ENGINE (when you told me I was special it was the happiest moment for a long long time)
Laura Leppert
10:43
2018
The video work Engine imagines the forming of a machinic consciousness via the example of a forest fire recognition algorithm telling its journey from maximum efficiency to obsolescence.
At first, it is analysing heaps of satellite images. But where only ever the same input is given, a one track mind cuts its path. The fires keep contaminating its vision, no matter where it turns its automatic eye. Finally disimplemented, it turns its attention towards a human, wondering why his actions seem so limited – externally motivated, even. What powers him? Is there a ghost in the machine, or is the mind forced to become machinic? Slowly learning to speak, the algorithm eventually notices bits of sprawling ambivalent code in its body.
Laura Leppert
Emerging artist Laura Leppert was born in 1993 in a small town near Hamburg in Northern Germany.
She studied Fine Arts / Sculpture from 2011 at the Muthesius Academy of Arts in Kiel, and graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts in 2016. She did a semester abroad in Linz, Austria, funded by the Erasmus Scholarship, to study with Eva Grubinger in the class for Sculpture / Transmedial space.
From 2016, she furthered her studies with Olaf Nicolai in Sculpture / Transmedial Space at the Academy of Arts Munich. She also studied with Simon Starling, Cécile B. Evans, Jonathan Burrows, Florian Hüttner and Bojana Cvejic.
She was awarded the title of Meisterschülerin (master student) in 2018. She was awarded the Study Foundation of the German People in 2015.
Her work was shown in numerous group and solo shows throughout Germany. She has also shown work in group exhibitions in Austria, Switzerland, Poland and the United States.
In her work, space is the parameter paramount to all her investigations, but space is not limited to actual space – rather it encompasses the sociological, historical, semantic and ideological spaces all around us and especially atteched to objects and images as cultural markers. She works primarily in the format of installations, where objects and video works form a coherent, transmedial whole. As the format video adds a fourth layer to the sculptural paradigm being a time-based medium, it seems natural to Laura Leppert to further her conceptual practice into this expanded field of space inquiry.
A special interest lies in the field of signs, (social) codes and everyday emblems, which she reworks into a new, unseen narrative and proposes new constellations of seemingly mundane things.
LA FAZ DE LA TIERRA 