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

Symbols

Symbols

Pera Museum’s Cold Front from the Balkans exhibition curated by Ali Akay and Alenka Gregorič brings together contemporary artists from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia.

From the Age of Reason to the “Tortoise Trainer”

From the Age of Reason to the “Tortoise Trainer”

A Salon exhibition held in the Grand Palais in Paris on May 1, 1906 showcased an Ottoman painting. This was Osman Hamdi Bey’s famous “Tortoise Trainer”. 

Portrait of Martín Zapater (1797)

Portrait of Martín Zapater (1797)

Martín Zapater y Clavería, born in Zaragoza on November 12th 1747, came from a family of modest merchants and was taken in to live with a well-to-do aunt, Juana Faguás, and her daughter, Joaquina de Alduy. He studied with Goya in the Escuelas Pías school in Zaragoza from 1752 to 1757 and a friendship arose between them which was to last until the death of Zapater in 1803.