Savant, savant, savant.

Join us at /rosa (Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße 35, Berlin Mitte) for the opening of Bertram von Undall's show Savant, savant, savant. on Friday, June 30 at 19:00.

Savant, savant, savant. is a conceptual romantic suggestion of a perspective that sees something very “human” and inherently flawed and messy in technology, presenting works that touch on the disturbances to affective relations and selfhood within techno-capitalism.

The exhibition is centered around a narrative based video game installation. The game is derived from a traditional non-verbal intelligence test called the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. This test was the first of its kind to circumvent the need for language in order to measure cognitive capacity; through a visual logic system the test determines the takers general abstract ability and fluid intelligence. The term "savant" refers to a person who has exceptional skills or knowledge in a particular domain - it is, incidentally, also the name of the person with highest IQ ever measured ringing in at an astounding 228. Her name: Marilyn vos Savant.

In the context of this exhibition, the idea of cognitive quantification is used as an aesthetic pointer that informs the production of the works in terms of their technical expression and their formal compositions. Cognitive quantification is, at the same time, a central component of today’s human experience, technological devices and computational logics condition nearly all of our social and environmental relations.

Accompanying the installation is a set of drawings manipulated on screen. The exhibition presents a mode of speculation and drifting off; distracted notebook drawings are placed in contrast to attention capturing game technology. On a small scale, the show proposes the notions of thought and learning in the light of a common denominator: algorithmically aided production.