In 2019 we began planning the second year in our 3-year Citizen Sci-Fi programme crowdsourcing creative and technological visions of our communities and public spaces.
With a planetary health check revealing over a million species on earth at risk of extinction as a result of human action, we wanted to explore ways of developing living and machine systems for mutual care and respect on earth. We had questions: How do we care? Who or what do we care for first? And who cares for the carers in a world ravaged by political crises and climate emergency?
Little did we know, by the time we were about to launch this programme of radical care, we humans would need it more than ever.
Covid-19 has both interrupted and accelerated our plans. Physical proximity and presence are vital to ongoing collaborations between artists and other human and non-human inhabitants of Finsbury Park (where our Gallery and Commons are based). We long for the time that these can resume. We have postponed The Treaty of Finsbury Park that we have been planning with Cade Diehm til next year. But you can read about this mid-Summer LARP for multi-species revolution here.
However, while we have had to close our Gallery space to visitors for the summer months, as a born-digital arts organisation we were already occupying online networks for connection, knowledge sharing, and support, so this year you’ll find even more of our programme there where everyone can get at it. Please check this page, our social media and sign up for our newsletter for updates.
Each of the projects in our Love Machines season explores how we might act together and start reprogramming all our technologies of production and control for better love and understanding between all entities on earth – human, creature and machine or other! From collective healthcare, to terrifying (and comforting?) technologies themselves, to shared stories and systems of empathy, for Furtherfield, 2020 will be the real summer of love.
31 Oct 2020 – 31 Jan 2021
UNINVITED by leading digital artists Nye Thompson (UK) and UBERMORGEN (AT/CH) is an art installation at Furtherfield Gallery and on the Internet exploring what happens when networked surveillance tools and AI capabilities get sick in the head. See for yourself by entering www.furtherfield.org in your browser or by scanning the cordoned off gallery with your phone. There you’ll encounter a website possessed and enter a ‘captcha’ code to the live feeds. Watch the watcher seeing the unseen as its eyes crawl the disturbing digital crevices of a world caught on camera (and entirely misunderstood) by MACHINES!
An invisible networked super-organism oscillating between anxiety, lust, and horror. Described by the artists as ‘a radically new creature looking at the world and nothing makes sense,’ the synthetic organism apprehends the universe through millions of hallucinogenic virally abused (CCTV) sensors. Thompson & UBERMORGEN’s life-form continually evolves by using human and machine learning. It defines its own existence and distributed agency through undergoing fear, instability, aggression, and vulnerability. UNINVITED can be experienced as a monstrous AI machine installation in Furtherfield Gallery, the horror movie it makes in its own mind and projects into the void, and an online viewing room where the humans and their own watching machines try to join the experience. By disrupting the traditional contract between the work and the visitor, the life-form insists on its own autonomy. Observers become part of this ostensibly alien organism.
Credits:
By Nye Thompson & UBERMORGEN
With…
Composer/sound designer: Thom Kubli
Project Consultant: Adrian Bojenoiu
Branding & Web Team: Studio Hyte
Industrial Design & Monster Prototype: Tareg Al-Zamel
Photography & videography: Geoff Titley
Software architecture & machine learning: Richard Hopkirk & Martin Dixon
Mechatronics: Modulab Bucarest
CCTV visual prototypes: Alexander Zenker
Prototyping and enacting a networked care distribution system.
February – September
In early 2020 Canadian artist Cassie Thornton arrived in London to do major work on her sci-fi-inflected project about the future of healthcare. As governments around the world began putting their nations on lockdown, Thornton found herself isolated inside the fiction she herself had been building – becoming a kind of pandemic artist in residence.
Thornton’s project uses ‘parafiction’ or, fiction presented as fact, to create an alternate universe of healthcare solutions for a world overcome by myriad new illnesses. Poignant in an age of ‘social distancing’, from her fictitious realm she will model the Hologram, a network of socially connected caretakers. Inspired by free, integrative and transformational healthcare developed in Greece during the financial/refugee crisis, each ‘hologram’ comprises a team who connect with one individual and talk with them about their health from three perspectives: social, physical or mental. Over time each person’s ‘hologram’ reflects back to them a multifaceted image of themselves.
August – September
This summer, as a continuation of The Hologram project Thornton will host a four week course prototyping and enacting a networked healthcare system as part of the European CreaTures programme. Participants will explore the Hologram state of being and co-create a portrait of the process in the form of advertisements for the model. Sign up for the Hologram newsletter here to receive more information.
These elements will all contribute to an exhibition and performance of The Hologram alongside performed trials in the park in 2021.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759, for CreaTures – Creative practice and transformations to sustainability.
An online art project exploring empathetic relationships between humans and networked non-humans developed by students from the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2020, Royal College of Art, London, in partnership with Furtherfield.
June – October
Empathy Loading is a transdisciplinary online art project inquiring into affective relationships between humans and non-humans. These emotional connections are the objects of speculation in the works of Friendred, Elisa Giardina Papa, Vishal Kumaraswamy and Marie-Eve Levasseur, who each submitted a creative ‘proposition’ in response to these themes. The artworks reflect upon the interweaving of the synthetic and organic worlds, and the emergence of new forms of caretaking and caregiving.
One submission, by Vishal Kumaraswamy, was chosen to be developed further into the project’s main online commission. Speculating on the potential of alternative systems of care for and with technology, all artists’ responses, exhibited on the Empathy Loading website, invite consideration of meaningful interactions between humans and machines by developing new forms of intimacy.
Launching on 15 June, the website will feature artist interviews, a curatorial statement, a newly commissioned creative text by poet and programmer Allison Parrish and host a live public programme.
Join us online for the events accompanying Empathy Loading:
• 15 June Project Launch of Empathy Loading
• 16 June 12:00 – 1:00 pm: Artist in Conversation: Vishal Kumaraswamy and Zarina Muhammad (The White Pube) | Event page
• 18 – 21 June: Speculative Listening by Amina Abbas-Nazari | Event page
Follow Empathy Loading on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook for all updates.
Delivering augmented reality stories about the Future of Finsbury Park through your door
September 2020-March 2021
Future Fictions of Finsbury Park is an augmented reality sci-fi zine set in Finsbury Park. In these dystopian times we are gathering alternative stories about the future, representing a range of diverse viewpoints, and presenting them in a futuristic format that will be delivered direct to the doors of the local residents.
The zine arrives in the post as an alien-looking booklet which needs to be scanned with a smartphone to reveal a set of stories about Finsbury Parks of the future. The augmented stories will only appear through the app, occupying their own dimension by hovering and moving above the page.
Future Fictions of Finsbury Park AR produced by Furtherfield and Studio Hyte with funding from Arts Council England and Haringey Council.
A cultural discussion podcast grounded in news from where we are
April, May and from November
We may be confined to our homes by the Coronavirus emergency but we still have access to thriving networked cultures from around the world. ‘News From Where We Are’ is hosted by Furtherfield’s Marc Garrett, a conversation with many voices from the ground. The podcast explores how the collaborative-imaginative fieldwork of artists, techies and activists is informing how we organise, imagine and build solidarity, good health and post-capitalist realities. Working together and supporting others to do the same. Each podcast includes your news from where you are, interviews, reviews, readings and announcements, to explore how people want to live in our globally-connected world now.
Listen to two full programmes that document the early stages of the pandemic. When we resume in November please send short audio recordings to marc.garrett@furtherfield.org in the style of local news headlines (up to 90 seconds) including your name, where you are, and your news. Also send your social media handles so that we can share the podcast with you.
Amina Abbas-Nazari is a London based designer, researcher and artist whose work expands reality through designed interactions, speculative systems and sonic fictions. She graduated from the MA Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art, where she is now a Research Fellow, working on the EPSRC funded Citizen Naturewatch project. She is also embarking on a Techne NPIF funded PhD studentship in the subject areas of Artificial Intelligence and Voice, in partnership with IBM. She is a member of MUSARC choir, a research and event platform based at London Metropolitan University, exploring the relationship between architecture and sound. Her projects re-compose or re-arrange reality as a way to understand how the world is constructed and then use speculation, storytelling and designed media to describe alternate arrangements of society and ways of life via technology, geopolitics, semiotics, economics and belief systems.
Friendred is an installation and computational artist currently based in London. He is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London, researching the intertwined relationship between technology and performance arts in the field of HCI. Since 2015, Friendred has been focused on disciplines crossing arts, technology and sciences. His recent work combines movement and algorithmic machines to explore sensory apparatus and interactive systems and their relationship to embodiment, technologised performance and the architectural body. His work has been published on several design and technology platforms including DesignBoom and CreativeApplications. He has won several prestigious awards including the Shanghai Da Shi Award and the Bronze prize in the third Cultural and Creative Design Competition. His work has been exhibited at Tate Britain and The Design Museum.
Elisa Giardina Papa is an Italian artist whose work investigates gender, sexuality, and labor in relation to neoliberal capitalism and the borders of the Global South. Her work has been exhibited and screened at MoMA (New York), Whitney Museum [Sunrise/Sunset Commission], Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018, Unofficial Internet Pavilion of 54th Venice Biennial, XVI Quadriennale di Roma, rhizome.org [Download Commission], The Flaherty NYC, Institute for Contemporary Art, Milano (ICA MILANO), among others. Giardina Papa received an MFA from RISD, and a BA from Politecnico of Milan, and she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in film and media studies at the University of California Berkeley. She lives and works in New York and Sant’Ignazio (Sicily).
http://www.elisagiardinapapa.org/
Mud Howard (they/them) is a gender non-conforming poet, performer and activist from the states. mud creates work that explores the intimacy and isolation between queer and trans bodies. mud is a Pushcart Prize nominee. they are currently working on their first full-length novel: a queer and trans memoir full of lies and magic. they were the first annual youth writing fellow for Transfaith in the summer of 2017. their poem “clearing” was selected by Eduardo C. Corral for Sundress Publication’s the Best of the Net 2017. mud is a graduate of the low-res MFA Poetry Program at the IPRC in Portland, OR and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Westminster. you can find their work in THEM, The Lifted Brow, Foglifter, and Cleaver Magazine. they spend a lot of time scheming both how to survive and not perpetuate toxic masculinity. they love to lip sync, show up to the dance party early and paint their mustache turquoise and gold.
