* 1982 in Bucharest, lives and works in Bucharest
What best reflects the emerging ideologies of our age? For Alexandra Pirici, it’s the bubble logic of the ranking algorithm implemented by Facebook’s EdgeRank and Google’s PageRank, through which popular and relevant content is privileged. Signals draws on newsfeeds from real political events, pop cultural memes, and ephemera. Performers, clad in black motion-capture suits dotted with white reflectors, act out this steady stream of images and information in a black box space: holiday-goers mingling with migrants on a beach, Kim Kardashian’s naked body “breaking the internet,” and Kevin Carter’s 1993 photo of a vulture preying on a famished little girl. The enactments are crowdsourced from online “users,” who can collectively select configurations of newsfeed content via a website. Meanwhile, no actual motion capture takes place. No reconstruction of these abstracted body signals occurs—apart from the one in the audience’s imagination.
Browse through and select content online at berlinbiennale.de/alexandra-pirici/ and at KW counter desk. The top 30 most relevant stories will be enacted everyday during the live ongoing action.
If you would like to film or take photographs, you can—for very short periods of time and from a distance—use your smartphone flashlight or collaborate with someone else’s (smartphone flashlight) in order to enable a better camera vison.
List of works
Signals, 2016
Ongoing action, content ranking algorithm
Performers Sandhya Daemgen, Madalina Dan, Martin Hansen, Alice Heyward, Negroma, Jasmin Ihraç, Anna Jarrige, Leah Katz, Jared Marks, Zwoisy Mears-Clarke, Emily Ranford
Light Design Andrei Dinu
Ranking Algorithm Consultancy and Integration Jonas Lund
Voice announcements recorded by Aanisa R. Jama
Courtesy Alexandra Pirici
Commissioned and coproduced by Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Art Collection Telekom
Additional support Rudolf Augstein Stiftung
Thanks to National Dance Center, Bucharest; Meredith Meredith
Ongoing action can be seen:
Mon–Fri 4–6 pm, Sat–Sun 2–4 pm
Summer break 23.–31.8.2016
Installation view of Signals, 2016, courtesy Alexandra Pirici, photo Timo Ohler
