At Art Cologne, Spiros Hadjidjanos Dives Headfirst into the Information Age

Spiros Hadjidjanos isn’t the only artist to harness cutting-edge technology and explore the ways it can alter the fabric of reality. His work stands out, however, for its refusal to offer a simplistic celebration or a one-dimensional critique of our digital landscape.

Case in point for Hadjidjanos’ use of technology as a tool and as a subject is Transmission-in-itself (2015), a sculpture currently on view in Future Gallery’s booth at Art Cologne 2016. At first, the piece has the air of a joke or a bauble, like a 21st-century take on the “ship in a bottle.” A ubiquitous Apple keyboard has been placed inside a glass bottle, its USB cord limply dangling from the opening. The sculpture could be seen as an attempt to capture the essence of communication by isolating and preserving a modern mechanism for such transmissions. However, though the keyboard might be safely contained, its utility has been completely lost in the process.

If Transmission-in-itself attempts to isolate information, Hadjidjanos’ other works have used technology to make visible the information we can’t otherwise see. A series of his UV prints, for instance, transform photographs from Karl Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst, a book of extreme close-ups of botanical images. Hadjidjanos used computer algorithms to add a sense of depth to the images, so the resulting pieces hover between two and three dimensions. In each, a complex flower or leaf seems to almost emerge into reality.