, Emiddio Vasquez
Description
Responding to the space - a museum of a “traditional Cypriot” household - and the exhibition’s theme on an intersection between Cypriot tradition and technology best captured by its title, Sickle and Code, LACK FINE POSE is about images, vision, “chair-fetishim” and the commodification of the familial.
Like a bad search algorithm the film draws references and paradoxes informed from the early history of computer vision and tests them against disparate sources: Clyde Beatty’s circus taming techniques using chairs, Donald Judd’s late furniture work, IKEA’s LACK series furniture, universalizing tendencies in design and the contested political space that the IKEA showroom represents in Cyprus.
The sound for the video uses similar techniques found in early computer vision training experiments (Hubel and Wiesel cat experiments in particular) whereby sections of the screen scans for activity.
Barely standing, the polyurethane pieces taken as “positives” from molds in IKEA’s LACK series lack both function and form but nonetheless altogether make up an image of a living room.
The title of the installation borrows from a technique used in computer vision used to “recognize” specific objects (in this case IKEA funrniture) from 2 dimensional photos in order to reconstruct to 3D meshes.
http://people.csail.mit.edu/torralba/publications/ikea_iccv2013.pdf