Vishal Kumaraswamy is a new media artist and filmmaker currently based in Bangalore, India. He has an MA in Photography from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. Vishal’s work has been presented at the Venice Biennale’s Research Pavilion, Galeria-de Arte-Mexicano, Athens Digital Arts Festival, Birmingham Art Summit, Apex Art’s Savdhaan – Regimes of Truth and will shortly be exhibiting at The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He is Programme Director at Walkin Studios, an independent multidisciplinary art studio and project space and founder of the international artist collective, Now You Have Authority, a collaborative practice through which he has curated exhibitions, residencies, and delivered workshops as part of Tate Modern’s Tate Exchange Programme, Tanzfest Aarau and The Sluice Biennial. Vishal is currently an artist-in-residence with Contemporary Calgary’s In-Collider Program and is presenting work online for www.the-lack-of.com as part of The Wrong Biennale.
Marie-Eve Levasseur lives and works in Leipzig, Germany. She completed a bachelor in Visual and Media Arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada and obtained her master and postmaster diploma at the Academy of Visual Arts of Leipzig. Using diverse forms and techniques like video, installation, sculpture and 3D animation, she questions the proximity of technological and organic surfaces in a posthuman context as well as our perception of device-mediated content. Inspired by thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, her projects use speculative fabulation; imagined situations with fictive devices to open a space to reflect upon the way we get along in the system we live in. Her works have been shown in many group exhibitions in Montreal, Berlin, London, Paris, Hong Kong and Zurich. In 2020, she receives a research and creation grant from the KdFS (Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen), Germany.
Zarina Muhammad is an art critic @ the white pube (thewhitepube.com // @thewhitepube) where she writes about exhibitions, how art makes her feel, and how institutions operate. cancer sun/aries moon/sagittarius ascendant. ‘intellectual charlatan’, ‘sociopathic pseudo-critic’, leading proponent of ‘The Philosophy of the Warm Tummy’ & cowboy in the art world.
https://www.zarinamuhammad.co.uk/
Stephen Oram writes thought provoking stories that mix science fiction with social comment, mainly in a recognisable near-future. He is one of the writers for SciFutures and, as 2016 Author in Residence at Virtual Futures – described by the Guardian as “the Glastonbury of cyberculture” – he was one of the masterminds behind the new Near-Future Fiction series and continues to be a lead curator. Oram is a member of the Clockhouse London Writers and a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors. He has two published novels: Fluence and Quantum Confessions, and a collection of sci-fi shorts, Eating Robots and Other Stories. As the Author in Residence for Virtual Futures Salons he wrote stories on the new and exciting worlds of neurostimulation, bionic prosthetics and bio-art. These Salons bring together artists, philosophers, cultural theorists, technologists and fiction writers to consider the future of humanity and technology. Recently, his focus has been on collaborating with experts to understand the work that’s going on in neuroscience, artificial intelligence and deep machine learning. From this Oram writes short pieces of near-future science fiction as thought experiments and use them as a starting point for discussion between himself, scientists and the public. Oram is always interested in creating and contributing to debate about potential futures.
Allison Parrish is a computer programmer, poet, educator and game designer whose teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet, with a focus on artificial intelligence and computational creativity. She is an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she earned her master’s degree in 2008. Named “Best Maker of Poetry Bots” by the Village Voice in 2016, Allison’s computer-generated poetry has recently been published in Ninth Letter and Vetch. Her first full-length book of computer-generated poetry, “Articulations,” was published by Counterpath in 2018.
https://www.decontextualize.com/
Nye Thompson is an artist turned software designer turned artist. She creates data-gathering software systems to explore new technology paradigms, and has a particular interest in the machinic gaze and its underlying power dynamics. She has exhibited internationally including Tate Modern, The Barbican, The V&A, ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica and The Lowry. Her first solo show Backdoored.io – described by C4 News as “too shocking to broadcast” – became global clickbait and triggered an international government complaint. Her work has been featured on BBC, C4, CNN, the Guardian and Wired, and she was a guest presenter on BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Art of Now: Surveillance’. She has been called “the new Big Brother” (Vogue) and “a contemporary Jacques Cousteau” (Bob & Roberta Smith). She has received several Arts Council England and British Council awards. She was a Lumen Prize finalist in 2018 & 2019, and shortlisted for the 2019 Rapoport Award for Women in Art and Technology. Her work was recently acquired for the V&A Museum’s permanent collection.
Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). She has worked in close collaboration with freelance curators and producers including Taraneh Fazeli, Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova, Dani Admiss, Amanda Nudelman, Misha Rabinovich, Caitlin Foley and Laurel Ptak. Her projects, invited and uninvited, have appeared at (or in collaboration with) Transmediale Festival for Media Arts, San Francisco MoMA, West Den Haag, Moneylab, Swissnex San Francisco, Pro Arts Gallery & Commons, Dream Farm Commons, Furtherfield, Gallery 400, Strike Debt Bay Area, Red Bull Detroit, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Flux Factory, Bemis Center for the Arts, Berliner Gazette and more. Feministeconomicsdepartment.com
Studio Hyte is a London based multidisciplinary design studio who place research and concept above medium. Working between graphic design, interaction and emergent forms of visual communication, we aim to create meaningful and thought provoking work. Formed of a small group of individual practitioners, Studio Hyte is the middle ground where all of our interests and practices meet. As such our collective practice and research covers a broad spectrum of topics including; language, inclusion & accessibility, egalitarian politics & alternative protest and technology & the human. With an emphasis on process, we often create critical narratives through our work in order to conceptualise through making. Collectively, our visual practice is a means through which we can plot out a conceptual landscape in order to understand and explore real-world scenarios. Studio Hyte works on self-directed research projects, commissions and client-led projects for a small pool of like minded organisations and individuals.
UBERMORGEN is an artist duo founded 1995 in Vienna by lizvlx & Hans Bernhard. Part of the Net.Art avant-garde of the 1990s and 2000s digital actionism & concept art, UBERMORGEN celebrate a radical-subversive approach to data & matter. UBERMORGEN own 175 websites/domains and they have been featured in 3000+ news reports & reviews. CNN called them ‘Maverick Austrian Business People’, NY Times called them ‘simply brilliant’. UBERMORGEN was featured at Centre Pompidou, MoMA/PS1, Sydney Biennale, MACBA Barcelona, New Museum New York, SFMoma, ICC Tokyo, Gwangju Biennale, Serpentine Galleries, Whitney Museum. Main influences: Rammstein, Samantha Fox, XXXTentacion and Pixibücher, Olanzapine & LSD, Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Coconut Shrimp Deluxe & Viennese Actionism. UBERMORGEN talk at international conferences, museums and symposia and they hold the professorship for Networks at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne.
Birbirine hiper güçlü ağlarla bağlanmış bir dünyada yerel ötesi bir dayanışma kurmayı hedefleyen Birleşik Krallık, Sırbistan, Türkiye ve Yunanistan’dan sanatçılar arasındaki iş birliği ve bilgi paylaşımından doğan çalışmaların sergisi.
SEE IMAGES FROM THE PRIVATE VIEW
TransLocal Cooperation exhibition, Connect for Creativity from Furtherfield on Vimeo.
Yerel Ötesi İş Birlikleri nedir?
Dünyamız hiper güçlü bağlarla birbirine bağlandıkça çok sayıda gerçek ve sanal mekânda eşzamanlı olarak bulunmak ya da bunların arasında seyahat etmek mümkün hâle geldi. Bunun sonucunda giderek artan bir hızla kendimizi birden fazla yer ya da kültürle özdeşleştirmeye başladık. Küreselleşmenin bu sosyal ve kültürel boyutu, genellikle belli bir yerde düzenlenen etkinliklerin, o yere özgü koşulların ve niteliklerin büyük bir hızla başka bir yeri etkilemesi ve o yerle bağlantı kurulmasını sağlaması anlamında ‘yerel ötesilik’ şeklinde tanımlanıyor.
Bu sergi ve bünyesindeki eserler, yerel ötesi topluluklarımızla ve onların kendileri arasındaki mesafeleri ve farklılıkları dikkate alarak nasıl örgütlenebileceğimizi ele alıyor. Sergi, Birleşik Krallık, Sırbistan, Türkiye ve Yunanistan’dan sanatçıların, Türkiye’de ATÖLYE, Yunanistan’da BIOS ve Sırbistan’da Nova Iskra yaratıcı platformlarının ev sahipliği yaptığı sanat ve teknoloji rezidans programları sırasında yarattıkları çalışmalardan bir seçkiye yer veriyor. Bu sanat eserleri çoğul kimliklerimizi ve onların yaratıcı dışavurumlarını nasıl kucaklayabileceğimiz, daha fazla iş birliği ve empati kurmak için oluşan yeni bağlantıları nasıl kullanabileceğimiz ve paylaşabileceğimiz sorularını yöneltiyor.
Kendileri de yerel ötesi olan Birleşik Krallık, Sırbistan, Türkiye ve Yunanistan’dan küratör ekibimizin sergilenmek üzere seçtiği eserler, sanal gerçeklikten üç boyutlu baskıya, probiyotik fermantasyondan etnografik dokümantasyona çok farklı araçlardan ve teknolojilerden yararlanarak yaratıldı. Sanatçılar, zaman ve mekândan koparılmış insanların, kültürlerin ve fikirlerin karşı karşıya oldukları güçlükleri görselleştirerek bu güçlüklerin hızla değişen bir dünyada yerel-ötesi dayanışma ve bilgi alışverişi için nasıl yeniden değerlendirileceğini ve oluşturulacağını inceliyor.
