Leon Leube

The project The Karma of Graphic Cards is about human movements with the technology and its cultural consequences. How people and ideas transit or migrate through the territories, when they’re located between worlds – that are unknown yet? What responds first and what do we fill this gap with to feel secure? Common understanding of technology as a tool to measure our movement between cities, countries, and the continents is nothing new but utilised long in colonial history. This includes the navigation technology to run a ship, to draw lines on the map dividing territories, and to picture a better future for immigration workers. The earliest navigator was in fact a person, not the hero kind we hear from the story of discovery but a nameless person who carried the knowledge of the home villages or the home islands, tattooed on their skin and had to contribute this data for the others. These old tattoos are used repeatedly by the graphic card industry, as the aesthetics to represent their speed and ability to render the unknown, in effect to move fast and see closer. The graphic card tells us stories like the navigators tattoos used to, rendering dot by dot the smallest particles, like dust gathering to make a bigger picture. Its endless measuring, calculating, re-calibrating is translated sculpturally in this project, in a way that slows down the acceleration and turns it to a bodily experience, the first responder we all share.