Ingo Günther: World Processor

Art encompasses all things, so it is not surprising that artists have embraced big data as both a tool and a subject of their work. Ingo Günther, who studied ethnology and cultural anthropology at Frankfurt University and sculpture and media at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, has been mapping data onto a sea of illuminated globes in his World Processor series for fifteen years. The series is now internationally renowned and numbers over one thousand objects, a selection of which will be available to Hood Downtown visitors for the first time. The artist’s envisioning of complex data on physically identical but content-specific illuminated globes foregrounds scientific, economic, and historical information to create multilayered accounts of the relationship between humans and the planet.

This exhibition is paired with Mining Big Data: Artists’ Global Concerns in the Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center, from March 24 through April 30. Both exhibitions reveal how artists use information to create new forms and ways of understanding global issues.
This exhibition was organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, and generously supported by the Hansen Family Fund and the Marie-Louise and Samuel R. Rosenthal Fund. Curated by Juliette Bianco, Deputy Director / Katherine W. Hart, Senior Curator of Collections and Barbara C. & Harvey P. Hood 1918 Curator of Academic Programming