*

2019

Installation

h160 × w300 × d150 cm

*(asterisk) is an installation consisting of an armillary sphere apparatus rotating an apple in 360 degrees, while four cameras scan its surface in real time. Computers compare these fragmentary images with apples I have eaten before, as if reconstructing a memory, and the results are displayed on four monitors. The work reflects on how recognition is guided by categorization. In a supermarket, you do not confirm if an apple is “really” an apple. The arrangement of goods and prior experience silently affirm it. Such automated recognition, reinforced by habitual living, spares us from processing every detail but also narrows our perception. Without this filtering, reality’s overwhelming resolution could paralyze us. Yet, as with appetite in certain neurological conditions, when the mind cannot merge micro-perceptions into a unified meaning, recognition fails. Categorization is a survival tool, allowing us to store and recall information efficiently. However, it also compresses reality, concealing its complexity and framing the world through arbitrary divisions, whether in the colors of a rainbow or the social constructs of gender and race. This process, described by Viktor Shklovsky as “Automatization,” causes the essence of things to vanish from our attention:

After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it. [...] This is how life becomes nothing and disappears. Automatization eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife, and the fear of war. [...] And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By "defamiliarization" objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and "laborious." The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity.

Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device” (1917)

Defamiliarization slows perception, compelling us to encounter objects anew and to see their specific texture, form, and individuality. The title *(asterisk) borrows the wildcard symbol from computing, a placeholder for anything. Here, it represents entities left undefined, complex, and resistant to premature categorization. The apple, a loaded cultural and symbolic object, is decomposed into material and visual fragments, complicating its category and summoning personal memories. In resisting symbolic shorthand, the work reopens the act of observation, exposing the overlooked richness embedded in the everyday.