Apophenia Exhibition by Ruy Klein on Display Through Oct. 12 in Vol Walker Hall

Image courtesy of Ruy Klein

"Somewhere in Arcadia," from the Apophenia exhibition on display through Oct. 12 in Vol Walker Hall.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The exhibition Apophenia will be on display through Oct. 12 in the Fred and Mary Smith Exhibition Gallery in Vol Walker Hall on the University of Arkansas campus.  

A gallery talk will take place at noon Wednesday, Sept. 12, and an opening reception will be held at 4:45 p.m. Sept. 12.

This exhibition features the work of David Ruy and Karel Klein, architects and directors with Ruy Klein in New York, New York. Ruy Klein examines contemporary design problems at the intersection of architecture, nature and technology. Encompassing a wide array of experimentation, projects study the mutual imbrications of artificial and natural regimes that are shaping an ever more synthetic world. The office probes the indeterminacies of 21st century architecture, locating territories in a frontier no longer outside the city walls, but unexpectedly found within the city itself. 

The pictures and models in the "Apophenia" exhibition simultaneously incorporate geographic information systems (GIS) and computer graphics (CG) technologies to design a composite world. A seamless collage of documentary evidence, the world depicted in this exhibition defamiliarizes survey data recorded by the United States Geological Survey and assembles a visual fiction. What is most difficult for the beholder of pictures of the real is the disturbing premise that the pictures, no matter how beautiful, are essentially without meaning. The exhibition is an examination of how in the presence of meaningless pictures one finds the ever-present apophenia of the human being — the need to see meaning and relationships where none exist.

The first known aerial photography was produced in France in 1858 by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon. Using a hot air balloon, the first pictures of earth from above were of a modest French village. Though none of these first photographs survive, these pictures inspired an obsessive interest in photographing the world from this apparently objective perspective. Using everything from kites to birds to rockets in order to elevate the eye, an explosion of pictures of the world from this new perspective was made.

Among the many transformations of human vision during the 20th century is the emergence and maturation of GIS, constructing an entirely new image of the world. As a consequence of beholding the world through mechanized media, aerial photography and other subsequent technologies of remote viewing has made our visual relationship to the world progressively more impersonal and clinical. What is provocative, however, about the current state of these technologies is its capacity to not only document but to invent. The very same GIS technologies that are used for surveying the world are also used today in computer graphics industries for the production of fiction and entertainment. What exists today in the visual culture of world building (both real and imagined) is an uneasy relationship between fact and fiction that mirrors the uneasiness we have about the real in general.

Admission to the exhibition is free. The exhibition gallery is located on the first floor of Vol Walker Hall, and it is open to the public from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays.