Joachim Coucke´s works speak of this natural change, the relationship between us and the digital and physical realm, knowing that a demarcation is impossible. His installations and sculptures investigate the ethical and moral debates that arise from current technofied euphemisms, using an ever lasting supply of outdated computer hard-ware. All that is fluid and ethereal, allowing information to flow, has indeed a physical equivalent. When an algorith-mized life tries more and more to detach sensation from one´s body, these accumulations of technological waste, seem unreal, but indeed they are and ever spreading.
“To Empty your Mind” continues to bring forth new beings, that seem to grow ever more amorphous structures. Standing in front of the space, the disparity of a digital future becomes obvious: Floating in the window, the ne-on-letters “The Societies In The Clouds” speak of our habit to share, the need to make everything translucent and accessible, while being juxtaposed by a room-filling installation of network, USB and power supply cables. Waste and lightness oppose each other, making clear one cannot go without the other. Following up on his series of sculp-tures using masks and computer parts, Coucke humanized them one step further in a strange manner, by making it somewhat clear they could be a head of something that watches you. This wild growth of hardware, that builds the “Dwellers“ series is continued in two aquarium-like pieces. Here, in a black server cabinet, and a plexiglass box, technified organic things, that could resemble coral reefs, seem to have long past the point, when things still needed human hands to construct it. They are asking, what the difference between nature and technology could any longer be. Against the backdrop of autonomous technology, the vision of our entanglement within a self-run megastructure doesn’t seem too kitschy any more.
Jonas Schenk
Co-curator at Mélange, Cologne, Germany
