Digital-Material-Loop

Corinna Berndt, “All My Chameleon Signals”, interactive digital work of 3D scanned personal items, 2019 – ongoing. *Collaborative text, written with American poet and academic, Cynthia Arrieu-King, and an artificial neural network

︎View a screen capture section of the work here
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The work reimagines narratives that might emerge in digital record keeping through speculating upon their continuous relationship to the material world. ‘All my Chameleon Signals’ explores the potential of digital scanning to enable a hybrid materialisation of bodied and disembodied information. By extension, this process also invites an examination of the kind of languages, grammars and poetics that potentially govern these hybrid forms.

In the twenty-first century, the seemingly infinite capacity for digital data storage systems and the relatively easy access to personal archiving platforms has made it possible to shift private mementos that once were collected in physical form, into digital space. The storage of digital information in which personal files can be accessed in any given order implicitly suggests an archive or database. As Lev Manovich argues in his essay, ‘Database as Symbolic Form’ (1999), the concept of the database presents a new order in which one might structure and navigate the world. This idea of understanding the world as a “list of items”, however, stands in contrast to other culturally significant forms of meaning-making, such as narrative. In a narrative, information is organised in a ‘cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events).’ (1999, 85).

Between 2019-2021, I recorded approximately 300 personal objects via a mobile phone photogrammetry app. The objects in the archive might seem familiar, yet the descriptions and quotes attributed to them confuse this familiarity and therefore our understanding of the object’s meaning. This also shows a disruption in translation factoring into narratives around the archived object.

Within the architecture of the database as symbolic form, the potential to infinitely add to and reorder information also suggests relational narratives with a capacity to render presented information as fluid in value and interchangeable in relation to its context. The digital archive then also becomes a fictionalised and indeterminate space within which collected information can shapeshift established meanings.

Screen capture of entire work can be seen here:
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/501805558

Corinna Berndt, “Not Born digital”, installation view, 2021. Photography: Zan Wimberley
screen capture of “All My Chameleon Signals” (excerpt), interactive digital work of 3D scanned personal items, 2019 – ongoing. *Collaborative text, written with American poet and academic, Cynthia Arrieu-King, and an artificial neural network

Corinna Berndt, “Not Born digital”, installation view, 2021. Photography: Zan Wimberley



Corinna Berndt, Big Data, digital video, 2019.

<sub>Corinna Berndt, “Streaming Data”, installation View, SomoS, Berlin, August 2019. Photo by Zack X Soltes





Corinna Berndt, Promises of Cyborgs, installation view, VCA Art Space, Melbourne,  2019. Photo: Andrew Curtis</sub>

_{Corinna Berndt, Promises of Cyborgs, installation view, VCA Art Space, Melbourne,  2019. Photo: Andrew Curtis}

︎View work here

_{Corinna Berndt, Promises of Cyborgs, installation view, VCA Art Space, Melbourne,  2019. Photo: Andrew Curtis}

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