Emmanuel Van der Auwera: A Thousand Pictures of Nothing

In Van der Auwera’s ‘VideoSculptures’, the screen and related hardware become sculptural material. The large-format VideoSculpture XXV (Archons) consists of eight manipulated screens and four black glass plates via which the images can be seen in their inverted form. This cinema in negative explores the theme of digital immortality and is loosely based on futuristic tales by research and security specialist Rick Ferguson. To the naked eye, the screens yield nothing but white light. It is only when looking down into the dark glass that one can see images flitting by, seemingly ad infinitum, as if squinting into an endless mine of poetic visions reflecting a postmortal digital life.

VideoSculpture XXV (Archons) was commissioned for the artist’s solo exhibition at the House of Electronic Arts in Basel, Switzerland (2022) and supported by the European Union’s S+T+ARTS program via the Mindspaces Residency.

Emmanuel Van der Auwera’s new film investigates mysterious white clouds, the promises of communication technologies and the lives of laborers whose work helps us see the world and yet remains outside of the visible grid. White Cloud is an emotional speculative documentary that offers one of the first looks into an equally mysterious and influential Rare Earth Element mining district. While questions related to geopolitics, ecology, capitalism, conspiracy and future scenarios circulate around the film, at the core is the testimony of a lonely miner attempting to embrace a dark and desolate landscape in search of a better tomorrow. Using generative audio and visual tools, Van der Auwera looks into the deep underbelly of these technologies and the rarely spoken relationship between the earth’s bowels and humanity’s outer space dreams. The film has an uncanny, slightly grotesque feel as emerging AI technologies show their own flaws. It was not despite, but exactly because of these flaws that Van der Auwera was driven towards the utilization of these tools. Within months or perhaps weeks, this aesthetic will disappear leaving us with an illusion of reality where what doesn’t exist is indiscernible from what does. And herein perhaps lies the artist’s focus, providing us with critical resources to read the physical world as it vanishes before our eyes.