on display is an exhibition format specially conceived for the basis reading room. Young artists are invited to present current videos parallel to the exhibition program in a regular monthly cycle. The solo presentation at the reading room gives the public a chance to engage intensively with the work in question, and, further, over a long period the opportunity to get to know works by a wide range of young artists working in the field of moving pictures.

We are delighted to present the work Possibilia Surgery by Sam Forsythe & Brian Rogers from September 19, to October 12. The opening will take place on September 18, from 7 p.m.

Possibilia Surgery
 - by Sam Forsythe & Brian Rogers

You switch on your computer. Something is different. There is a folder on the desktop
that was not there when you switched it off. The icon is a small, black box. It is labeled:

                                                    OBSIDIAN

You double-click it. Welcome to Obsidian Operating System. Would you like to continue?
Are you sure? Initializing. Thankyou. Good luck. Pop-up windows effloresce. Files
resembling abstract forensics: texts, images, sounds, rhythms. Impartial information.
Ambient information. Impossibly compressed heuristics. The unevenly distributed
coordinates of a plot. You follow the leads. Cliffs are scaled. Water is measured. Neural
detection. Shards of fiction become geometries, and vice versa. Your screen and your
attention become granular. You are abducted, abduced. Meso and micro orbits of
thought feeding back into each other. Digital erosion. Reading undermining semiotics. All
you can do is attempt to organize, grasp, until the discipline erodes just as quickly. The
insectoid cacophony turns to music and you realize you can see new colors, in spectra
you have only just invented. Topography becomes topology and you bore through time
via universalized vectors. An upwards avalanche of data, coordinates, views, horizons.
The breaking of conceptual symmetries. Like always, it all happens on low-lit flatness,
yet the movement is physical, exhausting. Turbulence. Clouds, cuts, vagueness. If all
this was yours, would you know what to do with it? There can/will be more. Do you wish
to continue?

In their first collaboration, Forsythe & Rogers have created a suite of videos detailing the
functional psychedelia resulting from the invasion of a digital space by a rogue cognitive
agent. Through an obsessive attention to the rhythmic and geometric qualities of digital
media, landscapes, sounds and narratives are streamed through multiple spatial and
temporal frames, spilling out like the neural death throes of a future video game. The
sequence is composed of 5 chapters, each negotiating an aspect of the violent collusion
of consciousness and technics; the cunning forces that ensnare us in traps that might
bootstrap us into the universe, or leave us stripped of all that makes us human. Or both.
Hopefully both.

Possibilia Surgery is part of an ongoing collaborative work detailing the fictional world of
‘Obsidian’, a multi-disciplinary platform engaging film and digital media, performance,
design, philosophy, and cognitive science.

Sam Forsythe lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. In addition to his own video and
performance works, he is a member of the performance collective ‘New Forms of Life’.

Brian William Rogers is an artist and writer living in Beirut. His work has been published
and exhibited internationally.

Forsythe & Rogers would like to thank Regi Megarestani, Benedict The Singleton, Razor
Brassier, Michael ‘The Universal’ Ferrer and Robin Banks Mackay.

this event on facebook.

on display is curated by gislind köhler.

Kindly supported by: