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ADAGIO FOR COLOR FIELDS

Chris Korda

Exhibition 9 September - October 7, 2023

open Saturday 14H - 19H (& by rdv)

“Any outcome is inevitably shaped by the tools used to achieve it. In industrial civilization, most people use the same standardized tools and achieve similarly standardized outcomes. But imagine discovering a tool for making tools. The outcomes are now limited only by toolmaking skills. This is how computer programming changed my life.”

— Korda in conversation with Goswell Road, August 2023

Goswell Road proudly presents Adagio For Color Fields an audio-visual work by Chris Korda. For the past 30 years, Korda's work has spanned avant-garde performance, culture- jamming, photography, video, audio and so much more - through her work as an engineer, coder and software developer, blurring the lines between art and technology, remains less known.

Adagio is controlled by a computer that uses a single algorithm to generate audio and video in real-time. Hence, the eyes and ears receive precisely synchronized content that may be experienced as seeing music, hearing colour, or both. Korda describes Adagio as a synesthesia machine and asserts that it is synesthetic phase art.

In the publication that accompanies the exhibition, we asked Korda:

Do you consider (your) software as a form of activism?

“The free software movement seeks to obtain and guarantee the freedoms to run, study, modify, and share software. The struggle against the proprietary enclosure of software is a type of intellectual property activism, but it’s not at the level of the civil rights movement, environmental movement, and so on. I distribute my software freely because doing so advances the state of the art, and because free software is a step towards a more altruistic, gift-based society.”

— Korda in conversation with Goswell Road, August 2023

Artist bio:

Chris Korda (b.1962) is an American antinatalist activist, techno musician, software developer, multimedia artist and founder of the Church of Euthanasia.