Compression

Artmaking since the turn of the millennium, using compression algorithms as a descriptive tool.

Since the turn of the millennium, contemporary artists have navigated a landscape comprising two worlds: one still indebted to critical operations of the past, and another whose real-time reformatting of culture through swift technological developments asks for an entirely different set of discursive models. The essays in Compression consider these superimposed realities by examining artists’ altered approaches across generations, taking up their new departures—from appropriation to memes, and from site-specific engagements to fabricated narratives—and ultimately looking at how artists have even begun to construct history, and memory, differently in their work. To this end, this volume explores the potential basis of compression algorithms as a descriptive term for these shifts. If such algorithms provide filters through which images are sifted in order to decrease the amount of memory space they occupy—discarding visual information but recasting those remaining details to provide an imperceptibly altered version of reality—how might they aptly characterize artists’ portrayals of contemporary experience? If these algorithms summon memory even while possibly “losing” information, what is similarly lost and gained as contemporary artists are entering a new age? Compressionexamines such questions as presented by the work of artists Chantal Akerman, Sayre Gomez, Pierre Huyghe, Ralph Lemon, Robert Longo, Maria Hassabi, Taryn Simon, Avery Singer, and many others.