Unscripted Interfaces
Curated by Marialaura Ghidini

Sophia Brueckner & Tara Kelton

Unscripted Interfaces presents two artistic encounters with the mediating effects of the interfaces of the everyday. Sophia Brueckner and Tara Kelton, with reciprocal approaches, explore the spaces that form a boundary between the human—our bodies, behaviours, emotions—and the machine—the software, the computer, the corporate infrastructure that enables technological developments.

Digital or not, interfaces mediate the relationship between reality and representation—they transform, developing new languages in response to technological advancements, and to the way the ‘users’ experiment with their limits. Brueckner and Kelton dive into the confines generated by the standardisation interfaces operate—they explore their inner workings and languages. Brueckner does so with the computer and the act of programming; Kelton with the built environment and the act of rendering it. Together, the artists explore the contours of their power in morphing what we see and how we see it, how we experience reality and we reconfigure it—they inspect what is scripted, by testing and taking apart what constitutes it.

Brueckner’s body of works, which includes objects, paintings, videos and text, depict her relationship with the computer. Through programming, the artist generates feedback-loop exchanges with the machine—she experiments with the syntax of its language, its controlling environment, the fact that it is devoid of the human body. Brueckner gives life to situations in which the computer and its code are humanised—she imbues them with emotions (hers and those of others). Programming, for Bruecker, is a world that is simultaneously a source of constraints and magic.

With her site-specific sculptures, paintings and digital images, Kelton dissects what encases the corporate infrastructure of the tech world—the franchised IT park that has become an aesthetic feature of the city of Bangalore. The artist uses the anonymity, standardisation and a-historicity of the Bangalore’s IT building as materials to create an environment where the human is confronted with the opacity of omnipresent digital products. Kelton renders spaces, a rendering that she uses as a means to reveal what passes unnoticed for its ubiquity.

Both Brueckner and Kelton play with the scripted spaces of interfaces to reveal their fictions and unravel them—they tweak their structures, rules, and appearances by looking through them.

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