Opening reception: July 29th | 4–7pm

Anglim Gilbert Gallery is pleased to present Venetie (1500-2017), an exhibition of new works by Bull.Miletic, the collaborative team of Synne Bull and Dragan Miletic.

The current proliferation of new aerial imaging technologies, such as satellites and drones, has prompted scholarly debate on the emergence of a new visual paradigm. Today, the aerial view is in motion, not only through the physical attachment of cameras to airborne machines but most prominently in the way these technological mediations are distributed and networked between portable electronic devices, merging news feeds and entertainment with intelligent operations. The complex contradictions of displacement and overview generated in the view from above thus enters a new paradigm of modular groundlessness as it combines with technologies on the ground and networked geospatial data in new diagrams of power. 

Presented at the 2017 Venice Biennale Research Pavilion, Venetie (1500-2017) re-examines Jacopo de’ Barbari’s famous woodcut from 1500, View of Venice, by exploring the print’s historic cartographic principles of composite imaging and spatial control, while shedding light on its new material life as an assemblage of micro-temporal events distributed across networks into new topological configurations. With reference to current debates on archives in motion as well as the hyper-location playing out across geo-tagged imaging in social media, this project thus takes a 500-plus year old document as a starting point for discussing pressing issues pertaining to what some commentators have called a “topological turn” in culture.

The Venetie (1500-2017) installation consists of Venetie MMXVII, a series of three digital prints corresponding in size with de’ Barbari’s woodcut and Venetie 11111100001, an algorithmic video displayed on a slanted screen. Each print is a composite of 14,196 discrete image tiles that make up de’ Barbari’s digitally encoded map while a “bug” produces a glitch pattern within the map’s spatial logic. A computer algorithm arranges hundreds of sequences in the video, making its unpredictable aesthetic appearance unique at any given moment.

Bull.Miletic are visual artists Synne T. Bull (Norwegian, b. 1973) and Dragan Miletic (American, b. 1970, Yugoslavia) who have been working together since 2000. Their work brings into question the entangled histories of the moving image and spatial perception, while addressing the imaginative and emotional capacities increasingly colonized by remote-sensing aerial-imaging technologies. Bull is a PhD Research Fellow at the Department for Media and Communication, University of Oslo and Miletic is an Artistic Research Fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. They both hold MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. Bull also holds an MA in Art History from the University of Oslo. This fall, they have been chosen as the artists-in-residence of the inaugural Art+Science in Residence program at UC Berkeley, a partnership program between the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society and the Arts Research Center.