During their 2023-2024 residency at Gallery 44, Soft Turns researched non-human and decentralized intelligences from plants, ant colonies, watersheds and AI networks. The differences of these ‘decentralized intelligences’ from the Western tradition are striking: non-linear decision making, self-organizing systems, brainless organisms solving sophisticated spatial problems, ecosystems maintaining their own climate. Human-built environments, on the other hand, usually involve massive expenditures of energy, materials, rigid planning and control—without which our greenhouses, parkland, homes and data centers would fail; for example, in 2013 an actual cloud formed inside a Facebook data center and it began to rain. Cold Data reflects on the material presences and ecological impacts of digital infrastructures and our relationships to them. Centered in this exhibition is a stop motion animation, filmed inside of Soft Turns’ model data centre (which they constructed from computer parts, aluminum heat sinks, staples, optic fibers and other recycled materials) in the sways of thermodynamic shifts.
For more information, read Cold Data, an essay and excerpt from thinking alongside itself, the forthcoming third volume in the Writer-in-Residence book series by Weiyi Chang. Designed by Mark Bennett.
The artists would like to thank the Toronto Arts Council and Canada Arts Council for funding the development of the video piece Cold Data, and Buttrum's Farm in Hamilton for hosting the model data center over the summer of 2025.
Soft Turns is the collaborative effort of Wojciech Olejnik and Sarah Jane Gorlitz. Alongside simple mechanisms —pulleys, mirrors, paper, lenses—and crucially, their own bodies, they use stop-motion animation’s capacity to stretch and collapse time, to attempt to get as close as possible to the rhythms of their subjects. The results are slow-paced, immersive, intimate video-centred installations. Recent research interests include: controlled artificial environments such as greenhouses and data centres, plant-human interactions and the physics of information. Feature articles about their work have been published in Canadian Art and Esse. Their work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally, most recently at the Plumb (Toronto, 2021) 8eleven (Images Festival, 2018), and The Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2018). Sarah Jane is a white settler of English and Menonite descent and Wojciech immigrated from Poland as an adolescent. Together, they have been privileged to live and participate in several communities abroad and in Canada, including a pivotal three year residency at the School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph (2016-19). They currently work and live with their two young daughters in the Lakeshore Village Artist Co-op, on the lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples, in what is commonly referred to as Toronto.
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