Daniel Canogar: Echo

About

Featuring the U.S. premiere of his flexible screen sculpture series, the show includes six objects that illuminate their environment. Echo opens concurrently with Tendril, the artist’s recently completed permanent installation for the Tampa International Airport and his largest project to date.

Based in Spain, Daniel Canogar is internationally renowned for pioneering a technique that enables him to create sculptural screens with a membrane-like quality that can conform to multiple surfaces, objects, and architectures. Each work in Echo consists of a grid of LED tiles with flexible rubber-backed PCB (printed circuit board) modules that uniquely allow for torsion and curvature. Outfitted with over one hundred twenty thousand points of light each, in concert, these modules depict scintillating abstract compositions. The undulating forms encourage a haptic relationship of the viewer to the moving image. 

The on-screen compositions in Echo are produced in response to real-time global environmental phenomenon such as temperature, rainfall, seismic activity, and other data sets. The works cull data from the web and process it into animations using a software developed by the artist’s team specific to each work. The animations displayed generate dynamic visual output based on complex mathematical descriptions of natural entropic processes such as the movement of water molecules in a ripple. The data collected influences various qualities of the generative animation such as speed, rotation, and color.

The sinuous forms and exposed cables appear creature-like, reminiscent of phosphorescent deep-water organisms with glowing membranes and tentacles. Echo’s physical embodiment of screen-skin is inspired by the writing of cultural theorist Giuliana Bruno on materiality and media:

“This membrane of the screen becomes a material possibility for us to connect. It presents a form of empathy, allowing us to reach to the other side via projection. Surfaces like these are things that one touches and they touch you in return.”

The works in Echo invite us to examine the screen as sculpture and search for empathy in the constant deluge of sterile abstract data.