Chance and Choice
Heike Kati Barath, Lui Kohlmann & Julian Hespenheide
In the middle of May 2022, during their Version Room residency at Circa 106, Heike Kati Barath, Lui Kohlmann and Julian Hespenheide transformed the gallery space into an open invitation to encounter chance and choice from three different perspectives. Between the three different components, a Projection-Animation, a Software Oracle and anthropomorphic life forms, common themes of repetition, randomness and selection were shared.
The exhibition Chance and Choice is the result of the collaboration between Heike Kati Barath, Lui Kohlmann and Julian Hespenheide where the three explored the motif of randomness, selection and choice.
In her component “A portrait of some-no-one” for The Dynamic Archive, Heike Kati Barath, encourages visitors of the archive to change, draw, add, reflect, print, scan, make it move or make it what you want. look for a portrait. Her work is a vast array of smaller components, drawn and in text form, that can be re-arranged to form new output. In the Circa106 space, Kati showed, for the fist time in an exhibition context, her video animation instead of her paintings and drawings.
Lui Kohlmann and Julian Hespenheide took Kati’s invitation to form versions of the original component.
“A portrait of some quadropods” is Lui’s contribution. She created anthropomorphic life forms, so-called Quadropods, gave them shapes and new forms of expression and transferred them from the archive to the real life as a small of archive of artefacts.
Julian’s version of the component is called “Stochastic Oracle”. It takes in the contours and eyes of the original component as a sort of database and combines it with randomness to permutate outcomes for the future. Texts that are generated from the software are tightly bound to I Ching (the Book of Changes) a chinese divination manual for cleromancy.
Chance and Choice is the fifth installment of the Program Version Room related to the project The Dynamic Archive in the space of Circa 106.
Video and photo documentation by Jimmy Dao Sheng Liu.
Promo video by Julian Hespenheide.