Contemplating Turing by Oberon Onmura

I suppose I could have written this blog post using only 0s and 1s, which would be in keeping with Oberon Onmura's new installation, Contemplating Turing, at the Turing Gallery in Extropia Core region. Offered the opportunity to develop something for the gallery, Oberon's response was an artistic investigation the gallery's namesake, Alan Turing, the British mathematician and logician whose work had a critical impact on computer science.

The look of the installation is really impossible to convey in still images, as the digits you see are changing, while other small objects are in motion, winding their way from the entrance of the exhibition through the gallery to a point overhead, where they're absorbed by a large prim covered in black and white 0s and 1s. Be sure to find the chair toward the end of the installation and to have a seat. It's essential to have your sound stream turned on—"The sounds, I think, are critical to the whole thing," said Oberon at today's opening reception, adding, "The black and white form a code...a code that is unreadable without the proper decoding device." He suggests that those curious about details read James Gliek's The Information.

"All of us and everything here are just data in tables on servers," wryly notes Oberon.