Simdi ve burada, geçmişte ve orada, Türkiye’de Hasankeyf’in sular altında kalması ve insanların yerlerinden edilmeleri ile Sırbistan’ın Belgrad şehrinde yaşayanların evlerinden tahliye edilerek yerlerinden edilmeleri arasındaki geçişkenliklere uzanan sanatçılar, bu proje vesilesiyle küreselleşmenin belli yerel topluluklar üzerindeki etkilerini inceliyorlar. Daha da önemlisi, bazı yerel kaygıların sınırlar ve kültürler ötesi izdüşümlerini, yansımalarını ve bağlantılarını ortaya çıkarmayı hedefliyorlar.
Connect for Creativity, British Council önderliğinde Türkiye’den ATÖLYE ve Abdullah Gül Üniversitesi, Yunanistan’dan BIOS ve Sırbistan’dan Nova Iskra ortaklığıyla yürütülen ve 18 ay boyunca devam eden bir proje. Proje, Yunus Emre Enstitüsü tarafından yürütülen ve Avrupa Birliği ile Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nin ortak finanse ettiği Kültürlerarası Diyalog Programı çerçevesinde hayata geçirilmektedir. Proje, Avrupa’da yaratıcı platformlardan oluşan bir ağ kurmak ve böylelikle daha uyum içinde, açık ve kenetlenmiş bir sivil toplum yaratmaya katkıda bulunacak yaratıcı keşif ve işbirliği olanaklarını desteklemeyi amaçlamaktadır.
Connect for Creativity Sanat ve Teknoloji Rezidans Programı, Birleşik Krallık, Sırbistan, Türkiye ve Yunanistan’dan sanatçıları, kültürlerarası iş birliği deneyimine odaklanmaları amacıyla bir araya getirdi. Dörder sanatçıya ev sahipliği yapan Atina, Belgrad ve İstanbul’da eş zamanlı olarak gerçekleşen program, toplam 12 sanatçıyı ağırladı. Son derece yoğun geçen altı haftalık rezidans programı boyunca sanatçılar, iş birliği ağlarıyla birbirine bağlanmış bir kültürün modern dünyaya egemen olan belirsizlik ve değişimiyle başa çıkmak için yakınlaşmayı nasıl sağlayabileceği sorununu ele aldı.
Eserler, Finsbury Park’ın ortasında bulunan Furtherfield Gallery’de sergilenecektir. Furtherfield Gallery, haftada aşağı yukarı 55 bin kişi tarafından ziyaret edilen bu kent parkının tam kalbinde yer alıyor ve Londra’nın yerel olarak neredeyse 200 dilin konuşulduğu üç semtinin sınırlarının ‘süper mozaik’ olarak anılan kesişim noktasında bulunuyor. Bölge, Birleşik Krallık’ta Türkiye ve Yunanistan göçmen nüfusun en yoğun olduğu mahalle ve Birleşik Krallık’taki en kalabalık Sırp topluluğun yaşadığı Batı Londra bölgesinin hemen yanında yer alıyor.
Açık Bir Gazete (Bir hareketi tahliye edemezsiniz.) – Theo Prodromidis (Theodoros Karyotis, Tonia Katerini, Stathis Mitropoulos, Nemanja Pantović ve Ana Vilenica ile ortak çalışma)
Sırbistan’da konutlardan tahliyelerdeki muazzam artışa yol açan süreçleri ele alan bu çalışma, kişisel konutları korumaya dair yasal çerçevenin Nisan 2020’de ‘vadesinin dolacak olması’ nedeniyle Yunanistan’daki güncel durumla da bağlantı kuruyor. Kolektif çalışma sonucu ortaya çıkmış olan bu baskı eser, giderek tırmanan küresel konut krizi bağlamında yaşanan mücadelelerle ilgili bir bilgi aracı işlevi görüyor.
Download and distribute your own copies now
Probiyotik Ritüeller – Ioana Man
Şehirler karmaşık ekosistemlerdir ve içlerindeki insanların varoluşu, bakımın çeşitli katmanlara yayılan ilişkilerle sağlanmasına bağlıdır. Probiyotik Ritüeller şehirde insandan-daha-fazlasını temsil eden bir yaşam için yeni gelenekler oluşturmayı amaçlıyor. Ölçeği büyütülmüş mikroplar, artırılmış gerçeklik arayüzü, bir internet sitesi ve bir dizi ritüel, gözlemci konumundaki insanı biyosferde bir vızıltı ile aynı konuma indirger ve toplumun mikroskopik hayata olan bağımlılığı gösterir. Birden fazla türün dâhil olduğu ritüeller ve görseller, şehrin daha küçük sakinleriyle birlikte yaşamayı güçlendirecek bir süreç ortaya koyar.
Öz Yaratım: Birlikte Oluşmanın Katmanları – Yağmur Uyanık
British Museum’daki iki ‘özgün’ heykelin dijital modellerini birleştirerek yaratılmış melez bir karakterin üç boyutlu baskı sonucu elde edilmiş kumtaşı heykeli: Makedonyalı III. İskender (Büyük İskender olarak anılır) ve antik Yunanlı Periskles. Öz Yaratım, ses ve heykeli bütünleştirerek kültürel bilgi yaratımının, yayılımının ve korunmasının coğrafi bağlamları, yerinden edilmişlik biçimlerini ve devletsizliği nasıl ön plana çıkardığını ortaya koyuyor. Kişisel anlatının ve kolektif belleğin kültürel mülkiyet, kültürel değer ve onlara içkin sembolik anlamlar sayesinde nasıl biçimlendirildiğini irdeliyor.
Bilinç Akışı / Hasankeyf‘in Mağaraları – Emmy Bacharach
Sanal gerçeklik deneyimi biçiminde olan bu çalışma, Türkiye’nin güneydoğusunda bulunan antik yerleşim bölgesi Hasankeyf’in yerel ve yerel ötesi önemine dikkat çekiyor. Yerleşim bölgesi, Dicle nehrinin sularının yükselmesine neden olacak Ilısu Barajı yüzünden sular altında kalarak yok olma tehdidi altında. Fotogrametri yöntemi ve bölgeden toplanan görsel malzemelerle Hasankeyf’in temsilini yaratan çalışmada ziyaretçilere, çoğu kısa süre sonra sular altında kalacak olan mağaraların benzersiz ortamıyla ilgili bir resim çiziliyor. Mağaralar yavaş yavaş suyla dolarken, bu deneyimi suyun bakış açısından yaşayan ziyaretçiler, aynı zamanda yerlerinden edilmiş yerel halkın travmasını da hissetmiş oluyor.
Taşa Kazınmış – Tamara Kametani
GDPR (Avrupa Birliği’nin Genel Veri Koruma Tüzüğü) kapsamında ‘unutulma hakkı’, herhangi bir kişinin bazı tartışmalı durumlarda kendisiyle ilgili olumsuz bilgilerin arama listelerinden silinmesini talep edebilmesi anlamına gelir. Taşa Kazınmış, maddelerin, yerel ötesi kültürlerin maddi değilmiş gibi görünen boyutları üzerindeki etkisi üstünde şiirsel bir meditasyon oluşturur. İnternet ortamında hem mahremiyet hem de ifade özgürlüğünün meşru ve gayrimeşru kullanımlarıyla ilgili hararetli tartışmalar devam ederken, bu çalışma Atina mermerine elle işlenmiş verilerin ömrü ile ilgili cümleler kuruyor ve böylelikle eylemlerin hem çevrimiçi hem de çevrimdışı ortamdaki sonuçlarını tarihsel olarak düşündürmeyi hatta belleğe kazımayı amaçlıyor.
Kurtuluş’a Dört Durak – Georgios Makkas
Bu çok kanallı video, 20 bini aşan Rum nüfusu nedeniyle eskiden beri ‘Küçük Atina’ olarak anılan Kurtuluş mahallesini ele alıyor. Günümüzde de bu kozmopolit mahalle, Rum nüfusun etkisi ve sayısı giderek azalmakla birlikte Türk, Rum, Ermeni, Kürt ve Musevi toplulukların yaygın olarak yaşadığı bir mahalle olmaya devam ediyor. Makkas’ın hâlâ bu mahallede yaşamayı sürdüren Rumlarla yaptığı görüşmeleri merkeze alan çalışması, ebediyen yok olacak bir şeyleri belgelendirme fırsatını değerlendirerek eski Kurtuluş’un belleğini korumayı amaçlıyor.
Ruth Catlow, Lina Džuverović, Diana Georgiou, Huma Kabakcı
Furtherfield
Furtherfield, Londra’nın en uzun süredir faaliyette olan sanat ve teknoloji (adem-i) merkezi. 20 yılı aşan deneyimimiz, 50’den fazla sergimiz ve 100’den fazla uluslararası ortaklığımızla alternatif örgütlenme ve ortak yaratım sistemlerinde uzmanlık geliştirdik. BBC, Guardian, New Scientist, Wired, Art Newspaper ve Hyperallergic çalışmalarımıza yayınlarında yer verdi. Piccadilly Metro Hattı haritasında Buckingham Sarayı’nın yanı sıra görülmesi gereken yerler arasında gösterilen Furtherfield Gallery, gelir eşitsizliğinin en yüksek oranlarda seyrettiği Haringey semtinde bulunuyor. İnsanlara hayatlarına ve yaşadıkları yere ortaklaşa sahip oldukları hissini veren çalışmalar üretmeye çalışıyoruz.
furtherfield.org
British Council
British Council, Birleşik Krallık’ın kültürel ilişkiler ve eğitim fırsatlarından sorumlu uluslararası kuruluşudur. 100’ü aşkın ülkeyle, kültür-sanat, İngilizce, eğitim ve sivil toplum alanlarında çalışmaktadır. Geçen yıl 65 milyondan fazla kişiyle yüz yüze, 731 milyonun üzerinde kişiyle de internet üzerinden, radyo ve TV programları ve basılı yayınlarla iletişim kurdu. Fırsatlar yaratarak, bağlantılar kurarak ve güven inşa ederek değiştirdiği yaşamlarla, beraber çalıştığımız ülkelere olumlu katkılar sunuyor. 1934 yılında kurulan British Council, Kraliyet Tüzüğü ile tüzel kişilik kazanmış bir hayır kurumu ve bir kamu kuruluşudur. Gelirinin yüzde 15’i ise Birleşik Krallık hükümeti tarafından karşılanmaktadır.
