KW on location:
Rachel Rossin
THE MAW OF
Tieranatomisches­ Theater

Daily 12–7 pm
Free admission
Venue: Tieranatomisches Theater
Campus Nord, Haus 3, Philippstraße 13, 10115 Berlin

Introduction:
Daily at 4:30 pm
In German and English
Registration: mediation@kw-berlin.de

THE MAW OF by Rachel Rossin (*1987, US) explores the coming together of flesh, machine, cognition, and code provoked by current research into brain-computer interfaces. An artist and programmer whose multi-disciplinary practice has established her as a pioneer in the field of virtual reality, Rossin’s work blends painting, sculpture, new media and more to create digital landscapes, which she uses to address aspects of entropy, embodiment, the ubiquity of technology, and its effect on human psychology.

Spanning installation, sculpture, augmented reality, virtual reality, and net art, THE MAW OF features a site-specific installation at Tieranatomisches Theater (TA T), Berlin, as part of the digital program of KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Conceived as mixed-reality theatre, Rossin’s project stages a new conceptual and visual vocabulary, addressing the expanded limits of the human body and mind today.

Imagining the corporeal as a component within a larger technical assemblage, the work draws from the historic development of body peripherals and outsourced sensing. Marshalling visual tropes from gaming, mobile apps, manga, and documentary video, Rachel Rossin’s work is a guided trip through the outer reaches of fantasy made real. Various icons are conjured along the way, like figures in a dream, that serve as symbols for prostheses used to augment our bodily existence. There are ‘sentinel species’ such as canaries, used to detect air toxicity in coal mines, or seeing-eye dogs, but also artificial devices such as smartphones and keyboards. Moving into the present, wearable exoskeletons represent an instance where hardware and wetware (flesh) increasingly meet. Many such technologies are currently being tested on animals before being implanted into the human brain—further intensifying the reality of cognitive peripherals.

The online artwork — co-commissioned by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and accessible on the websites of both KW (between 14 September and 21 October 2022) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (September 2022 – ongoing)—is an interactive feedback loop between the visitors’ screens and their mobile phone displays. Offline, at Tieranatomisches Theater, Rossin’s virtual reality environment morphs 3D scans of the theatre with the lobby of Whitney Museum and terrain features appropriated from a video game. Inside this environment, visitors chase an avatar, as a ‘ghost in a machine’, while it searches a network of tributaries representing their nervous systems.

THE MAW OF dramatizes relations between the inside and the outside as well as between humans, animals, and machines. It is a work about the theatre of embodied subjectivity in the technocene. It also performs the exhibition as an expanded body—blurring the line between the physical and the digital realm. The exhibition space is mapped through the creation of a world whose virtual reality may be accessed through various portals. These portals are entry points to digital spaces of contemplation and poetic representation authored by Rachel Rossin.

Curator: Nadim Samman,
Curatorial assistant: Linda Franken

Part of project: KW Digital Program

KW Institute for Contemporary Art sits at the intersection of virtual and material worlds, and the creative use of emerging technologies. We understand that the digital is not just online or onscreen—but increasingly conditions analog or ‘real’ space. For this reason, we consider the continuum between digital and physical domains to be a key issue in contemporary culture. Exploring, criticizing, or reinventing it through art is in the public interest.

The KW Digital Program showcased cutting-edge developments in line with this vision. The program did not place the virtual in a subordinate role to the physical (or vice versa). As everyday life becomes more saturated with tech, one’s experience straddles both. Addressing this condition, our program played out across various platforms—rather than being proprietary to any particular device or location.

Throughout, we trained a close eye on the relationship between culture and innovation. We were guided by dialogue with artists and scholars. We also pursued meaningful engagement with the tech sector—to better discover the implications of applied science, and intellectual frameworks for the future.

The program was curated by Dr. Nadim Samman, Curator Digital Sphere at KW.

Overview
2021–2024

KW Digital:
Poetics of Encryption
2023–2024

KW Digital:
Poetics of Encryption
17 February – 26 May 2024

Poetics of Encryption
Conference
27/28 October 23

Poetics of Encryption
Book launch
28 April 23

Tieranatomisches­ Theater
Open Secret
16 July – 31 December 21

The Last Museum
30 April – 6 June 21