A Fractal Manifesto at ZK/U | 1-3.9.2023

In this visual sonic spatial installation, Canadian-Haitian visual artist Stina Baudin and British, Berlin-based experimental music artist Abigail Toll, attempt to break down the objective logic of a dataset. Through a process of what theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva terms fractal thinking, they “de-centre time and sequentiality to identify compositional patterns that reveal the structuring grammar of our world.”

Through a process spanning almost a year, the artists collect truth values from their own daily experiences and co-create across the six hour time difference between Germany and Canada. Together, they distort hierarchies of knowledge and center nuanced conversations surrounding their histories of migration that are ordinarily left absent from datasets. In a series of studies, they layer together six woven panels combined with six music movements that encapsulate six themes – etymologies, water, time/displacement, flight, wonder, and memory – the six topics are generated through their research and illustrated with digitized and distorted layering of woven images and sound, as well as a co-creative manifesto. The fragmented sound and illegible visual documentation calls into question not only the absence and distortions that the artists found in previous datasets, but highlights how lived experience and memories (our truth values) undergo a process of fragmentation and distortion over time.

Stina Baudin (she/her) is an emerging Haitian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist. She has studied both at Concordia University in Montreal and The Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Using her own idiosyncratic visual language of pattern and relationships, Baudin’s large-scale, hand-woven fiber works create a counter-patriarchal, anti-capitalist and anticolonial way of narrating meaning from data.

By collapsing the division between anecdotal and statistical data, her work removes the hierarchical distinctions between the scientific and the personal. They then start to operate as an entangled web of cohabiting knowledge centers – the scientific data indivisible from other knowledge forms that are affective and embodied. It’s important to note that her weavings are not merely data visualization. Instead they are an interpretative recontextualisation of the datascape as a way to speak beyond binaries, a way to fashion a subversive lexicon that is haptic and relational rather than representational. She has participated in national and international art residencies and exhibitions including Banff Center for the Arts Creativity (CA), and Pocoapoco in Mexico.

Abigail Toll (she/her) is a British experimental music artist based in Berlin who makes ambient, psychoacoustic soundworlds. Her artistic research focuses on data aesthetics and harmonic chaos as a mode for critical thinking, often in collaboration with musicians, artists and writers. Matrices of Vision is the title of her debut release on Shelter Press which she composed during her Masters in Electroacoustic Composition at the KMH, Stockholm. It is based on a dataset which details the (in)accessibility to higher education in Sweden across seven decades and reveals the complexities around representation.