https://www.britishcouncil.org.tr
ATÖLYE
ATÖLYE, ödüllü Stratejik Tasarım Stüdyosu’nu canlı bir topluluk aracılığıyla iş birlikleri geliştiren Yaratıcı Platform’unun içine yerleştiren ve 21. yüzyıla ait yaratıcı hizmetler geliştiren bir organizasyondur. ATÖLYE, 2020’den itibaren değişimin öncülerini güçlendirmeyi amaçlayan Akademi’yi de hayata geçirmiştir. ATÖLYE, aynı zamanda, ekonomiyi ve toplumu harekete geçirecek yaratıcılığa kaynak olmak amacıyla kurulmuş ve stratejik olarak seçilerek özenle bir araya getirilmiş yaratıcı şirketlerden oluşan bir kolektif olan kyu Collective’in de bir parçasıdır. ATÖLYE’nin üstlendiği projeler strateji, tasarım, mimari ve teknoloji alanlarında yaratıcı danışmanlığın bütün açılarını kapsamaktadır. ATÖLYE, bu hizmetleri modern ve eşsiz bir yetenek ağı ile sunar. ATÖLYE, aynı zamanda Avrupa Yaratıcı Platformlar Ağı’nın yönetim kurulunda temsil edilen bir üyesidir. https://atolye.io/en/home/
BIOS
BIOS, Atina’da günümüz sanatı ve çapraz medyaları üzerine uzmanlaşmış bir merkezdir. BIOS iki konser sahnesi, dört barı, tiyatro ve performans mekânları, prova alanları, grafik tasarım ofisi, sinema ve enstalasyon alanıyla esnek, çok amaçlı bir merkez konumundadır.
https://www.bios.gr/
Nova Iskra
Nova Iskra, Balkanlar’da öncü bir yaratıcı platformdur. Nova Iskra, yaratıcı endüstriler, teknoloji ve insanlar arasında elle tutulur bağlantılar kurulmasını destekleyerek eleştirel düşünmeyi teşvik etme, fikirleri besleme, sürekli değişen günümüz koşullarına karşı duyarlılığını korurken gelecekte ayakta kalabilecek kurumlar tasarlama ve işletmeler kurma amacıyla kurulmuştur.
https://novaiskra.com/en/
Abdullah Gül University
Abdullah Gül Üniversitesi (AGÜ), Türkiye’de ilk vakıf destekli devlet üniversitesi modeli ile 21 Temmuz 2010 tarihinde kurulmuştur. Üniversite, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nin ilk ve en büyük sanayi yerleşkelerinden biri olan Sümerbank Bez Fabrikası’nın eğitim kampüsüne dönüşümü projesidir. İlk öğrencilerini 2013-2014 akademik yılında almıştır. Üniversitenin ikinci kampüsü olan Mimar Sinan Kampüsü’nün yapımı da devam etmektedir. Kayseri’ye yeni bir devlet üniversitesi kazandırılmasına yönelik çalışmalar, Büyükşehir Belediye Başkanlığı girişimiyle bir araya gelen Kayseri’nin kanaat önderleri tarafından 2007 yılında başlatılmıştır. Üniversitenin, kalkınması ve girişimciliği ile Türkiye’de örnek gösterilen Kayseri’nin vizyonuna uygun olarak, kenti eğitimde de öne çıkarması amaçlanmıştır.
http://www.agu.edu.tr/
Merkezi Finans ve İhale Birimi (CFCU)
Türkiye’yi aday ülke olarak kabul eden 10-11 Aralık 1999 tarihli Avrupa Konseyi Helsinki Zirvesi kararının ardından, Türkiye-AB mali işbirliğinin ana çerçevesi değişmiş ve AB mali yardımları katılım öncesi amaçlarına ve nihai olarak tam üyelik hedefine yönelmiştir. Bu değişiklik Türkiye’yi CFCU’nun da içinde yer aldığı, kısaca ‘‘DIS’’ olarak bilinen ‘Merkezi Olmayan Uygulama Sistemi’ ni kurmaya yönlendirmiştir. Merkezi Finans ve İhale Birimi bir uygulayıcı kurum olarak, Avrupa Birliği tarafından finanse edilen programlar kapsamındaki tüm mal ve hizmet alımları ile yapım işi ve hibelere ilişkin projelerin genel bütçeleme, ihaleye çıkma, sözleşme, ödeme, muhasebe ve mali raporlama işlerinden sorumludur. Bir ‘Program Yetkilendirme Görevlisi’ nin sorumluluğu altında çalışan CFCU, ihalelere ilişkin AB kural, düzenleme ve usullerine bağlı kalınmasını ve düzgün bir raporlama sisteminin işlemesini temin eder.
https://www.cfcu.gov.tr/
Yunus Emre Enstitüsü
Yunus Emre Enstitüsü, Türkiye’yi, kültürel mirasını, Türk dilini, kültürünü ve sanatını tanıtmak, Türkiye’nin diğer ülkelerle ilişkilerini ve dostluğunu geliştirmek, kültürel alışverişini artırmak ve Türk dili, kültürü ve sanatı alanlarında eğitim almak isteyenlere yurt dışında hizmet vermek amacıyla kurulmuştur. Eğitim, bilim ve kültür-sanat alanlarında faaliyetlerini sürdüren Enstitü, Türkiye’nin uluslararası alanda bilinirliğini, güvenilirliğini ve itibarını artırmak misyonuyla hareket ederken dünyanın her yerinde Türkiye ile bağ kuran ve Türkiye’ye dost insan sayısını artırmayı hedeflemektedir. Yunus Emre Enstitüsü, kültürel etkileşim ve diyalogu artıracak birçok farklı proje yürütmektedir. Enstitünün Avrupa Birliği ortak fonuyla hayata geçirdiği ilk projesi olan Türkiye-AB Kültürlerarası Diyalog Programını ile Türkiye ve AB ülkeleri arasındaki kültürel alışverişin ve ilişkilerin geliştirilmesi, güçlendirilmesi hedeflenmektedir. Aynı zamanda, Yunus Emre Enstitüsü’nün Avrupa ulusal kültürel enstitüleri ve onların çatı kuruluşu EUNIC ile ilişkilerinin artmasına ve güçlenmesine yönelik çalışmalar da yürütülmektedir.
https://www.yee.org.tr/en
Kültürlerarası Diyalog
Yunus Emre Enstitüsü tarafından yürütülen ve Avrupa Birliği ile Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nin eş finansmanı ile hayata geçen AB-Türkiye Kültürlerarası Diyalog Programı, farklı kültürlerden gelen çeşitli kurumları sanat ve kültüre tahsis edilen finansal destek sayesinde bir araya getirerek AB ve Türkiye arasında kültürel diyaloğun güçlenmesini amaçlamaktadır.
https://icd.yee.org.tr
Emmy Bacharach mimarlık, ses, sinema ve çok boyutlu teknolojilerin kesişim noktasında duran bir mekân tasarımcısı, DJ ve görsel-işitsel sanatçı. Çalışmalarında dijital teknolojilerin yarattığı toplumsal, siyasi ve uzamsal olanakları inceliyor. Emmy, Cambridge Üniversitesi’nde mimarlık eğitimini tamamladıktan Royal College of Art’ta yüksek lisans yaptı ve bu sırada ses, animasyon ve çok boyutlu gerçeklikle tanıştı. Goldsmiths Digital Studios’taki Volumetric Ecologies: Environments, Bodies and Mediated Worlds sergisinde gösterilen enstalasyon çalışması ‘Proxy Architecture’, izleyiciyi sanal bir dünyayla çevreliyor. İstanbul’un dijital görüntülerinden oluşan bir yüzer şehir, sanal ortamın kolektif potansiyelini tartışmaya açıyor. Araştırma projesi ‘Sonic Urbanism in Detroit: Techno as a Spatial Act’ (Detroit’te Sonik Şehircilik: Mekânsal Bir Eylem Olarak Tekno) kentsel mekânların müzik alt kültürü üzerindeki etkisini araştırırken tekno üretiminin mekânsal özneliği ve Detroit’in sanayi-sonrası kentsel koşullarının ortaya çıkardığı sonik kolektifliği savunuyor. İnşa edilmiş ortamlarda verileri ve artırılmış gerçekliği inceleyen disiplinlerarası tasarım kolektifi Xcessive Aestehtics’in kurucularından biri. https://www.rca.ac.uk/students/emmy-bacharach/
Ruth Catlow, Furtherfield’in Eş Kurucu Sanat Direktörü ve özgürleştirici iş birliği kültürleri, uygulamaları ve poetikaları konusunda önde gelen bir otorite. Mekân yaratma, alternatif ekonomiler ve ortak paydalar temalarına odaklanan 60’tan fazla dijital sanat sergisinin eş küratörlüğünü üstlendi. Konferanslarda konuşmacı ve sanat, teknoloji ve toplumsal değişimi konu alan sayısız yayının yazarı olmasının yanı sıra uluslararası saygınlığa sahip Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain’in editörlüğünü yaptı. 2019’da Ben Vickers (Serpentine Galleries) ve Goethe-Institut ile ortaklaşa geliştirdiği blok zinciri ve sanat laboratuvarı serisi DAOWO, Avrupa Yaratıcı Ekonomi Merkezi (European Centre for Creative Economy) ‘NICE’ ödülünü kazandı. Furtherfield bünyesindeki DeCentralised Arts Lab’in (DECAL) başındaki isim olarak sanatta yeni ekonomik modeller için sektörler arası ortaklıklar geliştirilmesine yönelik çalışmalar yürütüyor.
