Open Codes. We Are Data

Azkuna Zentroa - Alhóndiga Bilbao presents from October 23, 2019 to January 26, 2020 the exhibition Open Codes. We are data, a reflection on the world we live in today: a world that is created and ruled by codes.

Digital codes determine how we perceive our surroundings, they influence our financial systems, our legislations and our business models; in essence, they shape and create new horizons for social, economic, or cultural activity.

Technology pierces us with an avalanche of advances we have to adapt to. It is a generator of future and destinations, even though it controls us as well. The art perspective of this new reality aims to open a path and enable society to convert technology into a tool as opposed to a chain, besides developing a critical position regarding its individual and global consequences.

The exhibition project Open Codes. We are data is also a critical vision of contemporary culture, likewise a symbolic strategy, both physical and conceptually in equal measure. It studies art technology from the beginning of time to modern day, and includes essential cultural and philosophical elements. To do so, it opens the code, its genotype, i.e. what is inside to know it and understand it. Apart from conceptual barriers, it also breaks physical ones. Therefore, the exhibition goes beyond its usual location in the exhibition hall and expands to the Atrium, Mediateka and Physical Activity Centre.

Open Codes. We are data is conceived as an experimental space for creative encounters, where knowledge production on understanding computer codes and artistic approaches take place at a single venue. It is an attempt to engage with today’s realities and point out perspectives and lines of development for the future in order to better understand the world we live in: a world that has become a field of data.

The exhibition is accompanied by a public programme which includes talks, workshops and a contemporary film cycle. We invite our visitors to experience the exhibition hall as if it were a space open to thought, an art & science laboratory, a co-working & meeting place, a new way of congregating aimed at exchanging and acquiring knowledge, in other words, a new collaboration format.

To this end, Open Space is made available to the public, designed for public events such as workshops, conferences, round tables or meetings related to the open source theme. The distinguishing feature of this space is that anyone can shape its content. The exhibition provides the infrastructure, and the public fills it with ideas.

Exhibition organized by Azkuna Zentroa - Alhóndiga Bilbao in collaboration
with ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (Alemania).
Idea: Peter Weibel.
Curatorial team: Blanca Giménez, Jaime de los Ríos, Fernando Pérez, Rakel
Esparza.