Brigade is proud to present 'big-data-who-changed- the-business-world-through-the-sun', a solo exhibition by Danish artist Rune Bering (b. 1984). Bering's artistic practice can be described as that of an excavator and editor. Amongst technological developments, marketing strategies, and political agendas, Bering searches for what things consist of, their production, and their context. The artist works with found systems that he stages through new materials and forms.
Focusing on seemingly banal objects that we deal with on a daily basis, he persistently hones in on the glitches, disconnects, and breaches of interpretation between subjective choices and existing protocols. In this exhibition, Rune Bering continues his artistic exploration of the infrastructures that create the frameworks of meaning of our digital media, cultures, and practices, through photogravure, laser print and sculpture.
'big-data-who-changed-the-business-world-through- the-sun' explores personal information as a major currency in the global digital economy, where this data is voraciously collected and traded. Metadata is embedded in the traces we constantly leave, often unknowingly, to be potentially decrypted, analysed, and used for profiling. Bering's metadata ziplocks are examples of the kind of information that can be extracted from the personal photographs of where his life takes place-the location of his studio and his apartment-but also of random moments, such as the exact time, height, and speed when he was on a plane, right above the Bermuda triangle. Bering's personal metadata bags are taken out of their digital cloud storage into the Plexiglas encasing of photogravure prints. The value of such data, potentially subject to clandestine monetization online, now becomes the artistic subject in its new context of the art market.
The small, ordinary bits of every-day data that we scatter across the digital realm add up to vast data pools that power machine learning algorithms and "change the business world". In the exhibition, a technical sun, named after a stock image of a data center, shines onto the cloud of Bering's metadata. Like the real sun that powers life on earth, this image of a sun powers data centers and illuminates the flat layers of data that are deeply rooted in our private lives. The generic names of commercial stock images and the inaccessible spaces of our data banks have taken on a poetic disguise, generated out of the epic remnants of meaning that the endlessly repeated daily cycle of the sun embodies. This work sheds light on Bering's artistic process of probing, uncovering, gathering, and superimposing the many layers and screens that veil the backstage handshakes between users, governments and corporations to release, harvest and document our interactions with technological devices: be they almost-invisible codes on every single page of laser print, GPS and device data encoded in all photographs, or the commercial potential of any mouse click.
Natalie Koerner
