Part of the Are We All Addicts Now? exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery
Furtherfield co-director Ruth Catlow and artist Katriona Beales will be talking about the artwork featured in the exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery, Are We All Addicts Now?, followed by a group discussion.
In the exhibition, Katriona Beales addresses the sensual and tactile conditions of her life lived online: the saturated colour and meditative allure of glowing screens, the addictive potential of infinite scroll and notification streams. Her new body of work for Are We All Addicts Now? re-imagines the private spaces in which we play out our digital existence. Beales celebrates the sensuality and appeal of online spaces, but criticises how our interactions get channeled through platforms designed to be addictive – how corporations use various ‘gamification’ and ‘neuro-marketing’ techniques to keep the ‘user’ on-device, to drive endless circulation, and monetise our every click. She suggests that in succumbing to online behavioural norms we emerge as ‘perfect capitalist subjects’.
Join Ruth and Katriona to find out more about the works featured in the exhibition and to discuss the issues that it raises around digital addiction and online behaviour.
Katriona Beales is an artist who makes digital artefacts, moving image and installation, stressing the physicality of digital life. Are We All Addicts Now? develops Beales’ 2015 work ‘White Matter’ (a FACT commission for ‘Group Therapy: Mental Distress in a Digital Age’) which is showing at the University of New South Wales, Sydney as part of Anxiety Festival (Sept 2017). Beales’ received an MA from Chelsea College of Arts and has an artist profile on Rhizome.org
www.katrionabeales.com
Ruth Catlow is an artist and curator working with emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics. She is co-founding director, with Marc Garrett, of Furtherfield. As new digital processes change the way we live, Furtherfield champions the need for society and culture to evolve critical, aesthetic and ethical responses in parallel, bringing together cultural and technological innovation. Recent commissions include Time Is Speeding Up (20-21 Visual Arts Centre); Sociality-machine (Tate); and Play the Web We Want (Southbank Centre). Catlow is named by the Foundation for P2P alternatives in their list of 100 women Co-creating the P2P society.
ruthcatlow.net
furtherfield.org
Furtherfield Gallery
McKenzie Pavilion
Finsbury Park, London, N4 2NQ
Visiting Information
Join us on August 4th between 6 and 6.45 for an exhibition tour by Gretta Louw at the Furtherfield Gallery.
Then from 7-8pm, we will continue at Furtherfield Commons with Your Emojis Are Not Innocent: Selfies and Alterity, a presentation by Louw, in which she will present her upcoming collaboration with Warnayaka Art Centre to create a Warlpiri selfie and photo editing app, and a discussion about how selfies, social media, and alterity can be used for social good.
Gretta Louw is an artist, writer, and curator working predominantly with digital media, social practice, and networked performance, whose work explores the potential of art as a means of investigating cultural and psychological phenomena, particularly in relation to new technologies and the internet. For the last five years she has been deepening her research into cultural change brought about by, or happening in interaction with, digitalisation. She has a long standing collaboration with the Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation, a Warlpiri First Nations art centre in the remote community of Lajamanu in central Australia. The current exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery, Networking the Unseen, is a curatorial project born out of Louw’s collaboration with Warnayaka and Warlpiri artists like Neil Jupurrurla Cooke, Isaiah Jungarrayi Lewis, and Sharon Nampijinpa Anderson. The exhibition investigates themes of digital colonialism, contemporary indigeneity, digital and media art from outside the urban mainstream, and the ways in which digital media can be used either to perpetuate inequality or as a tool of social empowerment.
FREE – Limited places, booking essential (register)
Exhibition Tour and Artists Talk (Neil Jupurrurla Cook and Gretta Louw)
Meeting point: Furtherfield Gallery
Join Neil Jupurrurla Cook, artist and Director of the Warnayaka Art and Aboriginal Cultural Corporation, and Gretta Louw, artist and curator, for a curated tour of Networking the Unseen and then head down to Furtherfield Commons for a Show and Tell about their collaboration and work.
FREE – Limited places, booking essential
Contemporary indigeneity, understanding Warlpiri (Australian First Nations) culture and law – and how these encompass art-making, and the relationship between tradition, culture and technology. Join Gretta Louw, Neil Jupurrurla Cook, and Warlpiri scholar and educator Wanta Jampjinpa Patrick, in an informal discussion and presentation on these and other themes at Furtherfield Commons. A Q&A session moderated by Furtherfield directors Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett will open up the floor to visitors.
