The Ability to
Perceive

No Man’s Land

Installationsansichten Niemandsland, Galerie 5020, Fotos: Studio Fjeld, Eckmayr

Artificial Intelligence, Maps, Animationfilm, Ink-Jet Prints / 2021

These works are a selection from my current project The Ability to Perceive, which reflects the process of perception from different angles: What technocratic processes shape human perception? And on the other hand, what kind of glance do machines – e.g., surveillance systems and pattern recognition algorithms – cast on human agencies? These are critical questions especially in relation to the process of drawing borders, which is a defining process for our current societies. Theses borders mean to separate people not only territory-wise, but consequently on a cultural level by shaping social practice and human perception.

︎ Open Water - The ability to perceive walls

Animation Film, 11 Minutes

▤ 2024 Patterns of Disillusion / Galery 5020 / Salzburg, Austria
▤ 2023 Vienna Artweek exhibition / Vienna, Austria
▤ 2023 Short Waves Festival / Poznań, Poland
▤ 2022 Crossing Europe Film Festival / Linz, Austria
▤ 2022 Short Waves Film Festival / Poznań, Poland

Watch the full film above. A short animation film about borders drawn to evoke behaviour.

We never see the world as it is, as a mere fact,
but we shape sensual data into meaning by subjective patterns.

We touch, see and learn how the world is to be seen.

The development of perceptive patterns gives this film, Open Water, its dramatic structure. Along this we arrange, layer, combine, contrast several topics: nature versus human condition, surveillance by the means of artificial intelligence and the crisis in the Mediterranean sea.

“Who owns which space and how is the claim to power or ownership over it asserted?

Space and its influence on movement patterns ultimately becomes the protagonist of Georg Eckmayr's animated film Open Water [...]. This work interweaves behaviourism, territorial power, cartography, coding and demarcation. By linking individual behaviour with perception algorithms, Eckmayr exposes systems of repetition as the foundation for the recognition of barriers, even if the boundaries have already been lifted. He confronts the viewer with the question of whether we are still capable of questioning our behavioural patterns and breaking through imposed boundaries.“

Extract of the text Patterns of Disillusion by Anita Hosseini

︎ No Man’s Land / Niemandsland

(Mapdesign, Inkjet Print)

A radical questioning of the common imaginations of maps, nations and borders as something naturally given. Whereas we were lucky to be born into existing systems, which not only are culturally constructed, but also need to be forcefully maintained.