Meridian is a series of mood light sculptures that uses a skeletal frame made from a deconstructed chair designed with the human spine as a reference. Each Meridian sculpture is wrapped with a translucent skin, allowing an internal changing light to illuminate its bodily form. The color and intensity of the lights correspond to the real-time sentiment of people in distant cities, scraped from live Twitter feeds using algorithms to extract emotional information contained in informal language, for example the Twitter corpora produced by an event such as the Brexit vote, or a temporally diffused reaction to something as mundane as the weather. Meridian transmediates the information as an aggregate mood (positive/negative) into pulsing, chromatic light, powered by the affective energies of distant sensing bodies from disparate cities— in this case London and Istanbul. Mika Tajima’s (b. 1975, Los Angeles/New York) mood light sculptures and abstract woven portraits address the sensorial space of appearances and speculate what part of experienced life escapes machinic processes: technology that channels human sensations and translates emotions into codes. Tajima thus critically examines the integration of control technologies with our bodily senses and the way these technologies coproduce our lived space. Negative Entropy employs field recordings of specific sites of production, such as factories and data centers that function as the infrastructure of the financialized economy. These field recordings are digitally transmuted into spectrogram images, which are then interpreted by a weaving designer into a woven pattern made into Jacquard fabric. Jacquard looms are considered precursors to digital technology, underlining the intertwining histories of textile and digital production. gb11 presents Negative Entropy, which includes portraits of a data center, a car manufacturing plant, textile factories, and a selection of human “translators”. Drawing from the specific recordings, each textile work functions as an abstract portrait, for example textile designer Joy Alaoui, and Japanese translator of texts on avant-garde Kazue Kobata. Human presence in these abstract portraits is represented in subtle and apparent irregularities in the textile pattern.
self-presentation:
Tajima’s recent work invokes technologies developed to control and affect the body, focusing on techniques that shape bodily experience of space and time in a built environment where work and leisure spaces have meshed. This is a space where the human body comes into tension with the machinic body and its constructionist logic of fragmentation and measurement. It is also where the diffused productive life energies of individuals are processed as information to be scraped and decoded—the technological imperative to make a population visible and to bring everything to light. But what remains hidden from this visual apparatus and what can body forth from these realms into the space of appearance?
