The Compression Zone is a video game performance by artist Shaheer Tarar that explores compression algorithms as one of the primary engines of world-making today. Shaheer performs the game live, navigating a perilous, multi-resolution dungeon where all the world’s data is sent to be compressed.
Part autobiographical, part grounded in archival research on twentieth-century nationalism, and partly besieged by memes and conspiracy, the game moves through uneven resolutions of rendering and rigour—journeying across South Asia’s digital borderlands and through fibre-optic cables in the Pacific.
The performance acts as both a launch of the online exhibition Ghost in the Loop–featuring newly commissioned work by Shaheer Tarar, Valia Lolidou, Martyna Marciniak, Mariana Marangoni, Linden Derichs and Celune Acheampong–and a closing event for the exhibition Connection Established: Digital Folklore and Web Craft. You'll be able to view all the works at the gallery as well as on Unthinking Photography.
Continuing with the theme in both Connection Established and Ghost in the Loop, we will be creating a limited edition holographic sticker pack as a small keepsake for the event. In the spirit of communities and sharing, bring along your own stickers and swap them for a pack.
About Shaheer Tarar
Shaheer Tarar is an artist and geographer based in London. His work pursues stories buried in time, space, sediment, and code, examining artifacts that shape how the world is seen and governed. These investigations take the form of net art, experimental video games, and networked sculptures. His recent work traces how digital images are haunted by the infrastructures that produce them—and how those images, in turn, generate multiple and often competing worldviews. He is currently a Lecturer at Central Saint Martins and a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, where he researches internet geographies.
Ghost in the Loop is produced as part of the Inverted World Labs in partnership with Goethe-Institut London. This event has been organised in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image / Digital x Data Research Centre at LSBU.
