Never Not There

"Never Not There" is an augmented reality app by the artist Damjanski, which seeks to demonstrate the technification of our living environment in a dystopian way. The work was conceived as part of the European collaborative project "Beyond Matter" and produced on behalf of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. The work is on view in the exhibition Matter. Non-Matter. Anti-Matter. at the ZKM | Karlsruhe, which runs from 2.12.2022 to 23.4.2023 and will also be shown at the Centre Pompidou later in 2023.

Looking through the smartphone camera reveals an interwoven web of cables, servers, and other electrical devices that covers the entire environment. The visuals are automatically generated from images found on the Internet. This brings to the surface a dimension of the ostensibly “immaterial” digital space that otherwise remains hidden from view in high performance computing centers or server farms: a gigantean amount of hardware without which digitality or extended reality cannot be perceived, let alone thought.

It is no coincidence that an exhibition copy of Kasimir Malevich's Black Square serves as a marker within the exhibition space and the physical entry point to the app: recent art history research, with the aid of various scanning processes, has been able to make visible that at least two other compositions are hidden underneath the black surface of the square in the 1915 version of the artwork. In the same way as behind the digital images, many other material layers are also revealed underneath the uppermost surface of paint, which in sum can be regarded as a protocol of resources and ideas that have been utilized but are not visible.