Basin of Attraction
pressSolo exhibition at Bonner Kunstverein
September 10th – November 10th, 2013
Photographs by Simon Vogel
The corporate image owes its morphology to the (temporarily) stable-attractors of its instinctual and habituated affects. The commercial realm more so than any other domain of society is where the most research is done into the construction of affect: How humans process and respond to images of consumable goods and people. Because businesses depend on images to communicate to consumers in order to survive - vast sums are spent to study, map and sculpt the (real) virtual architecture of the affective qualities of images. This virtual environment hosting and generating the image attractor is inhabited by the economic, the political and the vestigial. In identifying these attractors and hyper-framing them to the Nth degree, we reach an often uncomfortable conflation of criticality and complicity. An uncanny valley where the dissected resembles the exalted. However synthetic seeming, these manifestations remain immanent to the compositions of a contingent nature like the bodies of plants and animals, the flows of rivers, or the geologies of mountains. Not a balanced and harmonious nature, but rather whirlpools of temporary stability within a chaotic and disinterested maelstrom of fluids, informations, and genes.