Dr Lina Džuverović, University of London’a bağlı Birkbeck College’de Sanat Politikası ve Yönetimi dalında küratör ve öğretim görevlisi olarak çalışıyor. Araştırmalarında güncel sanat evreninin dayanışma ve topluluk oluşturma platformu hâline gelmesini sağlayacak yöntemlere odaklanıyor. Lina’nın geçmiş yıllarda üstlendiği görevler arasında IZK – Institute for Contemporary Art, TU Graz, Avusturya bünyesindeki University of Reading’de öğretim görevlisi, Calvert 22 Foundation sanat direktörlüğü, Londra merkezli Electra’nın kurucu direktörlüğü, ICA ve Lux Centre, Londra ve Momentum Bienali, Norveç’te küratörlük sayılabilir. 2006’da Arts Council England tarafından verilen Decibel Mid-Career Curatorial Fellow ödülüne de lâyık görüldü.
Diana Georgiou, Londra’da yaşayan bir yazar ve küratör. Küratoryal çalışmalarında eşcinsel, feminist ve sömürgecilik karşıtı uygulamaları ve kuramları kullanarak kurumsal parametrelerin içinde ve dışında diyalogu, deneyimleri ve iş birliğini güçlendirecek karşılaşma mekânları yaratmaya çalışıyor. En son eş küratörlüğünü üstlendiği projelerden EcoFutures (Londra, 2019) ekolojik sorunların toplumsal cinsiyet, ırk ve cinsellik üzerindeki etkilerine odaklandı ve 70’ten fazla sanatçının, kuramcının ve aktivistin katılımıyla on ortak kuruluşu bir araya getirdi. Seçilmiş projelerinin arasında gezici video sanat sergisi Transitional States: Hormones at the Intersection of Art & Science (Londra, Lincoln, Barselona, Bolonya, 2017-18); Deep Trash Live Art Programme (Londra, 2017-18); düşünce, sanat ve aktivizmi konu alan ve The Showroom, ICA, Space Studios ve Raven Row’da gösterilmiş olan iki haftalık Now You Can Go (Londra, 2015) programı sayılabilir. Georgiou, University of London’a bağlı Goldsmiths’ten Görsel Kültür dalında doktora derecesine sahip ve tezi, feminist psikanalitik kuramlar ışığında sanat yazımı ve öznellik arasındaki ilişkiyi yenilikçi bir gözle değerlendiriyor.
Huma Kabakçı, 1990, Londra doğumlu ikinci nesil koleksiyoncu, bağımsız küratör ve Open Space’in kurucu direktörü. Londra ve İstanbul arasında hem işi hem de yaşamı nedeniyle mekik dokuyor. Kabakçı, London College of Communication’da Reklam ve Pazarlama üzerine aldığı lisans eğitiminin ardından Royal College of Art’ta Çağdaş Sanatta Kürasyon alanında yüksek lisans yaptı. Aralarında Sotheby’s’e bağlı Çağdaş Sanat Satış departmanı (Londra), The Albion Gallery (Londra) ve Pera Müzesi (İstanbul) olmak üzere Birleşik Krallık ve Türkiye’de bulunan pek çok galeri, müze ve müzayede evinde çalıştı. Kabakçı, Londra’daki Türkiye ve Orta Doğu çağdaş sanatına ve gelişmekte olan ülkelerin çağdaş sanat uygulamalarına özel olarak ilgi duyuyor. Küratoryal araştırmalarının merkezinde diaspora, göç, kültürel kimlik, kültürlerarası diyalog ve bellek konuları yer alıyor. Border_less, FAD Magazine, Guggenheim Blog, Istanbul Art News ve SYRUP Magazine gibi yayınlara katkı veriyor. Kabakçı 2018’de Liverpool Bienali kapsamında bir küratöryel ‘fellowship’ programı tamamladı. En yeni projesi ise kürasyonunu Inês Neto dos Santos ile birlikte üstlendiği, Open Space’de sergilenen Tender Touches (Yumuşak Dokunuşlar) (Londra) çalışması.
Tamara Kametani, Slovakya doğumlu, Londra’da yaşayan bir görsel sanatçı. Mekâna özgü sanatı merkeze alan enstalasyon, video, fotoğraf ve heykel gibi farklı mecraları kullanıyor. Çalışmalarında dert edindiği konular, iktidar ilişkileri, denetim, mahremiyet ve bilgiye erişim. Çağdaş ve tarihsel anlatıların üretilmesinde ve yeni deneyimlerin ortaya çıkarılmasında teknolojinin oynadığı role özel olarak ilgi duyuyor. 2017 yılında Royal College of Art’ta Çağdaş Sanat Uygulamaları programından yüksek lisans derecesi aldı. Kametani, çeşitli sanatçı rezidans programlarına katıldı; eserleri uluslararası düzeyde sergilendi. En son işleri ve sergileri arasında kürasyonunu AGORAMA, Londra’nın yaptığı (2019); Swayze ffect (Swayze Etkisi), Platform Southwark 404 – Resistance at Digital Age (Dijital Çağda Direniş), RAGE Collective, CFCCA, Manchester (2019); For the Time Being (Şimdilik), The Photographers’ Gallery, kürasyon CCA Royal College of Art, Londra (2019); Digital Diaspora (Dijital Diaspora), Studio 44, Stockholm (2019); Summer Show (Yaz Gösterisi), Florence Trust, Londra (2018) ve Triennial of Photography (Fotoğraf Trienali), Hamburg (2018) sayılabilir.
https://www.tamarakametani.com/
Georgios Makkas 1977’de Atina’da doğdu ve erken yaşlardan itibaren fotoğrafla yakından ilgilenmeye başladı. Birleşik Krallık, Newport’ta Belgesel Fotoğrafçılığı programından mezun oldu. Arnavutluk’un kırsal kesimlerinden kentlere göç konusundaki çalışması Observer Hodge Ödülleri’nde birinci seçildi. 2010 yılında Polonya’nın Poznan kentindeki Academy of Fine Arts’ın ’SETSE’ rezidans programına sanatçı olarak kabul edildi. İşleri, Londra’da National Portrait Gallery’de, Atina Fotoğraf Festivali’nde, Rethymno MedPhoto Festivali’nde, Valensiya Fotonoviembre’de, Reggio Emilia Fotografia Europea’da, Pordenone Le Voci dell’Inchiesta’da, New York DUMBO Arts Festivali’nde ve İstanbul Tasarım Bienali’nde sergilendi. Ayrıca Selanik Fotoğraf Müzesi’nde de kalıcı bir sergisi yer aldı. Makkas, mercek bazlı medyalar yoluyla belleğin korunmasıyla ilgileniyor. İnsanların portre fotoğraflarını çekmekten, hikâyelerini dinlemek ve filme almaktan, ayrıca kentlerin yok olan yüzlerini belgelemekten hoşlanıyor.
https://www.gmakkas.com/about/index
Ioana Man mimarlık, set tasarımı ve eleştirel uygulamalar alanlarında farklı disiplinleri bir araya getiren bir tasarımcı. Alternatif gelecekleri biçimlendirmek, yaratmak ve yeniden tahayyül etmek için mimari, set tasarımı ve ritüeller arasında yeni karşılaşmalar ortaya çıkarıyor. Bu günlerde mimarları ve uygulayıcı konumdaki bilim insanlarını mikroskopik ölçeğe daha da yaklaştıracak uzun soluklu bir proje üzerinde çalışıyor. Open Platform’un talebiyle Wellcome Collection için hazırladığı çalışması, Londra’da Architectural Association’da sergilendi.
www.ioanaman.com
www.probiotic-rituals.com
Theo Prodromidis, Yunanistan’ın Atina kentinde yaşayan bir görsel sanatçı ve yönetmen. Çalışmaları Galerija, State of Concept, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, 1. ve 5. Selanik Bienali, 4. Atina Bienali, Werkleitz Zentrum für Medienkunst ve Haus der Kulturen der Welt gibi galerilerde, müzelerde ve festivallerde sergilendi ve gösterildi. 2017’den bu yana National and Kapodistrian University of Athens’ta Bilim Felsefesi ve Tarihi bölümünde Risk Değişimi programında misafir sanatçı olarak görev alıyor ve Open School for Immigrants of Piraeus’ta gönüllü olarak çalışıyor. Institute Of Radical Imagination ve Solidarity Schools Network üyesi. 2019-2020 yıllarında ise Stavros Niarchos Vakfı Sanatçı Destek Programı’nda sanat eserleri kurulu üyesi olarak çalışmalarını yürütmeye devam edecek. www.theoprodromidis.info
Yağmur Uyanık San Francisco’da yaşayan mimarlık, yeni medya ve müzik alanlarında çalışan Türkiyeli bir sanatçı. Çalışmalarında ışık, ses ve mekânı kullanarak yer değiştirme araçlarını yaratıyor, böylelikle tekrarlama, süreç ve elle tutulamazlığa odaklanıyor. Amacı dijital medyanın sınırlarını, fiziksel bir deneyime dönüştürünceye kadar genişletmek. Uyanık, yüksek lisans derecesini Fulbright bursuyla okuduğu San Francisco Art Institute, Sanat ve Teknoloji bölümünden aldı. İşleri, Ars Electronica, Sonar +D, Signal Light Festival, MUTEK, Exploratorium, California Academy of Sciences ve Diego Rivera Gallery gibi enstitülerde uluslararası düzeyde sergilendi.
https://yagmuruyanik.com
Bu yayın Avrupa Birliğinin maddi desteği ile hazırlanmıştır. İçerik tamamıyla British Council’ın sorumluluğu altındadır ve Avrupa Birliğinin görüşlerini yansıtmak zorunda değildir
Furtherfield Gallery at the McKenzie Pavilion is located in the middle of Finsbury Park in North London, across the children’s playground from the cafe, next to the boating pond. Accessible between the gates near Finsbury Park Station and Manor House Station.
Изложба радова насталих кроз сарадњу и размену информација између турских, грчких, српских и британских уметника који покушавају да остваре транслокалну солидарност на локалном нивоу, у нашем хипер-повезаном свету.
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TransLocal Cooperation exhibition, Connect for Creativity from Furtherfield on Vimeo.
