Cloud Profiles: Weightless Measures

Artist: Katherine Behar
2013, 7', color

A powerful technological commodity, data seems poised to standardize the world by digitizing everything, transparently translating and transferring value under a universal standard of ones and zeros. Data is a contemporary manifestation of the same universal standards that began with physical weights and measures, but today's standards seem to have lost their weightiness. This animation cycle, showing a misshapen stone figure cloaked by wavering clouds of data and obscured by her own digital shadow, seeks to restore weight to data's measure. The project alludes to "cloud computing," a colloquial name for loosely networked, web-served applications and data storage that connotes an amorphous, innocuous nonentity. But to imagine the cloud as frictionless, immediate, or beyond critique is a "clouded" misperception that misses the gravity of these technologies. Inspired by the Pera Museum's Anatolian Weights and Measures CollectionCloud Profiles: Weightless Measures was produced as a site-specific installation in the collection's permanent display, as part of the exhibition Katherine Behar: Data’s Entry.

Supported in part by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by the Professional Staff Congress and the City University of New York. Exhibitied: "Katherine Behar: Data's Entry" solo exhibition at Pera Museum between Sept 8–Oct 16, 2016, curated by Fatma Çolakoğlu and Ulya Soley.

Weights And Measures Issue Title Weight And Sea

Weights And Measures Issue Title Weight And Sea

Weights And Measures

Weights And Measures

Paperweights

Paperweights

Modern Scales

Modern Scales

Precision: The Measure of All Things

Precision: The Measure of All Things

Cloud Profiles: Weightless Measures

Cloud Profiles: Weightless Measures

For All the Time, for All the Sad Stones

For All the Time, for All the Sad Stones

Face to Face

Face to Face

A firm believer in the idea that a collection needs to be upheld at least by four generations and comparing this continuity to a relay race, Nahit Kabakcı began creating the Huma Kabakcı Collection from the 1980s onwards. 

Giacometti in Paris

Giacometti in Paris

The second part of exhibition illustrates Alberto Giacometti’s relations with Post-Cubist artists and the Surrealist movement between 1922 and 1935, one of the important sculptures series he created during his first years in Paris, and the critical role he played in the art scene of the period.

Midnight Stories: Hotel of Retro Dreams <br> Doğu Yücel

Midnight Stories: Hotel of Retro Dreams
Doğu Yücel

He didn’t expect this from me. And I hadn’t expected that we would decide to get married that day, at that moment. Everything happened all of a sudden, but exactly like it was supposed to happen in our day. We thought of the idea of marriage simultaneously, we smiled simultaneously, blinking and opening our eyes in unison.