ROKOLECTIV
STATES OF APOPHENIA

With States of Apophenia, Rokolectiv are looking for meaningful patterns that are not really there.

With States of Apophenia, Rokolectiv invites several artists to produce new video works that investigate apophenia and some of its most common expressions (such as pareidolia) from different points of view: aesthetical, biological, technological, socio-cultural etc. Apophenia is a term used in psychology to describe the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things or to look for patterns in random events.

The exhibition presents newly commissioned videos from artists Madison Bycroft, Adrian Ganea, Apparatus 22, Nona Inescu, Jared Marks, and Natasha Tontey & Riar Rizaldi.

You can watch the video works, here.

Face off/Thick Skin is a new film by Madison Bycroft that takes as its departure Lauren Berlant's use of "Flat Affect" to describe underperformance or expressionlessness. Flat affect refers to a "general atmosphere of non-transparency… and withheld or uneven accessibility." The work moves across, through and below surfaces, with narratives that might get carried away or never quite arrive.
In her strenuous attempt to understand love, this ultimate abstract human concept, she was programmed not to feel. Atletica Ideal – a hybrid A.I from the utopian realm of Suprainfinit – did everything to immerse in definitions and depictions of love and pleasure. Literature, porn, philosophy, cinema – nothing was left untouched in SEX TAPE VIII by Apparatus 22.
Dividuations is a term proposed by Michaela Ott as an alternative to that of the individual, encompassing not only the divisible nature of a single body, but also its participations in multi-scalar events. Jared Marks embodies the term with Dividua, a deity whose card game ritual forces players to draw mental connections between a wide array of phenomena, dissolving any sense of individual agency.
Based on a few particular fragments from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Adrian Ganea's Dance of the Butterflies is a speculative work about generative algorithms and digital simulations that have the tendency to search for meaning in their surroundings through the senses they possess.
In Fugitive Haruspicy, Natasha Tontey & Riar Rizaldi transport us inside the imagination of a tired and worn pattern-recognition machine intelligence, in the future of Indonesia. A glimpse into the lyfe of a biological anthropoid; breathing, dancing, singing, and becoming one with nature.
A mimetolith is a natural rock formation that resembles a living form in nature. This type of anthropomorphized rock can be anything from a striation that resembles human muscle, to large formations with apparent human features such as faces, body shape, and hands. In Looking at stones, looking at me, Nona Inescu takes on pareidolia trough a juxtaposition of concretion stones and Roger Caillois' writings.