Andres Ramirez Gaviria

Vienna-based Colombian artist Andres Ramirez Gaviria is a conceptual artist, and uses digital technology as his laboratory for the analysis of art-historical "truths". His work modal.patterns for the BIX facade is about the abstracting of narration and the analysis of a principle important for abstract art. This involves a project of data visualisation and sonification that translates text data into abstract visual animation sequences in a thoroughly ironic questioning undertone. A core axiom of gestalt theory is likewise taken over and deprived of its meaning by being scrambled into an anagram. The original axiom by Max Wertheimer, 1924, is (in its English translation): "(A whole is) more than the sum of its parts." The ironic commentary in the anagram is "a misshape of truth torments".
The project that translates this sentence into a sample alphabet on the basis of the seven principles of gestalt psychology makes the Kunsthaus Graz a rhythmically pulsating arena of perception phenomena.

In this project, the building, which seems to reinforce these effects with its amorphous roundings, engages in a visually challenging dialogue with the urban surroundings. On a content level, modal.patterns interlaces several messages: it emphasises the meaning of gestalt theory within the discourse of pattern recognition as transmitted by digital technologies. On the other hand, as a result of the garbling of the theoretical message, it is at the same time also an ironic, self-reflective criticism of the idea of using digital technology for verification.