Error is Shadow
502 Bad Gateway at Flux IV
502 Bad Gateway (@502.bg), the art collaboration project of Alexander Baumann and Robert Ruth, make work that operates somewhere between speculative fiction (such as Roadside Picnic) and architectural criticism. In their latest show, Error is Shadow, they take up the idea of “danger architecture”—a kind of brutalism designed not to keep the wealthy safe from the present, but to keep deep-future people, or perhaps aliens, away for their own good. The premise is as much a thought experiment as an aesthetic position: How do you communicate with structure? How do you warn a being that may not share your language, your temporality, your sense of threat?
This is territory we are very engaged in at SUB/URBAN REVIEW. But the question the show keeps circling is whether our future selves listen. If the Pyramids are any indication—or the long cinematic tradition of entering the tomb, the bunker, the exclusion zone, the going towards the SCREAMS—the more elaborate and explicit the warning, the more irresistible the invitation. The show suggests something like a value-discounting hypothesis applied not to economics but to complexity: the more intricate the danger architecture, the more appealing it becomes. The most effective deterrent might be a kind of undesigned architecture, the opposite of complexity and wonder. But that wouldn’t be any fun.
Error is Shadow forces philosophical questions and elicits more discussion than it resolves. What is danger architecture, really? According to 502 Gateway, it may be the opposite of what is happening here, unless the invitation is in itself the invasion.
Bureaucracy is rarely as innocent as it seems, it is often disingenuous in its incompetence and typically accomplishes hegemonic’s goals.
Think Tolkien THE ONE RING!
Do we want to hurt the future us (other)? Is it a final slap (and temptation) from beyond the grave? What if feigned incompetence is all part of the plan!?
Showing at Flux IV until August 30
502 Bad Gateway (@502.bg) is the artist duo of Alexander Baumann and Robert Ruth, whose collaborative artistic disciplines include motion capture performance, oil painting, 3D game development, sculpture, vintage tech restoration, building audio synthesizers, animation, and filmmaking. Their practice focuses on integrating their artistic methods with deprecated technologies from many different eras, drawing on the history of usage to underline the intent of the work.
Flux IV is a project space by Flux Factory, presenting an annual season of free, multidisciplinary exhibitions and public programs.
