Woven All of Dream and Error from artist duo Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty presents a collection of films, images, and sounds that consider the overlap of two areas of technological history: the sites of abandoned railway lines, and the emergence of machine learning — or what has popularly come to be referred to as artificial intelligence. The exhibition, which takes its title from a poem written in 1918 by the Portuguese modernist master Fernando Pessoa, investigates the artistic and practical implications of the overlap of these two technologies.
The works present a series of walks undertaken by the artists along the paths of now-disused railway routes in Berlin and the surrounding area. In these walks, they carry portable speakers, playing the sound of machine-learning-generated audio of invented trains: sound that has been hallucinated by the dream and error of contemporary computational technology and which is juxtaposed with the ruins of past layers of the built environment.
Opening reception: Thursday, 12th September
Discussion event: Saturday 14th September
Closing event with live concert: Sunday, 15th September
Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty have worked as a collaborative duo since 2011. They live and work in Berlin.
Their work combines elements of durational and time-based art, minimalist movement, and electroacoustic music and sound. They are interested in processes, sounds, and movements that come close to imperceptibility, and the ways in which this material can be transformed through repetition, patterning, layering, and archiving.