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Image credit: Elke Finkenauer, ‘BitParts’, a handmade dataset, (2023). Courtesy of the artist. Image description: a grid showing hundreds of pages of line drawings at a tiny scale. Many of the drawings are on brightly coloured or printed paper.
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Image credit: Elke Finkenauer, Thing 4589 from ‘BitParts’, (2023). Courtesy of the artist. Image description: Brown line drawing of a scrap of polystyrene, with some flat edges and some jagged edges. The line drawing is filled in with white, brown and terracotta. It is drawn over the top of an image plate showing ‘A Satyr mourning over a Nymph’ (1495) by Piero di Cosimo.
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Image credit: Elke Finkenauer, Thing 5052 from ‘BitParts’, (2023). Courtesy of the artist. Image description: Red line drawing of an apple core on tissue paper, through which other drawings are visible. The other drawings visible through the tissue paper are a kaleidoscope from a Christmas cracker, and a cardboard box with a hinged lid.
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https://bitparts.net
Exhibition
BitParts
18 Sep 2023 – 31 Dec 2023
Regular hours
- Monday
- 00:00 – 23:30
- Tuesday
- 00:00 – 23:30
- Wednesday
- 00:00 – 23:30
- Thursday
- 00:00 – 23:30
- Friday
- 00:00 – 23:30
- Saturday
- 00:00 – 23:30
- Sunday
- 00:00 – 23:30
Timezone: Europe/London
Free admission
Online
- Language: English
- Join the event
'BitParts' is the digital archive of a drawing project and handmade dataset containing 5279 things, fragments and scraps from an artist's studio.
About
Over two and a half years, from October 2019, Elke Finkenauer made a drawing, colour tile and description of 5279 things, materials, experiments and fragments from her studio. Using pencil, biro, felt-pen, and techniques associated with breaking out of habitual thinking, she modelled in a slow, analogue way what goes on when a dataset is created.
The interactive, web-based tool, ‘BitParts’, invites viewers to explore this eclectic collection of things from a workspace that often remains unseen; encountering things individually, as categories, and on a continuum from literalness to abstraction.
Whilst digitising a physical collection broadens access beyond fragile things and fixed locations, it also requires ascribing written and numerical language to the things it mediates. ‘BitParts’ foregrounds and resists this translation. Through the familiar forms of drawing and things Finkenauer nudges the edges of an understanding of data, how it is created and used, and suggests ways in which it can be questioned.
