ROBERT CERVERA @robertcervera Exhibition: Ye Soft Pipes @tangent_projects This past May I had a solo show due to open at Tangent Projects in Barcelona. It’s been rescheduled for September and I'm very much looking forward to it, especially in the middle of so much stasis and uncertainty. Tangent always encourages artists to present work that somehow differs from their usual practice or that brings a new element into it - hence their name. The show I am preparing comes from a residency I did last summer with them in which I explored a new strand of work based on music and videogames. I have a background in music (I studied at a music conservatory in my hometown and I can play the trumpet) but I never brought that to my art practice, which is centered around sculpture, installation and video. My main area of interest is materiality and our relationship with it. I use a lot of concrete, for instance, and I'm fascinated by how the use of that material over time and throughout the world comes with its own cloud of anthropological, political, psychological and sociological implications. Over the years, I have researched the use of concrete to contain shapeless assets, such as water in reservoirs. That took me to the use of concrete to build the containers for the currently privileged shapeless asset: data. Data centres have many parallels with reservoirs and they are also connected in interesting logistical ways. In any case, I ended up looking at data management, cooling systems, the physical needs of data farms... and also the operations involved in playing online multiplayer video games. At my Tangent residency I started using images of 'first person shooter' games and looking at the material needs of the computers used by gamers (how to keep them cool and running despite being overclocked on a permanent basis). They tend to use liquid cooling inside their computers, running water through tubes snaking between their internal components. I record the sounds they can produce and code them into musical compositions. #robertcervera #tangentprojects #yeoldepipes #installations #data (en Tangent Projects) https://www.instagram.com/p/CBZCNAcAh8L/?igshid=ukobgzxwzop3
