INDEX III: DATASET - 2023
‘Index II: Dataset’ explores the relationship between the banking sector and the national economy. Or more precisely: the privatisation 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 as it relates to form. 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 in 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 liability indices form one set of numerical variables, and broad money (M3), credit, and GDP indices form another. These indices are imported into an application for 3D modelling, where they are plotted along different axes of space to create three-dimensional forms by connecting their vertices.
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 locally by the sculptures of Gerður Helgadóttir. And on the other, the off-beat aesthetics of post-modernism as embodied in the architecture of Gerðasafn – the museum dedicated to Gerður Helgadóttir in which the installation is exhibited. The first formal criteria 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.
