NYAB Event - Daniel Canogar “Small Data”

Daniel Canogar “Small Data”

Bitforms Gallery

This event has ended.

bitforms gallery presents Small Data, a second solo exhibition in New York with Daniel Canogar. Featuring the premiere of a new series, the exhibit includes nine video projection-mapped objects that are intimate in scale.
Based in Spain, Canogar is renowned internationally for his use of discarded electronic materials in his photography, video, sculpture and installations. Finding inspiration in the archeology of new media, he brings the dead back to life. Secrets contained beyond an object’s surface are revealed, as he constructs portraits of a society and an age. Canogar is also the creator of numerous public art installations, many of them engaging the participation of local communities, such as Waves in Houston, the world’s largest arabesque LED video sculpture; Constelaciones in Madrid at MRío Park, the largest photo-mosaic in Europe; and Travesías in Brussels, a commission for the atrium of the European Union Council in 2010.

The process of excavation is central to Canogar’s practice. Works from his new series Small Data are comprised of overhead projections and salvaged devices, such as crushed computers, scanners, printers, old cell phones and hard discs. The artist pulled each item from piles of discarded materials in junkyards and recycling centers–today’s veritable cemeteries for consumer electronics. The found objects are organized on shelves, as if they were fragile remnants of a bygone era. Light seemingly reanimates these abandoned technologies, as video projections are precisely aimed at each object, crafting layered and painterly abstract narratives.

Canogar’s animated installations capture our complex and sometimes ambivalent relationship with consumer electronics. “Buying the latest gadget makes us feel like sophisticated citizens of the digital age. Yet these technologies break down or are rendered obsolete at a fast pace,” says Canogar. Propped on shelves, the decaying technologies of Small Data are presented as contemporary still lives, insidious reminders of our own aging process and inevitable expiration date.

As a collection of objects, Small Data explores the life and death of consumer electronics–and how when we discard our devices, we are throwing out a small part of ourselves. As tools for communication with the outside world, and as repositories for so many of our memories, we acquire a very intimate relationship with the technological devices present in the artworks. Haunted by these pasts, Canogar attempts to reveal the memories, both personal and collective, that seem trapped within, mementos of a time when they had fully functional lives and served us well.