The Beautiful Square [electronic resource].

The Shed 2019

Open access content

In 1915, Kazimir Malevich painted his famous Red Square painting, more properly called Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions (1915). I think about how incendiary it must have been at the time, how arresting. How it prefigured the general collapse of figuration, of representation, into a single, glowing screen, an ultimate abstraction of life and death that is later taken up by PredPol, a predictive policing software company. How the Red Square is not even a square, but a slightly angled parallelogram. Particularly exciting is the way it, along with its sibling Black Square (1915), references Russian Orthodox traditions. In their colors, yes, but especially in the way they were originally displayed: hung high in the corner of a room, in the place that an icon painting would have traditionally been displayed. Malevich purportedly kept a small Black Square painting in the same sacralized part of his own bedroom until he died. Today, in the same spot, we install surveillance cameras instead…
https://www.librarystack.org/the-beautiful-square/?ref=unknown

Algorithms
Technology and the arts
Art criticism
Artificial intelligence
Electronic surveillance
Electronic surveillance in art

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Rahel Aima
Nora Khan