Откада је наш свет постао многоструко увезан, можемо истовремено боравити или кретати се по многоструким физичким и виртуелним просторима. Последица је да се, као појединци, све више поистовећујемо са већим бројем места или култура. Овај друштвени и културни аспект глобализације често се описује као “транслокалност”(translocality), што је ситуација у којој се догађаји, условљености и везе могу брзо преносити са једног на друго место.
Ова изложба, и радови изложени на њој, баве се питањем како се треба организовати да бисмо могли водити рачуна једни о другима, на даљину и без обзира на разлике између наших локалних заједница. Приказан је избор радова настaлих током боравака турских, грчких, српских и британских уметника на уметничким и технолошким резиденцијама, у креативним центрима какви су Радионица (ATÖLYE) у Турској, биос у Грчкој и Нова искра у Србији. Кроз ове уметничке радове, поставља се питање како можемо да подржавамо многоструке идентитете и креативне изразе кроз отварање према другима и успостављање нових веза ради јачања сарадње и ширења емпатије.
Уметничке радове одабрао је наш транслокални тим турских, грчких, српских и британских кустоса, специјално за ову изложбу која се ослања на читав низ различитих медија и технологија, од виртуелне реалности и тродимензионалног штампања, па све до пробиотичке ферментације и етнографских докумената. Уметници визуелно приказују потешкоће и проблеме народа, култура и идеја расељених у простору и времену, постављајући питања о томе како их можемо преиспитати и поново вредновати ради веће транслокалне солидарности и боље размене информација у свету који се убрзано мења.
Остављајући по страни границе између овде и сада, тамо и онда, обухватајући на истом месту поплаве и расељавања у Хасан-Кејфу у Турској и избацивање грађана из станова у у Београду, у Србији, уметници користе ову прилику да проуче и испитују ефекте глобализације на поједине земље, али и да истакну као најважније питање шта треба учинити да би се сазнања о тим локалним бригама проширила изван оквира тих заједница, како да се на њих одговори и успоставе везе неспутане границама и различитим културама.
Реч је о 18-месечном пројекту који води Британски савет, у сарадњи са Атолие и Универзитетом Абдуллах Гул у Турској, те организацијама биос у Грчкој и Нова искра у Србији. Пројекат је део програма интеркултуралног дијалога који води Институт Јунус Емре, а суфинансирају га Европска унија и Република Турска. Пројекат има за циљ формирање мреже креативних центара широм Европе, са циљем подстицања креативног истраживања и сарадње који ће допринети изградњи кохезивнијег, отворенијег и боље повезаног цивилног друштва.
Програм уметничких и технолошких резиденцијалних боравака уметника из Грчке, Србије, Турске и Велике Британије у фокусу има искуство интеркултуралне сарадње. ,,Повежи се ради креативности“ је програм који је истовремено реализиован у Атини, Београду и Истанбулу кроз симултане боравке уметника у сваком од ових градова, који су били домаћини за укупно 12 учесника. Учесници су током свеобухватног шестонедељног програма откривали како умрежене културе могу допринети јачој повезаности ради успешнијег суочавања са неизвесностима и променама које доноси савремени живот.
Уметничка дела представљена су у галерији ,,Фердерфилд“, у срцу парка Финсбури. Финсбури Парк је урбани зелени простор који сваке недеље користи око 55.000 људи, а налази се у кварту који стоји на граници три лондонска округа. За тај кварт кажу да је “супер-разноврстан”, јер се у њему говори око 200 језика који припадају великим имигрантским заједницама. У овом делу града лоциране су највеће турске и грчке заједнице у Енглеској, а повезан је и са највећом српском заједницом у Енглеској, настањеном у западном Лондону.
„Отворене новине“ (Не можете избацити покрет) Теа Продромидиса (Theo Prodromidis) – у сарадњи са Teoдоросом Кариотисом, Тоњом Катерини, Статисом Митропулосом, Немањом Пантовићем и Аном Виленицом – Açık Gazete (Отворене новине)
Ова студија, која се бави процесима који доводе до све чешће појаве избацивања људи из станова у Србији, повезује се са грчким контекстом у коме законски и правни оквир за заштиту првобитних станара „истиче“ у априлу 2020. године. Ово колективно дело, створено уз помоћ штампача, служи и делује као средство информисања о борбама које се воде у контексту све веће глобалне стамбене кризе.
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Пробиотички ритуали (Probiotic Rituals) – Јоана Ман
Градови су сложени екосистеми и људско присуство у њима зависи од слојевитих односа пажње која им се посвећује. Пробиотички ритуали (Probiotic Rituals) теже стварању нових обичаја за живот људи у граду, који обухвата много више од самих односа међу људима. Скалирани микроби, интерфејс проширене реалности, вебстранице и низ других ритуала, изједначавају људског посматрача са зујањем биосфере и показују зависност заједнице од микроскопског живота. Ритуали и слике живота међу разним врстама развијају процесе за побољшање суживота у коме се обраћа пажња и на оне ситније учеснике градског живота.
Самостално стварање (Kendikendiniyetiştirme): Yağmur Uyanık – „Формирање слојева постојања са“ (Selfmaking: Layers of Becoming With)
Скулптура од пешчара, настала уз помоћ 3Д штампача, хибридног је карактера, створена спајањем дигиталних модела две “оригиналне” скулптуре у Британском музеју (British Museum): скулптуре Александра Македонског трећег (познатог као Александар Велики); и старо-грчког Перикла. “Самостално стварање” комбинује звук и скулптуру, показујући како стварање, преношење и чување културног знања почива на географским контекстима, обрасцима одлазака и останка без домовине расељавања и апатридије. Пројект приказује како се индивидуалне приче и колективно сећање обликују кроз културно власништво, културну валуту и кроз симболичка значења која су им својствена.
Ток свести – Пећине Хасанкеифа – Еми Бакарак (Emmy Bacharach), 2019.
У форми искуства виртуелне стварности, овај рад скреће пажњу на локални и транслокални значај Хасанкеифа, древног града који се налази на југу Турске, а угрожен је пројектом Бране Илису (Ilisu Barajı), која прети да подигне водостај реке Диџле и поплави овај град. Хасанкејф је представљен уз коришћење фотограметрије и визуелног материјала сакупљеног са терена, пружајући људима јединствено окружење пећина, а већина ових пећина биће временом поплављена. Публика зна шта ће вода донети, и да ће пећине полако бити потопљене – искуство које је одјекнуло траумом расељеног локалног становништва.
Уклесано у камену – Тамара Каметани
„Право да будеш заборављен“ као део ГДПР-а (Опште уредбе Европске Уније о заштити података), указује на уклањање негативних информација са интернетских листа за претрагу у одређеним дискутабилним ситуацијама. ”Уклесано у камену” (Set In Stone) представља поетичну медитацију о утицају материјала на разлчичите аспекте транслокалних култура који су често нематеријалне природе. Док на мрежама букте полемике у вези легитимног коришћења, злоупотреба приватности и слободе говора, овај рад користи фразе о животу чињеница руком уклесаних у атински мермер, изазивајући историјске рефлексије или урезивање резултата ових акција у памћење, на мрежи и изван ње.
”Четири станице до Куртулуса” (Four stops to Kurtuluş) – Георгиос Макас (Georgios Makkas)
Овај вишеканални видео бави се округом Куртулуш, који је кроз историју био познат као „Мала Атина“ (на турском – Küçük Atina) због својих више од 20.000 становника грчког порекла. Данас је ово космополитско насеље дом турске, грчке, арменске, курдске и јеврејске заједнице, док његов историјски грчки утицај и број становника и даље опадају. Фокусиран на интервјуе са Грцима који живе у региону, Макасов рад покушава да сачува сећање на „Стари Куртулуш“ (“Еski Kurtuluş”) чиме користи прилику да документује нешто што ће ускоро заувек нестати.
Рут Катлоу (Ruth Catlow), Лина Џуверовић, Диана Георгију, Хума Кабакчи.
Фердерфилд (Furtherfield)
Фердерфилд је најстарији центар за уметност и технологију у Лондону, давно основан и дубоко укорењен. Са више од 20 година искуства, преко 50 реалиѕованих изложби и више од 100 међународних партнерстава, развили смо експертизу у алтернативним системима организације и здруженог стварања. Наш рад су представили ББЦ (BBC), Гардијан (Guardian), Нови научник (New Scientist), Wired, the Art Newspaper и Hyperallergic. Истакнута на мапи подземне железнице на станици Пикадили (Piccadilly Underground line) поред главних знаменитости као што је Бакингемска палата (Buckingham Palace), галерија Фердерфилд налази се у власништву локалне управе Харингеј што је локална власт са највећом неједнакошћу у дохотку у Британији. Покушавамо да произведемо дела која људима дају осећај заједничког власништва над њиховим животима и местима у којима бораве.
https://www.furtherfield.org/
Британски савет
Британски савет је британска међународна институција која се бави британским културним односима и могућностима у области образовања. Радимо са више од 100 земаља у домену уметности и културе, енглеског језика, образовања и цивилног друштва. Прошле године директно смо стигли до више од 65 милиона људи. Ако укључимо и онлајн публикације, стижемо до 731 милиона људи. Ми дајемо позитиван допринос земљама са којима радимо отварањем могућности, успостављањем веза, стварањем атмосфере поверења и утицањем на промене у начину живота. Основана 1934. године, наша институција је јавна и добротворна организација из Велике Британије створена путем краљевског едикта. Од владе Велике Британије добијамо грант који представља 15 процената нашег основног фонда.
https://www.britishcouncil.org.tr
ATÖLYE is a 21st-century creative organization with an award-winning Strategic Design Studio that is nested within a creative hub. A is a member of the European Creative Hubs Network and is represented in the Steering Committee. ATÖLYE is also part of the kyu Collective, a collective of strategically curated creative businesses whose purpose is to be a source of creativity which propels economies and societies forward. ATÖLYE’s work encompasses all facets of creative consulting including strategy, design, architecture, and technology. It provides these services through a unique modern network of practitioners. https://atolye.io/en/home/
БИОС
БИОС је центар савремене уметности и умрежених медија у Атини. БИОС је флексибилно мултифункционално подручје које обухвата два простора за музику уживо, четири бара, простор за позориште/перформанс, простор за пробе, канцеларију за графички дизајн, биоскоп и просторе за уметничћке инсталације.
