Multitasking
NGBK, Berlin, Germany
Harrassed by spam, cookies and pop-ups, through our simultaneous use of different media, we are continually bombarded with data. The selection of works featured in the NGBK’s group show, ‘Multitasking. Synchronität als Kulturelle Praxis’ (Synchronicity and Cultural Practice), demonstrates how our processing of technology-based information can verge on the schizophrenic.
Stefan Panhans’ video piece Sieben bis Zehn Millionen (2005) features the artist manically narrating the fluctuation of his emotions while buying a digital camera, a testimonial to technology’s overwhelming infiltration of our daily habits. Bill Shackelford’s installation, Spam Trap (2007), and Cory Arcangel’s computer-based images, Data Diaries (2002), trace the decline of data from essential to essentially redundant. The apparatus that both creates and consumes such figures is exposed in Lars Tunbjörk’s photographs, as office desks disappear under tangled wires, machines print reels of spam, and stacks of computer screens flicker. Human presence is minimal; in his Stockbroker, New York (1997) an anonymous figure sits in the background manning countless computers, while in Stockbroker, Stockholm (1998) a busy hand hovers near a half-eaten office lunch.
‘Multitasking’ explores many facets of a technologically saturated culture. Impressively, despite the relatively small space of the gallery, the exhibition is never reductive. Perhaps, though, it does not privilege one particular aspect of this wide topic enough. One such casualty is Adrian Piper’s impressive sound installation Seriation II (Now) (1968), which commands disappointingly little attention. And yet divided attention emerges as a theme, exemplified in Lars Siltberg’s perplexing video piece, Ambidextrous Performance (2006), in which, perching on a stool, the artist frantically scribbles upon a blackboard with his hands and feet. The texts remain undecipherable, failure ironically built into the efficiency-driven enterprise of multitasking. Indeed, research conducted in neuroscience has demonstrated that multitasking is not only counterproductive but impossible; the brain is only able to process information sequentially, never simultaneously, moving rapidly back and forth between the different tasks at hand. As Fischli and Weiss remind us in their playful text piece How to Work Better (1991), ‘Do one thing at a time.’
Alice Planel
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