signs and symbols

November 15 - December 21, 2021

Opening Online: Monday, November 15, 6:00pm
Closing: Wednesday, December 15, 6:00pm

signs and symbols is pleased to present Letters to M_HTR, a video exhibition by Ornella Fieres as part of the gallery’s series of online-only solo presentations of video works.

Fieres’s video work, which was recently presented on 3 historic TV monitors, has been re-programmed specifically for signs and symbols’ online format. Each time a viewer presses the video’s play button, a random order of 133 clips will be generated, displaying English sentences with a German voice over. Thus new textual contexts are constantly created, and every viewing becomes a unique process.

This body of work originates from an estate sale in 2016, where Fieres acquired a box containing approximately 700 letters, photographs and postcards from the 1960s and 70s addressed to a woman in East Berlin — in the former German Democratic Republic. Over the course of four years, the artist processed this found material via several Artificial Intelligences.

For Letters to M_HTR, Fieres used a Deep Learning system for handwritten text recognition to decipher the letters’ thousands of pages of historical German handwriting. The partly scribbled, faded or weathered words were transcribed into digital texts — including any errors caused by the humans who wrote the phrases and by the intelligent machine that tried to read them. Fieres then selected 133 phrases from these two decades of letters to and from this unknown woman and tasked an AI-generated female voice to read them out loud. For the online version of the installation, these written sentences are translated by yet another Deep Learning mechanism into English.

In Fieres’s work, we seem to learn about a person who lived in a closed off and divided country, which was known for spying on its inhabitants, by spying ourselves on this woman’s life via automated, self-teaching and self-developing technologies.

*Please note that Fieres's video will be viewable online from Monday, November 15 at 6:00pm until Tuesday, December 21 at 6:00pm. Following the end of the exhibition, the video will only be accessible via private link and password. We trust that given our current circumstances, everyone will act in good faith and good will, understanding that these are primary artworks by our artists that are collected and which would otherwise be password protected.    
 

ornella fieres's work explores the hidden aspects of digital technologies. For her investigations she develops photography, video and sound techniques that forcefully merge analog and digital material. Fieres works with photographs and documentary film material from the turn of the 20th century — a time that was characterized by a fascination of occultism in combination with technology — and processes the found footage with experimental methods. Fieres uses self-built apparatuses, autonomous algorithms, tweaked software or artificial intelligence to create moments that carry lingering traces of the past and might be foreshadowing events in the future. Fieres's multimedia installations have been exhibited internationally at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Goethe Institut Toronto, Literaturhaus Berlin, NurtureArt Gallery New York, Kunstverein Speyer and Fotografie Forum Frankfurt. She has given lectures and presentations at Volksbühne Berlin, Haus am Lützowplatz Berlin, Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach and at New Lab New York, where she had a research residency in 2017.