The Search Drive, 2014. Video still. Courtesy of the artist

The Statisticon

September 23, 2020

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Miami Practicas Contemporaneas, Bogotá, Colombia, presents ‘The Statisticon’, the first solo exhibition in Colombia of the American born conceptual artist Warren Neidich. Warren Neidich’s art practice is interdisciplinary and theoretically based. For this show he will present a large Neon diagram entitled ‘The Statisticon’, 2016, which maps out his theory of the Statisticon. The Statisticon is the perfect and seamless confluence of the conditions of massive data collection, the sculpting of the brains’ neural plasticity, smart and sustainable architecture and urban design, the processes of valorization created by communicative capitalism and the technologies of affect integrated into post-production and special effects found in film and virtual platforms. Art and shamanism play important roles in releasing the individual from these forms of contemporary domination. The diagram consumes the entire back of the gallery and its colorful display casts an ambient texture of red, white and yellow light upon the opposite wall. Neidich is performing a blind folded performance in front of it at various times during the exhibition elucidating its meaning from memory. In the front gallery his internationally acclaimed video The ‘Search Drive’, 2014, which has been screened at such places as the Zentrum fur Kunst and Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe German and The Centre of Photographie, Geneva, will be projected. In the video a secret agent hacks into the personal data of the artist using the same soft ware utilized by the National Security Agency to spy on Americans to create a data profile he calls a hack-ography rather then a biography. Spyware, the Dark web, Tor software, facial recognition software and drones are the protagonists of this contemporary thriller.