March 05th, 2020

Franz John

​Turing Tables
An Untitled Composition for Tectonic Spaces

"Several million earthquakes of different intensities occur each year. Seismological institutes throughout the world measure these vibrations and exchange and communicate this collected data among themselves via automated internet-transfers. It is this meta-perception that Franz John makes visible in his project “Turing Tables,” siphoning this human-machine-communication data stream directly from finger-servers and bringing it into his online installation.
In a matter of seconds, this installation converts these measurements from the seismological stations into sound and image. From the perspective of a "global eye" the internet directly connects the observer with the pulsating core of the earth. This project is therefore not about the catastrophes that cause these movements in inhabited areas, but instead about the archaic feeling and consciousness that the earth is an organism, that it moves and that it can be understood as an organism in constant flux.
“This artistic realization is based on the machine-theory of the mathematician Alan Turing, wherein my interest is not in the number-chain itself but rather in the tectonic forces and energies of a matrix which is visibly and continually updating and renewing itself.”
A project in collaboration with sound artist Ed Osborn (Oakland, CA) and Sascha Brossmann (Berlin, Germany)."

Turing Tables. ifa-Galerie, Berlin, 2001