https://www.bios.gr/
НОВА ИСКРА
Нова Искра има пионирску улогу међу креативним хабовима на Балкану. Нова Искра је настала на идеји стварања конкретних веза између креативних индустрија, технологије и људи како би се подржало критичко размишљање, неговале идеје и подржале дизајнерске организације уз развијање пословања оријентисаног ка будућности. Док стреми ка будућности, Нова Искра не губи из вида потребе стварности, која је у стању непрестане промене. https://novaiskra.com/en/
УНИВЕРЗИТЕТ АБДУЛЛАХ ГУЛ
Прве кораке ка оснивању Универзитета Абдуллах Гул предузели су 2007.године Општинско веће града Кајсери и значајни појединци у граду. Циљ је био подићи образовни профил у Кајсерију у складу са властитом визијом развоја града. Универзитет, прихватајући ту част, добио је име по 11. Председнику Републике Турске Абдулаху Гулу. Овај универзитет настоји да се уврсти међу високо-квалитетне елитне универзите у Турској не заостајући у надметању са другим међународним институцијама. То је први државни универзитет у Турској подржан од стране фондације. Званично је основан 21. јула 2010. године. Универзитет Абдуллах Гул (AGÜ) примио је своје прве студенте у академској 2013 – 2014. години. Универзитет је лоциран на тлу где се налазио први турски индустријски комплекс и сада је на путу да се претвори у образовну институцију историјског значаја.
http://www.agu.edu.tr/
CFCU- ЦЕНТРАЛНА ЈЕДИНИЦА ЗА ФИНАНСИЈЕ И УГОВОРЕ.
Након прихватања Турске као земље кандидата на Самиту Савета Европе у Хелсинкију, 10. и 11. децембра 1999. године., промењен је Главни оквир за финансијску сарадњу Турске и ЕУ, Финансијска подршка ЕУ усмерена је на пред-приступне циљеве и коначно пуноправно чланство. Ова промена навела је Турску да оснује систем за финансирање уговора о активностима успостављања „Децентрализованог система примене“ (MOUS). Као извршна агенција, Централна јединица за финансије и уговоре одговорна је за укупни буџет, тендере, уговоре, плаћања, рачуноводство и питања финансијског извештавања за пружање свих услуга, материјала, послова и грантова у контексту програма финансираних од Европске Уније (ЕУ). Под одговорношћу лица надлежног за одобравање програма (СОП), Централна јединица за финансије и уговоре, осигурава да се поштују правила, прописи и процедуре ЕУ везане за тендере и да функционише одговарајући систем извештавања. Централна јединица за финансије и уговоре повезана је са Под-секретаријатом за трезор, који је административно одговоран за финансијско управљање програмима које финансира ЕУ.
https://www.cfcu.gov.tr/
ИНСТИТУЦИЈА ЈУНУС ЕМРЕ
Фондација Јунус Емре је јавна организација која је основана са циљем да доприноси повећању културне размене и промовише пријатељство између Турске и других земаља, да стави на располагање релевантне документа у свету, да промовише Турску, турски језик, историју, културу и уметност, да пружа услуге и обавештења људима у иностранству у вези са турским језиком, културом и уметносшћу који желе да студирају у иностранству, у Турској. Институт Јунус Емре као институција повезана са фондацијом, поред наставка рада на достизању циљева овог закона за подучавање турског језика у културним центрима основаним у иностранству, спроводи културне и уметничке активности на промоцији наше земље и подржава научна истраживања.
https://www.yee.org.tr/en
ИНТЕРКУЛТУРАЛНИ ДИЈАЛОГ
Програмом Интеркултурални дијалог измећу ЕУ и Турске, управља институција Јунус Емре, која промовише културни дијалог између ЕУ и Турске, окупљајући различите институције различитог културног профила у контексту пружања финансијске подршке уметности и култури.
https://icd.yee.org.tr/
Еми Бакарак (Emmy Bacharach) је просторни практичар, аудио-визуелна уметница и ДЈ која ради на пресеку архитектуре, звука, филма и имерзивних технологија. Рад уметнице истражује друштвене, политичке и просторне могућности усвајања дигиталних технологија. Еми је завршила постдипломски програм на aрхитектури, на Универзитету Кембриџ (University of Cambridge), касније је завршила магистарски програм на Краљевском колеџу уметности, где почиње да се бави покретним сликама, звуцима, имерзивним (свепрожимајућим) технологијама. Њена инсталација “Proxy Architecture (Прокси Архитектура)”, приказана је у оквиру Волуметријске екологије у Дигиталним студијама Goldsmiths – Инсталацијски радови на изложби у окружењу, телима и световима за размишљање уронио је публику у виртуални свет, плутајући град дигиталних делова Истанбула, спекулирајући о колективном потенцијалу виртуалног простора. Истраживачки пројекат „Сонична урбанизација у Детроиту: Технологија у смислу просторног покрета“ говори о утицају урбаног простора на музичку суб-културу расправљајући о техно’-продукцији и звучној колективности за просторну агенцију у контексту постиндустријске урбане ситуације у Детроиту. Суоснивач је компаније ,,Xcessive Aesthetics,,То је интердисциплинарни дизајнерски колектив, који истражује проширену стварност у изграђеном окружењу
https://www.rca.ac.uk/students/emmy-bacharach/
Рут Катлоу (Ruth Catlow), је оснивач и уметничка директорка Мorefield-а. Она је успешни стручњак који се бави ослобађањем мрежних култура, пракси и поезије. Сајт је организовао више од 60 изложби дигиталних уметности око алтернативних економија и заједничких тема. Ауторка је бројних публикација о уметности, технологији и друштвеним променама, а била је главни говорник и уредник међународно признатих Blockchain – Уметници који размишљају. Освојила је награду Центар за креативну економију Европе ‘NICE’, blockchain и арт лабораторија серије DAOWO, 2019. године од стране Ben Vickers (Serpantin) и Goethe-Institut. Она је директорка DECAL-а – Децентрализоване уметничка лабораторија, која развија међуиндустријска партнерства за нове економске моделе уметности.
Др Лина Џуверовић, је кустос и предавач у области уметничке политике и менаџмента на Лондонском универзитету – Колеџ Биркбек. Њено истраживање фокусира се на начине на које би област савремене уметности могла да постане центар солидарности и да доприноси учвршћивању заједница. Лина је претходно предавала на Универзитету Рединг, на Институту за савремену уметност (ИЗК), у ТУ у Грацу, у Аустрији, била је метнички директор Фондације „ Калверт 22,“ као и и оснивач и директорка агенције “ Електра“ са седиштем у Лондону. Радила је на пословима кустоса у ICA (Institute for Contemporary Art) и у Центру Лукс, у Лондону, као и на бијеналу Моментум у Норвешкој. 2006.године,била је сарадник кустошког програма „Десибел“, под покровитељством Уметничког савета Енглеске (Arts Council, England).
Диана Георгију (Diana Georgiou), писац и кустос која живи у Лондону. У свом кустошком раду користи различите, феминистичке и антиколонијалне праксе и теорије како би створила подручја сусрета која могу унапредити дијалог, експериментирање и сарадњу унутар и изван институционалних параметара. Најновији заједнички пројекат Eco Futures (Лондон, 2019), фокусирао се на ефекте еколошких питања нација, раса и сексуалности и укључивао је 10 партнерских организација уз учешће више од 70 уметника, теоретичара и активиста. Међу одабраним пројектима били су; видео уметничка изложба Земље у транзицији, Изложба : Хормони на раскрсницама науке и уметности (Лондон, Lincoln, Барцелона, Болоња, 2017-18); Deep Trash (Дубоко смеће), Уметнички програм уживо (Лондон, 2017-18); The Showroom, ICA, Space Studios ve Raven Row (Лондон, 2015); двонедељни програм ,,Now You Can Go, (Сада можеш да идеш) који је општеприхваћен као феминистичка мисао, уметност и активизам. Диана је докторирала јвизуалну културу на Goldsmiths-у, Универзитет у Лондону. На иновативан начин описује однос између феминистичке психоаналитичке теорије, уметничког писања и субјективности.
Хума Кабакчи (Huma Kabakcı) (рођена 1990.године, у Лондону) Колекционар друге генерације која живи и ради између Лондона и Истанбула, Независни је кустос и оснивач – директор Отвореног простора (Open Space). Хума Кабакчи, дипломирала је на курсу рекламе и маркетинг на Колеџу за комуникације у Лондону и магистрирала је Савремене уметности на Краљевском колеџу уметности. Радила је у Енглеској и Турској у разним галеријама, музејима и акцијским кућама укључујући Одељење за продају дела савремене уметности „Sotheby“ (у Лондону), Галерија Албион (у Лондону) и Музеј Пера (у Истанбулу). Хума Кабакчи, посебно се занима турско-блискоисточном савременом уметношћу и савременом уметношћу која се приказује у Лондону. Њена кустошка истраживања и аналазе се често односе на дијаспору, попут миграција, културног идентитета, интер-културалног дијалога и сећања. Доприносила је изради публикација као што су Border_less, FAD Magazine, Guggenheim Blog, IAN (Istanbul Art News) и SYRUP Magazine. Хума Кабакчи, је завршила кустошки курс на Liverpool Bienalе у Ливерпулу 2018. године. Најновији пројекат зове се ,,Додир понуде“, (Лондон), организован је од стране Open Space, где је кустос Инес Нето дос Сантос (Inês Neto dos Santos).
