Naomi Cook: Allegory Algorithm
08 Aug - 05 Sep 2015
Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to present Naomi Cook’s first solo exhibition in Toronto: Allegory Algorithm. This exhibition addresses different modes of data visualization used by the artist as allegories for current socio-political events. In turn, these works are complemented by more classical allegorical drawings that speak to the movement and fluctuation of data-driven environments.
This exhibition is comprised of three elements: The BATS stock exchange visualization, the Pianola Project, and the Forms drawing series. The BATS stock exchange visualization is a set of drawings accompanying a six minute hand-drawn video mapping the drop in value of a stock affected by high-frequency trading algorithms. Each second of the video shows three milliseconds of the original stock data. The Pianola Project is based on a player piano scroll of Pete Wendling’s song “Hesitation Blues”. This was used as a template to transfer the placement of notes onto a 4 x 18 ft roll of paper, embellishing the original in a fractal-inspired way influenced by Benoit Mandelbrot’s theory of noise and disturbance. The Forms series uses many of the stylistic similarities in Cook’s data processing and visualization to depict ambiguous human forms in bizarre yet classical poses, as if cast from a mould of manipulated data.
This exhibition is comprised of three elements: The BATS stock exchange visualization, the Pianola Project, and the Forms drawing series. The BATS stock exchange visualization is a set of drawings accompanying a six minute hand-drawn video mapping the drop in value of a stock affected by high-frequency trading algorithms. Each second of the video shows three milliseconds of the original stock data. The Pianola Project is based on a player piano scroll of Pete Wendling’s song “Hesitation Blues”. This was used as a template to transfer the placement of notes onto a 4 x 18 ft roll of paper, embellishing the original in a fractal-inspired way influenced by Benoit Mandelbrot’s theory of noise and disturbance. The Forms series uses many of the stylistic similarities in Cook’s data processing and visualization to depict ambiguous human forms in bizarre yet classical poses, as if cast from a mould of manipulated data.