Portfolio: Anna Ørberg 2022

--------------------------------------

"TECH-HIGH!" at Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen, September 17 2022 - January 22 2023

Algorithms are complicated mathematical models that control everything from Google searches to consumer behaviour monitoring, financial speculation and surveillance equipment. Programmed by humans, algorithms direct the ubiquitous computer technology. The models are created by tech companies and military institutions with different agendas and are based on calculated beauty which is why they are far from neutral.

In her exhibition TECH-HIGH!, Anna Ørberg depicts the back side of the hyper-technological world that surround us through a video work and a felt sculpture.

The video work shows six algorithms dressed in rabbit costumes gathered in a closed room for an AA meeting. A meeting at Algorithms Anonymous. In the small, closed circle, they share their stories and use AA's 12 steps for personal recovery. They each process their past facing it. They are algorithms that have been involved in activities such as data collection, manipulation of debt certificates and drone warfare. Actions that have led them deep down the rabbit hole and of which they only now understand the consequences.

Togehter with the video work hangs a felt sculpture that keeps us in the material world. The sculpture takes shape after a scene from a presentation video for the new social media Metaverse where all togetherness is limitedto virtual reality. Unlike weaving and similar textile production, which is based on a pixel structure and therefore has a close connection to the digital, felt is made by entangling organic fibres into a random and unpredictable mass.

Ørberg's sculpture can be seen as an appropriation of the founder of the Metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg's, future vision for the internet. For this exhibition, the figure is no longer a digital simulation but in Ørberg's version contains a tactile and aesthetic quality that can only be experienced in the physical world.

The title of the exhibition, TECH-HIGH!, not only refers to advanved high technology but with its reversed word order becomes an expression of the obsession with getting high from the latest technological developments. The wordplay of the title refers to the tech giants' of Silicon Valley' compulsive attempts to keep the addiction alive with inventions such as web3, blockchain and NFTs and with the consumer's desperate yearning for the dopamine-triggering notifications. At the same time, the title points to our fear of having to do without something if we defy the paradigm of eternal growth.

The exhibition has been curated by Anders Kjær Rasmussen and Emil Busch Madsen. Installation photos Mads Holm.