2/3 GALERIA
SCULPTED SPACE
STR FRANCEZA NR 4 BUCURESTI RO
BLIND SPOT
05/09-05/10/ 2025
Vladimir Florentin
curated by Felicity Hammond
In the condition of nonbattle, when you have nothing on which to act tangibly, there is still one thing you can do: act on that condition. Act to change the conditions in which you wait.” Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Duke University Press, 2015), 69.
Blind Spot - an expansive multi-media installation by Romanian-born London-based artist Vladimir Florentin -interrogates the technologically charged space of the nonbattle - a term originally coined by Virilio to describe how technology has impacted the logic of war. Florentin’s installation holds a mirror up to the processes that de ne contemporary violence and con ict; processes that play out through sophisticated technological networks both in periods of action and waiting. As we navigate the hallucinatory space of Florentin’s installation, we are met with familiar yet distorted symbols - calibration markers, resolution targets, maps anddiagrams. These graphic symbols become the backdrop for sculptural interventions that imagine what might happen if we disrupt the operational violence of capitalism, highlighting the potential agency we have in a society increasingly structured, organised and controlled by data technologies. Florentin is interested in images that operate rather than represent, and looks to a future where we might use these systems of control against themselves.
The central work of the installation imagines a steel aircraft, seemingly crashed into the graphic markers that it relies upon; the image misbehaves and causes the aircraft to fail. Part-drone, part paper-plane, the crashed object embodies the child-like dreams of ight and the crashing reality of technologicallydriven systems. As Virilio notes, whenever any new technology is invented or deployed, it is at that moment that a new accident is invented.
At this point of technological failure, we question where human intervention sits within this large-scale system. Florentin’s installation does not overlook human presence and includes a sculptural portrait of a gure that at once resists the machine whilst is also seemingly made for machine readability. The portrait work questions the points at which machine vision fails or misreads - the zones of misclassi cation and systematic error, whilst simultaneously o ers tactics of intentional invisibility, re-enacting the potential to resist the violence of extractive data capitalism. Florentin’s investigations into the potential of these tactics also extend to typography, employing designs that turn letters into optical noise and using surveillance-resistant type faces. The installation includes a printed adaptation of a 2010 broadcasted exchange that occurred when a dormant Soviet-era station was interrupted by a human voice. The human interaction with the mechanical drone of the broadcast is transcribed using a type face that resists machine readability; words that can be seen but not clearly read signals in reverse.
The distorted text and symbols act as a graphic score to the sonic backdrop of the installation. Synthetic voices tuned to refuse speech recognition systems are woven with fragments of stealth eld recordings, cut and distorted as if the remnants of a broken translation engine. Through doing so, Florentin deliberately draws attention to the blind spots in contemporary surveillance caused both through intentional resistance and machinic failure. As witnesses, we are left in a space of re-callibration, questioning the future of a society governed by a broken system./Felicity Hammond
︎︎︎ the work is an installation made of metal, pesplex, aluminium
Blind Spot - an expansive multi-media installation by Romanian-born London-based artist Vladimir Florentin -interrogates the technologically charged space of the nonbattle - a term originally coined by Virilio to describe how technology has impacted the logic of war. Florentin’s installation holds a mirror up to the processes that de ne contemporary violence and con ict; processes that play out through sophisticated technological networks both in periods of action and waiting. As we navigate the hallucinatory space of Florentin’s installation, we are met with familiar yet distorted symbols - calibration markers, resolution targets, maps anddiagrams. These graphic symbols become the backdrop for sculptural interventions that imagine what might happen if we disrupt the operational violence of capitalism, highlighting the potential agency we have in a society increasingly structured, organised and controlled by data technologies. Florentin is interested in images that operate rather than represent, and looks to a future where we might use these systems of control against themselves.
The central work of the installation imagines a steel aircraft, seemingly crashed into the graphic markers that it relies upon; the image misbehaves and causes the aircraft to fail. Part-drone, part paper-plane, the crashed object embodies the child-like dreams of ight and the crashing reality of technologicallydriven systems. As Virilio notes, whenever any new technology is invented or deployed, it is at that moment that a new accident is invented.
At this point of technological failure, we question where human intervention sits within this large-scale system. Florentin’s installation does not overlook human presence and includes a sculptural portrait of a gure that at once resists the machine whilst is also seemingly made for machine readability. The portrait work questions the points at which machine vision fails or misreads - the zones of misclassi cation and systematic error, whilst simultaneously o ers tactics of intentional invisibility, re-enacting the potential to resist the violence of extractive data capitalism. Florentin’s investigations into the potential of these tactics also extend to typography, employing designs that turn letters into optical noise and using surveillance-resistant type faces. The installation includes a printed adaptation of a 2010 broadcasted exchange that occurred when a dormant Soviet-era station was interrupted by a human voice. The human interaction with the mechanical drone of the broadcast is transcribed using a type face that resists machine readability; words that can be seen but not clearly read signals in reverse.
The distorted text and symbols act as a graphic score to the sonic backdrop of the installation. Synthetic voices tuned to refuse speech recognition systems are woven with fragments of stealth eld recordings, cut and distorted as if the remnants of a broken translation engine. Through doing so, Florentin deliberately draws attention to the blind spots in contemporary surveillance caused both through intentional resistance and machinic failure. As witnesses, we are left in a space of re-callibration, questioning the future of a society governed by a broken system./Felicity Hammond
︎︎︎ the work is an installation made of metal, pesplex, aluminium
