Pleased to share Tromarama’s participation in the group exhibition The Threshold under Turbine Vents at Sun Blanket Foundation, Seoul, curated by Chao Jiaxing.

Contraflow by Tromarama is an installation that consists of eight Himalayan salt lamps. Allegedly purificatory and good for nurturing a meditative state, the lamps scattered along the walls are activated by tweets that use hashtag #power, performing blinking dances choreographed by a binary code-translating machine. It is representative of Tromarama’s longstanding interest in re-assessing the link between the analogue and the digital: “Trying to purify the tweets… bringing the messages back into a physical space.”

The technical aspect of the installation goes like this: every time it fetches a tweet that uses the hashtag #power, it breaks each word in the message into alphabets, then transforms the alphabets into 8-digit binary codes. Whenever there is a 1, the corresponding salt lamp is turned on; whenever there is a 0, the lamp is off. In 2019, Tromarama showed in Shanghai (2018), which uses the hashtag #kinship and 96 lamps sourced from a flea market.

— Courtesy of Sun Blanket Foundation.