In the fashionable age of sensible telephones and fixed web entry, we’re inundated with knowledge, info and information. We have turn out to be hooked on the lure of limitless connection, unaware of the myriad methods it influneces our lives.

This is the theme of Spanish multidisciplinary artist Daniel Canogar‘s first solo exhibition within the area — following from his work on the Spain’s nationwide pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai. Called Loose Threads, the present at Galloire gallery in Dubai’s City Walk opened this week and runs till February 24.

It is an unexpectedly lovely and ethereal examination of the fixed stream of knowledge that we eat via expertise. Canogar, who splits his time between dwelling in Madrid and Los Angeles, not solely creates data-driven artworks, however makes use of knowledge as a medium itself.

“There used to be these really specific news cycles,” Canogar tells The National. “You’d buy the newspaper in the morning, then at night you’d catch the evening news. But now it’s incessant, it never stops. I’m very interested in trying to capture that incessant flow.”

The present features a 2016 work known as Ripple — an oblong display hung in portrait format on the wall. At first look, the floor seems like a multicoloured, finely woven textile, till three adjoining horizontal traces cascade from the highest at various speeds, abandoning a placing colored path.

Each of those transferring traces signify a brand new video being uploaded on to CNN’s web site. When a brand new video is uploaded, a big thumbnail of that clip seems and makes its method down the display, abandoning a ripple of color based mostly on the hues that seem on the video.

Once the video reaches the underside of the display, it reappears on the high as a collapsed line trickling down once more. These uploads make up the archive of movies from CNN from the previous hour, and as a brand new clips are available, the oldest ones are kicked out.

“I’m just creating this algorithm that’s creating this very patterned fabric,” says Canogar. “Somebody told me it looks like a Missoni fabric and I do like that idea that it has pleats and the folds of this of this fabric.”

Canogar first made the connection between cloth and expertise when he noticed a personal assortment of pre-Columbian textiles. “I was just so affected by the beauty and mystery, the complexity of some of these [pieces],” he says.

The artist discovered himself drawn to how completely different weaving methods had completely different meanings. And whereas the textiles used symbols to signify completely different concepts, Canogar noticed one thing past that. “The way textile craftsmen and craftswomen were referencing their own medium … that takes a very sophisticated mind, a very modern mind,” he added.

“In a way, you’re thinking about the act of making a textile as part of the subject matter of the textile. And that’s where I connected to my working with technology and referencing technology.”

For the following few years, Canogar researched the idea and fleshed out the connections he noticed between expertise and materials.

He was fascinated to find that the Jacquard loom, a machine that simplifies the method of producing textiles and was patented in 1804, is taken into account the primary pc. Patterns are created on the material utilizing punch playing cards carved with holes, that are inserted into the loom.

Canogar sees these punch playing cards as a sort of primitive algorithm. From there, he noticed how tv screens use interlaced traces, taken from textiles, to create photographs.

“I think of screens as a modern forms of textiles, the way we think about screens, the way we use screens to represent our world,” he says. “The way we’re beginning to cover buildings, particularly here in Dubai with screens … it has a membrane skin like aspect, which is very textile.”

While visually mesmerising, Canogar’s work goes past aesthetics. These digital textiles thread completely different varieties of knowledge collectively, which additionally inform the visible high quality of the works.

All the items within the exhibition, bar one, are related to the web and use stay knowledge to create digital materials of knowledge, leading to summary, transferring graphic shapes and hues.

One work, Chyron, depicts a group of entangled, skinny ribbons of assorted colors floating as if in water. Each has a sequence of phrases working throughout it. These are literally the “tickers” seen on the backside of screens from real-time broadcasts on CNN, Al Jazeera, the BBC, MSNBC, Fox News and extra.

The strongest of his works is Tunica. In comparability to the others, it’s a a lot smaller display, set in a distinct, a lot darker house within the gallery. Thin, horizontal white and golden threads are woven via with silver vertical ones. They transfer like a dial, synchronously increasing and shrinking in dimension.

The vertical traces additionally signify the names of people that died in Madrid throughout the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, whereas the horizontal ones mirror these born within the metropolis throughout the identical interval.

Through every work, Canogar takes us out of the minutia of stories and knowledge, that are embedded into our lives and, via the metaphoric and symbolic use of digital textiles, makes us rethink our relationship with expertise and information.

“I want to use the news to create art and to see it almost from a different perspective,” he says.

“My works allow me to process the news and to find some kind of mysterious beauty, the inner calmness, within the island storm.”

Daniel Canogar’s exhibition Loose Threads runs till February 24 at Galloire gallery in City Walk, Dubai

Updated: January 29, 2023, 4:04 AM