Galerie b2

Ronny Szillo is not concerned with the big issues, he does not take part in
subjective navel-gazing and does not explore any formal problems related
to the technologies or media that he chooses to use. Rather the mechanisms
of media are central to his investigations of a post-digital world.
Szillo’s work emerges in this place where Smartphones and Tablets appear
as multimedia-interactive prosthetics and organ-like interfaces that almost
seem to abolish the border between analog and digital spheres. Through
the misuse or manipulation of commonplace consumer technologies, he
first generates virtual pieces that, re-translated as IRLs in the object world
of ‘real life’, create undeniable references to their digital origins. Calculated
loss of control and glitches generate awkward remixes of ubiquitous consumption
practices and, at the same time, highlight the aesthetic potential
of the underside of mundane user-interfaces.

The form of presentation recalls the non-hierarchical system of tightly
packed posts on his numerous Tumbler sites. It can be read as a critical
statement in relation to traditional forms of presentation whereby seemingly
auratic works are found in awe-inspiring white cubes or temple-like
museums. Szillo lets go of the reins and thus the ‘artist’, whose creative
personality we are used to constructing, steps into the background, recognizable
only as the initiator of bizarre, half-automated mass production
and its unpredictable effects.

Martin Bull

What could presenting a medium as a fossil and the currently most common
communication device as an imprint imply? Pondering the question
in how far a medium can potentially carry meaning and function as a referential
object, can firstly be interpreted as a theoretical punchline of the
constitutional correlation between a medium an its purpose.
That a medium functions more effectively as this correlation is obscured is one aspect
of the indifference of media, another aspect can be constructed between
the application of a medium (as a tool) and ist purpose (communication,
mediatization), respectively between a medium and its formal quality.
Rather than differentiating the connection of technical devices and
linguistic-symbolic structures, Ronny Szillo is concernd with the sensory
perception, the materiality of media and the confrontation of the viewer
with the possibilities of perception that a medium predefines. Thus the
series of imprints in marmorated clay not only comments on the technical
and technological versatility of a medium no longer primarily defined
by basic functions (verbal exchange, written exchange), but documents a
forever-changing medial space of action which enables and predetermines
operational and communicational activity. Besides the symbiosis of
telecommunication and the processing of data, apparent in the evolution
of the cellphone with analog user interface to the iPhone with multi-touch
screen, it is above all the notion of materiality and eventfulness, that shines
new perspectives on operative multi-media activities that the devices
that Szillo fossilized are a gateway to.

Christian Ronneburger