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

Giacometti: Early Works

Giacometti: Early Works

Organized in collaboration with the Giacometti Foundation, Paris, the exhibition explores Giacometti’s prolific life, most of which the artist led in his studio in Montparnasse, through the works of his early period as well his late work, including one unfinished piece. Devoted to Giacometti’s early works, the first part of the exhibition demonstrates the influence of Giovanni Giacometti, the father of the artist and a Swiss Post-Impressionist painter himself, on Giacometti’s output during these years and his role in his son’s development. 

Louis Isadore Kahn (1901-1974)

Louis Isadore Kahn (1901-1974)

Louis Isadore Kahn was born in 1901 to a Jewish family in Pärnu, Russia (today Estonia), far from Philadelphia where he spent his whole life, worked, fell in love, and breathed his last. Kahn family emigrated to America when he was five years old. 

Bruce Nauman Look At Me!

Bruce Nauman Look At Me!

The exhibition Look at Me! Portraits and Other Fictions from the ”la Caixa” Contemporary Art Collection examines portraiture, one of the oldest artistic genres, through a significant number of works of our times. Through the exhibition we will be sharing about the artists and sections in Look At Me!.