Metahaven, Information Skies

Bar Laika is very pleased to present an evening with Metahaven, featuring a screening of their short film Information Skies followed by Q&A with the artist(s).

Metahaven, Information Skies, 2016
24 minutes
Hungarian with English and Korean subtitles

“Along with the damp landscapes of the Black Forest and space anime, Information Skies comprises yet another visual dimension—that is, the graphic framing in grey, blue and indigo, at times resembling torn and melted film or, perhaps, a deconstructed digital control panel. Metahaven perspicaciously call it “interfacial ruins.” Ruins are inevitably a beginning, a potentiality; they have an “existentialising function,” as coined by Félix Guattari in his essay Cracks in the Street: “Cracks in the text of the State, cracks in the state of things, in the state of places, in the state of norms… Cracks leading us despite ourselves to new social practices and to new aesthetic practices which will reveal themselves as less and less separate from each other, and more and more in complicity.”

Information Skies is not a dystopia but rather a poetically rendered document of the current evolutionary mutations that concern changes in communication tools and reality processing. Metahaven succeed at grasping the essence of these changes by virtue of their creative origins. Leaning on graphic design as a primary and ultimate instrument for storytelling—film being incorporated as yet another one of its extensions—they find themselves at the heart of these mutations. As early as 1992, Guattari described how “computer-aided design leads to the production of images opening on to unprecedented plastic Universes.” Metahaven perfectly embody this thesis: in their work, form blends with content, enlarged visual tropes, and symbols (which might unjustly be overlooked by cinema snobs) serve as pivot points for process of the production of meaning. And the universes it opens shed light upon the upcoming universes.”

—Lesia Prokopenko, 2019

The work of Metahaven consists of filmmaking, writing, design, and installations, and is united conceptually by interests in poetry, storytelling, digital superstructures, and propaganda. Films by Metahaven include The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda) (2015), Information Skies (2016), Hometown (2018) and Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) (2018). Recent solo exhibitions include Version History at the ICA London (2018), and Earth at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2018). Recent group exhibitions include Ghost:2651 in Bangkok (2018), the Sharjah Biennial (2017), and the Gwangju Biennale (2016). Publications by Metahaven include PSYOP (2018), Digital Tarkovsky (2018), and Uncorporate Identity (2010). 

For more information, contact laika@e-flux.com.