It is with great pleasure to announce the world premiere of ARIAN’s ‘Perses and the Blackbody (Perses und Schwarzkörper),’ awarded finalist at the 50th Anniversary of the Arecibo Message, ‘Contact Attempt,’ organized by Art Meets Science—Foundation Herbert W. Franke.

The work responds to and is an unyielding continuation of Arian's monumental récit, ‘Integral Sprawl,’ which has studiously dislocated the artist for well over three years, forming a play that is symmetrically exilic and astral. The multiplex subjects explored in the piece comprise astroparticle physics, tracking algorithms, interplanetary scintillation, exotheology, mythographic dramaturgy, Verfremdungseffekt, and star catalogues, among others.

Tracking algorithms, employed in radio detection and radar systems, predict future positions of moving objects, based on previous data reported by sensors. They are, in other words, real-world portraits of their namesakes used within the informational space, per surveillance capitalism e.g., probabilistic ad-tracking systems used across the Internet. In ‘Perses and the Blackbody,’ such algorithms are employed as dramaturgical tools, remodeling time-based video art, an artform conventionally organized using film (moving images), to use instead light as foundation for interplanetary landscape painting, creating the illusion of movement.

The titular ‘blackbody,’ an idealization in physics defined as an object that absorbs all incident rays—often a model for stars and planets—here hints at the ways in which the informational space inverts the original conception of landscape, as ‘[something which] looks and [someone who] is looked at,’ replacing the human onlooker, with a non-human agent (algorithm). The piece’s final act of breaking the fourth-wall acts as an instance of Verfremdungseffekt, equating the denouement (character) with the source (light), thereby suggesting how prior movements were falsely presented to the viewer as time-based.

The character in question is identified as Perses, the mythical progenitor of the Persians, an ‘alien’ people within Greco-Roman mythography. That Perses and his half-sibling, Heracles, whose constellation provides the end-point for the Arecibo Message, are related characters is further explored in ‘Mithraion,’ the wider work within which the piece is situated.

Aesthetically, the piece extends the multicolored digital representation of the message, in polyptych form, to render a planetary ontology, highlighting how sun appears in a different color when viewed from, e.g., Mars (with a blue tint), achieving a naturalistic effect while using a technique endemic to German expressionism.

Prediction of ‘future’ positions of objects is furthermore subverted when ‘time’ is taken as a virtual agent impacting future modulations of the same root module/piece (per ‘modular media’), so as to restructure kinetic art while accommodating long-term advancements in machine learning e.g., mechanical neural networks (MNNs), which the artist has closely studied since their emergence, as part of early research into generative models, presented, among others, at the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI).

Part of Arian's forthcoming Total Work of Art (TWoA), ‘Mithraion,’ the piece will be publicly exhibited at the Hamburg Planetarium, on Nov 16, and at the Bochum Planetarium, on Nov 18, 2024.

Tickets are available here (Hamburg / Bochum). Specific event pages for RSVP are also available on Luma (Hamburg / Bochum), ArtRabbit (Hamburg / Bochum) and Events.xyz (Hamburg / Bochum).

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The Art of ARIAN—Arian Bagheri Pour Fallah ©️ 2024. All rights reserved.