At the talk at Furtherfield Commons, there will also be a rare opportunity for Furtherfield visitors to purchase a painting, ethically sourced and sold directly by the Aboriginal-owned art centre. This curated selection of canvases are by some of Warnayaka Art Centre’s most acclaimed artists, including senior law women Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves, Rosie Napurrurla Tasman, and Molly Napurrurla Tasman.
DOWNLOAD PRESS RELEASE (.pdf)
Furtherfield presents DIGITAL ZOO: Life from the world wild web, a touring exhibition that invites audiences to explore and marvel at new patterns of human and digital behaviours in the network age.
Featuring Andy Deck, Mary Flanagan, Genetic Moo, Liz Sterry, Thomson & Craighead, Pete Gomes, and a new interactive mobile artwork commission by Transnational Temps.
DIGITAL ZOO features experimental software, interactive videos, installations, workshops, networked and mobile media created by internationally recognised artists inspired to explore the ways in which our lives are being shaped by digital technologies, and challenge the concept that digital art is only accessible in galleries or online.
Since 2008 artist group Genetic Moo have been developing a series of interactive video installations using choreographed video clips that respond in a variety of life-like ways to user motion and touch. With Animacules they take inspiration from the 19th century sea life illustrations of Ernst Haeckel and the work of the 17th century Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek to create a dark sea of wiggling, luminescent creatures that gorge on torch light.
Internationally renowned artist duo Thomson & Craighead create a new site-specific installation especially for the DIGITAL ZOO tour. A wall of propaganda style posters of the Tweets and other status updates drawn from people in the local area of the tour venues, offers a poetic snapshot of the invisible conversations taking place, “the idle mutterings of ourselves to ourselves as a form of concrete poetry.” The work is based on the artists’ London Wall series shown at the Museum of London (2010), Furtherfield Gallery (2012) and Carroll/Fletcher (2013).
Liz Sterry is an artist fascinated with the way people use the Internet to express themselves. In Kay’s Blog she presents an exact physical replica of a young woman’s bedroom, recreated through information, images and notes about her daily life that the real Kay posted on her public blog. With social media often used as a platform for self-expression and performance, the work questions how much of ourselves we share online with strangers without even realising it.
With his novel use of Twitter, US artist Andy Deck savours the wildness of everyday language with people around the world, inspired by the wealth of nature-related sayings passed down over centuries. He invites audiences to help him build a bestiary of animal idioms using social media and an interactive installation.
Experimental filmmaker Pete Gomes invited residents in Sunderland with no acting experience to participate in a 45 minute long acting session. Each participant was directed to perform on camera for a single five-minute take. Screened as a series, Cycle of Purposes questions reality and artifice by exploring how thoughts and feelings are acted, amplified, exaggerated and stylised every day in response to different people and places.
Mary Flanagan travels overland and undersea, in virtual worlds built and inhabited by other virtual beings. [borders] is a video documentation of her walks in beautiful and hypnotic landscapes that expose the boundaries of the virtual world by testing its edges. Her walks are inspired by Thoreau, the great American nature writer and walker, who, avoiding highways, chose instead to wander in order to understand the spiritual possibilities of the landscape.
Mall of the Wild by Transnational Temps is a new commission created especially for Digital Zoo. Players help the famous artist Magritte to find fake wildlife in the shopping centre. Equipped with a store map and a smart phone app, they have limited time to find a number of representations of wild animals visible in the products of the shopping centre. They map rare species and share their wildlife documentary photos in the online “Ceci n’est pas…” collection via social networks.
In creating DIGITAL ZOO, Furtherfield believe that digital networks and social media offer the potential for a more open relationship between artists and audiences, changing the life of an artwork in the world, and the ways in which people encounter it, and sometimes collaborate in its creation.
Personal information is exchanged with increasing frequency, and daily lives are becoming ever more public, as if in a public zoo. People are both animals and visitors; hunters, trackers, observers, naturalists and zookeepers; and educators and pundits. The longer-term social effects of this collective public performance are awaited…
The exhibition was accompanied by a series of creative workshops inspired by Crow_Sourcing for children aged 6-11 years old.
Curated and produced by Furtherfield in collaboration with Culture Code and Land Securities.
Digital Zoo is supported by Arts Council England through the Strategic Touring programme.
Crow_Sourcing by Andy Deck was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation, and was a 2012 Commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website.
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