signs and symbols

April 16 - 29, 2020

Opening Online: Thursday, April 16, 6:00pm
Closing: Wednesday, April 29, 6:00pm

signs and symbols is pleased to present An Algorithm for Snowfall, a video exhibition by German artist Ornella Fieres as part of the gallery’s series of online-only solo presentations of video works.

Ornella Fieres’ An Algorithm for Snowfall is a digital manipulation and reconstruction of historic scientific film footage. Fieres uses an algorithmic intervention to create a simultaneously dystopic and utopic world in which nature and technology intertwine. The two adjacent frames display the same film in extreme slow motion, one part moving forwards while the other moves in reverse — mirroring each other in only one imperceptible instant.

Fieres writes: “With this piece, I wanted to look deeply into the microcosms of the world — the realm of microbes, protozoon, worms or splitting cells — to see if there are traces of some hidden relations between nature, humanity and machines. If we think that everything is connected, then technology has to be one of the paths of life. It wants to grow, evolute and communicate, like the roots of a plant down in the earth, reaching rhizomatically further and further.

“For An Algorithm for Snowfall, I selected footage segments from more than ten historic science documentaries on space, microbic beings or glaciers. The imagery of people entering the Arctic seemed especially foreshadowing the destruction of the poles due to human causes. I imagined that the cracking of the icebergs would open the world of microscopic hidden beings that would intertwine with the machines that humans built.

“In order to look closely at the digitized film material from the 1950s, I used different basic and complex computational methods like extreme slow motion or an algorithm that tries to foresee the image of the next frame, creating movements and fractures within the pictures that I could not control.

“I wanted to make a film that could simultaneously be futuristic or historic; so, I developed two timelines: The left part of the video is showing the evolution from natural microcosm to technical macrocosm. On the right, the same images are moving backwards, forming a synchrony in only one hardly perceivable moment.”

Where we were, where we are, where we are headed…

Throughout history, humans and viruses have long coexisted. We have evolved to live with them, and in response they have developed new ways of affecting us. Today, a virus sweeps over and weakens the globe, revealing how fragile we really are. No one is spared. Knowledge is our only hope. What will happen when the ancient and long-dormant bacteria and viruses, trapped and frozen in ice and permafrost for millennia, are reviving as Earth’s climate warms? As the global temperature rises, these melting glaciers could potentially open a pandora’s box of diseases that could rise from the slush to infect humanity. Will the earth soon be so degraded that life on it becomes impossible? With An Algorithm for Snowfall, Fieres looks to nature, science and technology for answers to our most basic esoteric inquiries… where do we come from and where are we going…

*Please note that Fieres's video will be viewable online from Thursday, April 16 at 6:00pm until Wednesday, April 29 at 6:00pm. Following the end of the exhibition, the video will only be accessible via private link and password. We trust that given our current circumstances, everyone will act in good faith and good will, understanding that these are primary artworks by our artists that are collected and which would otherwise be password protected.

ornella fieres (b. 1984) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. As a visual artist, her work explores boundaries and transitions between the digital and analogue space. To investigate these areas she develops different photographic, video and sound techniques that forcefully juxtapose and merge, not only analogue and digital technologies, but also diverse sources of light and moments in time. The techniques that she uses are developed intuitively and the results seem diffuse: Interferences cast rainbow patterns over black and white images. Pixels merge with film grain. Found footage is altered with an algorithm, whilst video works explore and transform the visual and audible representation of space recordings. Her goal is to combine the analogue universe with the digital space, her work forms an ellipse between universe and earth, analogue and digital, past and present. Her multimedia installations have been exhibited internationally at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Goethe Institut Toronto, Literaturhaus Berlin, NurtureArt Gallery New York, Kunstverein Speyer, and Fotografie Forum Frankfurt. She has given lectures and presentations at Volksbühne Berlin, Haus am Lützowplatz Berlin, Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach and at New Lab New York, where she had a research residency in 2017. Her third solo exhibition in Berlin will open in the fall of 2020, followed by her second solo exhibition in New York at signs and symbols.