In collaboration with the University of Ottawa’s Department of Visual Arts, Knot Project Space hosted a solo exhibition by Berlin-based media artist, writer and designer Patricia Reed. This five-week exhibition was dedicated to presenting a single work from Reed’s multifaceted practice, Volatile Prophecies. The animation and sound work was installed as a large-scale projection in the room, projected onto a black-painted wall, producing a depth and vastness to the video’s negative space that extending the sense of the space beyond its comfortable limits, pushing it into an unstable, dizzying, alienating state.
Volatile Prophecies
Volatile Prophecies presents a swirling tour in deep space where star constellations have been replaced by coins from all active currencies today. The camera takes a “random walk” path through the constellations, with each coin spinning in a suspended state of probability. The gesture of flipping a coin in a decision-making process breaks down when inertia is unending and friction is nonexistent, while the bodily discomfort of the camera movements renders a sense of ungrounded orientation within our complex condition. The soundtrack includes fragments of voices in the six languages most used in global exchange markets. The words originate from a sentiment analysis dictionary in finance used for the algorithmic processing of human emotions to forecast trends in trading and incite speculation. The work has been influenced by the tendency in algorithmic trading to pluck specialists from astrophysics, who possess rare expertise in integrating incredible amounts of data, but whose capacities have been reduced to operationalizing micro-second competitive advantages in profit seeking.
Patricia Reed
Patricia Reed (b. Ottawa, Canada) is an artist, writer and designer based in Berlin. As an artist, selected exhibitions include those at the Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź; The Future of Demonstration, Vienna; The Museum of Capitalism, Oakland; Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa; Home Works 7, Beirut; Witte de With, Rotterdam; HKW, Berlin; and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart. Recent writings have been published in Post-Memes (Punctum Books); Para-Platforms (Sternberg); Distributed (Open Editions); Xeno-Architecture (Sternberg); e-flux Architecture; _AH Journal; Cold War Cold World (Urbanomic); Moneylab #2 (Inst. of Networked Cultures) and The Neurotic Turn (Repeater Books). With V. Ivanova, she co-curated the 1948 Unbound: Tokens session as a performative symposium with the House of World Cultures team, Berlin (2017), and was a theory researcher for Public Art Munich 2018. Reed is also part of the Laboria Cuboniks (techno-material feminist) working group, whose 2015 manifesto was reissued by Verso Books in 2018.
Related Programming
Talk: Promiscuous Publicness, Patricia Reed. Oct. 11, 2019. Knot Project Space.