Ivana Franke: Waking background

14.02.2012 - 13.03.2012

Exhibition opening and talk: 14/02/2012 at 19.00 h
Art and Neuroscience in dialogue 

Invited speakers: artist Ivana Franke, neuroscientist Ida Momennejad, neurosurgeon Ulrich-Wilhelm Thomale
Moderator: Sunčica Ostoić
The talk will be in English.

Curators: Vanja Žanko and Petra Vidović

Book reading: Distant Feeling
11/02/2012 at 13.oo h at Prozori Gallery (Zapoljska 1)

 

The opening of Ivana Franke’s exhibition Waking Background will take place on 14 February 2012 at Lauba. The exhibition features the installation Seeing with Eyes Closed (realized within the interdisciplinary project Seeing with Eyes Closed, in collaboration with neuroscientist Ida Momennejad and The Association of Neuroesthetics, Berlin), as well as the series of prints Waking Background. A presentation of the artist book Distant Feeling will take place at Prozori Gallery, which will later be exhibited at Lauba.

Besides the works from the Waking Background exhibition, Ivana Franke’s works Latency (Sala Colonne) from 2007 and Floor (collaboration with Silvio Vujičić and Damir Očko) from 2005, owned by the Filip Trade Collection, will also be on view as part of the Non-permanent Exhibition at Lauba.

Participants of the talk are author of the installation, Ivana Franke, neuroscientist Ida Momennejad and neurosurgeon Ulrich-Wilhelm Thomale, co-founder of The Association of Neuroesthetics. The talk will be moderated by curator Sunčica Ostoić (Device art Festival, Kontejner).

  

The installation Seeing with Eyes Closed concerns the visual experience of flowing images induced by stroboscopic light behind closed eyes. Being aware that the seen images have no foundation in external reality, one experiences them as hallucinatory. This ‘conscious quasi-hallucinating’ challenges our sense of the real in its alternation and its permeability with the imaginary. Each person’s experience differs from that of others, and each ascribes different dimensions to the perceived space in constant transformation. Communicating the content of this ephemeral flux of unpredictable percepts stretches the limits of acquiring a subjective report to extremes, and challenges the scientific aspiration to precisely measure the timing of conscious phenomena.

With the unpredictability of visual responses to light stimuli, participation in the art installation raises the question of subjectivity and authorship. The final “work” happens in our body and depends on our experience as well as on the boundary between the public and intimate space.

The series of prints Waking Background and the artist book Distant Feeling are a spatial translation of the temporal sequence of flashing light used in the installation Seeing with Eyes Closed into black and white striped patterns. In the process of this translation, the duration of each flash of light is translated to the width of a white bar, and the durations of the dark pauses between flashing lights are translated to black bars.

The different visual stimuli used in Seeing with Eyes Closed and Waking Background/Distant Feeling (flashing light vs. black and white stripes) have certain physical characteristics in common - in spite of the radical differences in material and frequency domains. These commonalities of the two pieces give rise to the somewhat similar conscious experiences of seeing hallucinatory/illusory images in space.

The ephemeral experience induced by the two pieces raises the further question regarding similar perceptual experiences in response to frequencies of different visual stimuli. One wonders whether there is an underlying similarity in the corresponding neural activity induced by the stimuli in the cortex of the observer. One of the most fascinating scientific puzzles is to understand how these cortical rhythms translate into the conscious experience of seeing images in space, where there is nothing. It is precisely this experience that is the point of both scientific and artistic interest: Seeing images, with eyes closed or open, in absence of isomorphic stimuli in spatial locations where the images appear.

Seeing with Eyes Closed is an installation with LED lights which are programmed to flicker simultaneously at a frequency between 12 and 50 hertz and for an entire duration of 3 minutes and 18 seconds. Each flash of light lasts 6 milliseconds, and the dark pauses vary in duration. Visitors are invited to sit on the floor in front of the installation and close their eyes. They are then exposed to the flashing light, which gives rise to a quasi-hallucinatory visual experience of flowing images behind closed eyes.

The translation of the installation to drawings in Waking Background and Distant Feeling uses rectangular wave gratings. These rectangular waves are drawn in the range of spatial frequencies between 12 and 50 cycles per degree of visual angle, throughout the length of 560 cm. Visitors/readers are invited to observe each page for 5 seconds. This ‘reading’ process gives rise to the appearance of illusory moiré-like patterns. (From the text by Ida Momennejad and Ivana Franke) 

The project Seeing with Eyes Closed will be presented at the exhibition opening and the topic of discussion, among other things, will be neuroesthetics, collaboration between artists and scientists, limits of the perception of visual reality and its construction, as well as the meaning of what we see without knowing what we are looking at.

The installation Seeing with Eyes Closed was first presented at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2011. In March 2012 it will be presented at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. It will be on view at Lauba until 13 March 2012.

Photos:

 

Ivana Franke (Zagreb, 1973) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, and has since participated in several research programs, including the Institute for Spatial Experiments (Institut für Raumexperimente) in Berlin, Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu (CCA) in Kitakyushu and P.S.1
Contemporary Art Center in New York. She represented Croatia at the 52^nd Venice Biennale in 2007 with her solo exhibition “Latency”, and at the 9^th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2004 with the collaborative work “Frameworks” with architects Petar Mišković, Lea Pelivan and Toma Plejić. She has realized a number of projects in collaboration with architects, including “Room for Running Ghosts” with 3lhd Studio in 2011 and “Light Carpet” with Studio UP in 2010. Her other exhibitions include Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2011, Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in 2011, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka in 2010, Art Pavilion in Zagreb in 2009, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Centre in New York, Manifesta 7 and Reykjavik Experiment Marathon in 2008, and the project “Linienstrasse113” in Berlin in 2007, organized by the Filip Trade Collection. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

 

Curators: Vanja Žanko, Petra Vidović

Press Release: Petra Vidović
Exhibition Preface: Elena Agudio
Photo Documentation: Ivana Franke, Damir Žižić, Sandra Aračić
Production: Lauba, Studio Ivana Franke
Production of the Artist Book: Knjižnice grada Zagreba
PR: Vanja Žanko
Translation: Zana Šaškin, Maja Blažun
Proofreading: Susan Jakopec (eng), Becky McKay (eng), Tina Novak (cro)
Technical Team: Jure Strunje
Thanks to: Irena Bekić, Dominik Markušić, Luka Goreta 

 

The exhibition was realized in collaboration with the Association of Neuroesthetics, Berlin. Seeing with Eyes Closed and Distant Feeling are realized with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia and the City of Zagreb. The project is supported by Goethe-Institut Kroatien. 

www.lauba.hr
www.association-of-neuroesthetics.org 
www.ivanafranke.net