INDEX III: DATASET - 2023
‘Index II : Dataset’ explores the relationship between the banking sector and the national economy. Or more precisely: the privatization of the banking industry at around the turn of the century.
The sculptural installation includes three compositions that each represent one of the three major banks in Iceland through the proportion of its dimensions in relation to each of the other forms. Each composition within the sculpture is a geometric expression of numbers built on data found on the website of The National Bank of Iceland. These sculptural compositions are then placed on a platform that expresses the variables of the year those numbers peaked (2007).
MDF & paint
Approx. 310 x 420 x 180 h. cm
The numbers on which the sculptural composition is built include variables in which banking system assets, banking system equity and banking system liabilities are grouped into one index, and broad money (M3), credit, and GDP are grouped into another. The numbers are imported into an application for 3D modeling, where they are arranged along different axes of space, which then merge to create three-dimensional forms.
The next operation has to do with the relationship between composition and meaning. Or the way that the combination of forms produces meaning. Especially in relationship to two monumental reference points of contemporary aesthetics. On one hand, the lyrical compositions of high modernism as embodied by the works of Gerður Helgadóttir. And on the other, the off-beat aesthetics of post-modernism as embodied in the architecture of Gerðasafn. The first formal criterion takes the formalist paradigm of meaning embodied within form at face value. The second throws the paradigm into question by ironically insisting that the two may very well never be reconciled.
