Award-winning architecture studio SOFTlab unveiled their new installation in Frankfurt, Germany as part of the ‘abstrakt Abstrakt – The Systemized World’ exhibition organized by the NODE festival. The piece is a three stories high funnel composed of hundreds of neuron-like pieces of reflecting plastic. SOFTlab was one of the 13 artists invited by Eno Henze and Marius Watz, curators of the exhibit, to analyze the nature and effect of abstraction systems.

“Abstraction systems reproduce the ‘world’ in a new medium (e.g. the financial system) and have great effect on our lives through complex regulatory circuits. The extensive and powerful autonomy of such systems becomes obvious in moments of their dysfunction, like during the interruption of air traffic due to a scientific simulation of a vulcano cloud, or by the drop of the stock market due to automated computer trade. Under a regime of rationality scientists and engineers become performing agents of this development, and bring ever new abstraction systems (and even abstractions of abstraction systems) into action, empowered by computerization and softwareization. The NODE festival emerged from the ‘scene’ of users and developers of the programming language vvvv, which is widely used for the realization of art and design projects. Coming of age, it is not solely committed to these roots, yet two dispositions still characterize its pursuit: on the one hand there is a great familiarity with the ‘workbench of abstraction’ (programming / conditioning of machines), and on the other hand we share an artistic perspective, which is interested in the social and philosophcal implications of this work.”

Photos: Marius Watz
Design Team SOFTlab: Michael Szivos, Carrie McKnelly, and Charlotte Vlerick
Installation: Brandt Graves