Datumsoria: The Return of the Real

A neologism, »Datumsoria« conjugates »datum« and »sensoria«, denoting a new perceptual space immanent to the information age. Following stops at CAC | Chronus Art Center Shanghai and ZKM | Karlsruhe, the exhibition »Datumsoria. The Return of the Real« travels to Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, South Korea in July 2018.

»Datumsoria: The Return of the Real« is a considerably expanded version of the eponymous exhibition previously mounted at Chronus Art Center in Shanghai. The exhibition is an outcome of the »Art&Tech@« research program conceived and curated by ZHANG Ga, which aims, through resuscitating the valuable legacy of experiments in art and technology from the mid-twentieth century, to meet with the challenges of a technologically constructed time-space: a new reality that has altogether changed the rules of the game in work and play, in politics and economics, and in artistic imagination and cultural sensibility.

Copresented by Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, ZKM | Karlsruhe, Nam June Paik Art Center and CAFA Art Museum Beijing, »Datumsoria« brings together ten highly idiosyncratic works, shedding new light upon relations that bespeak the logic of the Real of the information age, a reality predicated on binary instructions of the generic, of the uniformity of the ones and the zeros, from whose generality comes forth a hardening of shapes and forms, precipitating sentient residues and invoking emotive potentials. »Datumsoria« signals that the politics of the Real no longer only lies in the sphere of the actual bodies and social sites recognized in the form of the traumatic and abject subject as the predominant subject of contemporary experience and object of artistic inquiry, but also alludes to how grasping this new reality of bits and bytes is as ethically imperative as it is epistemologically fundamental.