Vernissage - Jakob Mödlinger "Just Make Me a Computer"

The exhibition Just Make Me a Computer presents a painterly and graphic examination of the role of the individual in a virtualizing society. In view of the increasing tendency to grasp identity in virtual space, Jakob Mödlinger's works raise critical questions about the comprehensibility of the self in the context of today's technological developments. It deals with a present that is understood as a time of change from the organic to the technical, from the analog to the digital, from man on his way to the computer; a development whose end lies in the inseparability of these two instances. Discomfort and fears lurk behind the dazzling facades of social media and networking, which Jakob Mödlinger reflects through the use of pastel shades in the color scheme in combination with an impulsive painting style. A classic sense of beauty is placed in a transient, even morbid context through an aesthetic contrast between idyll and decay.
druClinging to the tried and tested artistic form of painting, the analog image, the individual finds himself in a distorted space of the no longer completely real and not yet entirely virtual, which demands an adaptation or reshaping of old ideas and values. Bliss through algorithms, exposure in the transparency of the Internet, the fetishization of data and the perversion of old ideals are examples of inadequate responses to the demands of the new world, which are reflected in Jakob Mödlinger's works in a critically ironic way.
Just Make Me a Computer confronts viewers with questions about the symbiosis of the ephemerality of man and the infinity of the Internet and proclaims an end to this confusing episode of "no more" and "not yet" by devoting oneself to becoming one with the computer.