Deep Talk Holding Pattern & Moving Bodies”
“Deep Talk Holding Pattern & Moving Bodies,” a video production by Kaput – Magazine for Insolvency & Pop in collaboration with the Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV).
Concept and implementation: Jan Höhe, Thomas Venker, Linus Volkmann; Music / Feature image: Stefan Parnhans & Andrea Winkler
We would like to thank the HMKV for their hospitality, Inke Arns for the interview, and Erika Balsom for permission to document the talk with Thomas Venker.
Holding Pattern is the English term for the tactic used by air traffic controllers to keep several aeroplanes in the air above a busy airport without allowing them to crash. This symbolic scenario unfolds the motif of remote control and mastery: the sense that human destinies are closely interwoven with the circuits of technology – interwoven with expectation and fear, danger and rescue, as well as geometry, aesthetics and even beauty.
What are the patterns that guide our lives? Do we design them ourselves, or are they written elsewhere, in dark zones that we can only glimpse but never fully see? Holding Pattern presents a selection of international artists who explore the choreographies, rhythms and algorithms that characterise modern life, the ways in which data is embodied and how bodies are transformed into data.
The exhibition Holding Pattern is the result of an invitation from Anne Hilde Neset (Oslo) to the award-winning writer Tom McCarthy to explore the themes of his books through contemporary art. McCarthy’s publications repeatedly feature human figures in a kind of limbo (or in loops), embedded in the circuits of techno-informatic systems.
Artists: Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Åke Hodell, Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler, Susan Philipsz, Elizabeth Price
Curated by Tom McCarthy and Anne Hilde Neset.
The exhibition is on view at the HMKV until July 27, 2025.
Parallel to the exhibition, a film series on Harun Farocki’s extensive oeuvre of over 120 films, videos, and installations will take place in cooperation with the sweetSixteen-filmclub e.V. The next screenings are on June 13 and June 20.