Тамара Каметани (Tamara Kametani), је словачка уметница из Лондона. Рођена је у Словачкој, али ради у различитим окружењима, укључујући и рад на инсталацијама, видео, фотографију и скулптуру. Кључна питања у њеном раду су односи између власти, надзора, приватности и приступа информацијама. Посебно је занима улога коју технологија игра у изградњи савремених и историјских наратива и нова искуства која она пружа. 2017. године магистрирала је из Праксе савремене уметности на Краљевском факултету уметности. Тамара Каметани је учествовала у већем броју уметничких резиденција и излагала на међународном нивоу. Међу најновијим комисијама и изложбама налази се: Swayze ефекат (Swayze effect), AGORAMA, Лондон (Лондон) (2019) кустос Platform Southwark; 404- Отпор у дигиталном добу (404-Resistance in the Digital Age) , RAGE Collective, CFCCA, Manchester (2019); За сада (For the Time Being) Галерија Уметника Фотографије, Лондон (2019). Кустос је CCA Краљевске колеџ за уметност; Дигитална дијаспора, Студио 44, Стокхолм (2019);Summer Show, Florence Trust, Londra (2018) ve Triennial of Photography, Hamburg(2018).
https://www.tamarakametani.com/
Георгиос Маккас (Georgios Makkas)
Рођен је у Атини 1977. године. Од раног детињства веома су га интересовале професије везане за Документарну фотографству. Тај студиј је завршио у Њупорту, у Енглеској. Освојио је низ признања и прво место, награду ,,Observer Hodge Award”, zahvaqujući свом радu o становништву руралне Албаније. Маккас je у 2010. години, bio уметник-резидент у Познану, где је учетвовао на резиденцијалном програму „СЕТСЕ“ на Пољској Академији ликовних уметности. Његов рад је изложен у Националној галерији портрета у Лондону, на Атинском фотографском фестивалу, Med-photo Festivalnу Ретимну, Foto Noviembre, Валенциа, Фотографиа Еуропеа у Регио Емилиа, (Le Vocidell’Inchiesta) у Порденонеу, ДУМБО АртФестивал у Њујорку и на Истанбулском бијеналу дизајна и такође је организован у сталној колекцији Музеја фотографије у Солуну. Макас, се бавио чувањем сећања кроз објектив. Ова његова апликација фотографисањa портрета, слушање причa и снимање прича људи, документовање несталог лица градова. За више информација: https://www.gmakkas.com/about/index
Јоана Ман (Ioana Man), је мултидисциплинарни дизајнер са архитектуром, сценографијом и критичком праксом. Њен приступ омогућава нове сусрете између областима архитектуре, науке и ритуала како би се обликовало, пронашло и редизајнирало алтернативно опредељење будућности. Тренутно је тежиште на дугорочном пројекту чији је циљ приближити архитекте микроскопској скали и научницима који је користе. Њен рад је откупљен од стране Отворене платформе у колекцији Wellcome, изложеној у Лондонском архитектонском удружењу. www.ioanaman.com
www.probiotic-rituals.com
Тео Продромидис (Theo Prodromidis), је визуелни уметник и филмски режисер који живи у Атини. Његови радови су излагани у галеријама, музејима и фестивалима као што су Галерија Нова, тање концепта, прво и пето Солунско Бијенале, Четврто Атинско Бијенале, WerkleitzZentrum Für Medienkunst и Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt. Од 2017. Године добровољно је радио на Одељењу за историју и филозофију Националног и Каподистријског Универзитету у Атини као извођач у оквиру програма Промена ризика и волантирао је у Отвореној школи „Имигранти Пиреја“. Члан је Института за радикалну имагинацију и члан Савета мреже школа солидарности. Тренутно је члан 2019-2020 -Artworks, Програм за стипендије уметничке Фондације Stavros Niarchos.
www.theoprodromidis.info
Јагмур Ујаник (Yağmur Uyanık) је турска уметница која живи у Сан Франциску и бави се областима архитектуре, нових медија и музике. Својим радовима, ова уметница истражује понављања, процесе и нематеријалне ствари стварајући медије за премештање помоћу светлости, звука и простим ширењем дигиталних медија у физичко искуство. Јагмур Ујаник је магистрирала уметност и технологију на Институту за уметност у Сан Франциску као прималац Фулбрајтове стипендије. Рад уметнице је приказан у институцијама као што су Ars Electronica, Sonar D+, Signal Light Festival, MUTEK, Exploratorium, Академија наука, у Калифорнији и у Галерији „ Diego Rivera“.
https://yagmuruyanik.com
Ова публикација произведена је уз финансијску подршку Европске уније. За њену садржину одговоран је искључиво Европски савет, па изнети ставови не морају да се поклапају са ставовима Европске уније.
Furtherfield Gallery at the McKenzie Pavilion is located in the middle of Finsbury Park in North London, across the children’s playground from the cafe, next to the boating pond. Accessible between the gates near Finsbury Park Station and Manor House Station.
Μία έκθεση έργων που προέκυψε μέσα από την συνεργασία και ανταλλαγή γνώσεων μεταξύ καλλιτεχνών από την Τουρκία, την Ελλάδα, την Σερβία και την Αγγλία σε αναζήτηση διατοπικής αλληλεγγύης σε έναν υπερσυνδεδεμένο κόσμο.
SEE IMAGES FROM THE PRIVATE VIEW
TransLocal Cooperation exhibition, Connect for Creativity from Furtherfield on Vimeo.
Το γεγονός ότι ο κόσμος μας είναι πλέον υπερσυνδεδεμένος μας έχει δώσει τη δυνατότητα να ταξιδεύουμε ή και να βρισκόμαστε ταυτόχρονα, σε διαφορετικούς φυσικούς και ψηφιακούς τόπους. Αποτέλεσμα αυτής της δυνατότητας είναι το ότι οι ταυτότητές μας καθορίζονται αυξανόμενα από παραπάνω από έναν τόπο και πολιτισμικό πλαίσιο. Αυτή η κοινωνική και πολιτισμική πλευρά της παγκοσμιοποίησης περιγράφεται συχνά με όρους «διατοπικότητας», όπου τα γεγονότα, οι συνθήκες και οι σχέσεις που συναντώνται σε μία περιοχή μπορούν να επηρεάσουν και να συνδεθούν ταχύτατα με τις ιδιαίτερες συνθήκες που επικρατούν σε μία άλλη.
Η έκθεση «Διατοπικές Συνεργασίες» και τα έργα αυτής, εξερευνούν τους τρόπους με τους οποίους μπορούμε να οργανώσουμε από κοινού τις αποστάσεις και τις διαφορές μέσα αλλά και προς όφελος των διατοπικών μας κοινωνιών. Η έκθεση παρουσιάζει μία επιλογή έργων που δημιουργήθηκαν από καλλιτέχνιδες και καλλιτέχνες με καταγωγή από την Τουρκία, την Ελλάδα, την Σερβία και το Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο κατά τη διάρκεια της συμμετοχής τους σε residencies στο ATÖLYE στην Τουρκία, Bios στην Ελλάδα και Nova Iskra στην Σερβία. Τα έργα θέτουν το ερώτημα πώς πιθανά θα μπορούσαμε να γιορτάσουμε αυτές τις πολλαπλές ταυτότητες και τις δημιουργικές εκφράσεις τους καθώς μοιραζόμαστε αυτές τις νέες συνδέσεις και είμαστε ανοιχτοί για μεγαλύτερη συνεργασία και ενσυναίσθηση.
Τα έργα επιλέχθηκαν από την επιμελητική ομάδα μας που απαρτίζεται από επιμελήτριες με καταγωγή από την Τουρκία, την Κύπρο, την Σερβία και την Αγγλία, και περιλαμβάνουν μέσα και τεχνολογίες που ποικίλλουν από εικονική πραγματικότητα και 3D printing έως προβιοτική ζύμωση και εθνογραφική τεκμηρίωση. Οι καλλιτέχνες εξερευνούν τις προκλήσεις των ανθρώπων, των πολιτισμών και των ιδεών που έχουν εκτοπιστεί χωρικά και χρονικά, καθώς και τις δυνατότητες επανεκτίμησης και επαναδιαπραγμάτευσής τους με στόχο την διατοπική αλληλεγγύη και την ανταλλαγή γνώσης μέσα σε έναν συνεχώς μεταβαλλόμενο κόσμο.
Ανάμεσα στο εδώ και τώρα, το εκεί και τότε, μεταξύ της ορμητικής και εξελισσόμενης μετατόπισης των ανθρώπων στο Hasan Keyif της Τουρκίας και τον εκτοπισμό των πολιτών που υφίστανται εξώσεις στο Βελιγράδι της Σερβίας, οι καλλιτέχνες εξετάζουν τις επιδράσεις της παγκοσμιοποίησης σε συγκεκριμένες γεωγραφικές περιοχές και αναδεικνύουν το πώς τα «τοπικά» ζητήματα μπορούν να πληροφορήσουν και να δώσουν απαντήσεις με έναν τρόπο που υπερβαίνει τα σύνορα και τα πολιτισμικά πλαίσια.
To 18μηνο έργο Connect for Creativity πραγματοποιείται υπό την εποπτεία του Βρετανικού Συμβουλίου σε συνεργασία με το ATÖLYE και το Abdullah Gül University στην Τουρκία, το Bios στην Ελλάδα και το Nova Iskra στην Σερβία. Το έργο είναι μέρος του προγράμματος Intercultural Dialogue που πραγματοποιείται από το Yunus Emre Institute και συγχρηματοδοτείται από την Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση και την Δημοκρατία της Τουρκίας. Το έργο στοχεύει στη δημιουργία ενός δικτύου δημιουργικών κόμβων ανά την Ευρώπη το οποίο θα προάγει τις δημιουργικές αναζητήσεις και συνεργασίες και θα συμβάλλει σε μία πιο συνεκτική, ανοιχτή και συνδεδεμένη κοινωνία των πολιτών.
Το Πρόγραμμα Art and Technology Residency εστιάζει στην διαπολιτισμική συνεργατική εμπειρία και φέρνει κοντά καλλιτέχνες από την Ελλάδα, την Σερβία, την Τουρκία και την Αγγλία. Το πρόγραμμα διεξήχθη παράλληλα στην Αθήνα, το Βελιγράδι και την Κωνσταντινούπολη και φιλοξένησε τέσσερις καλλιτέχνες σε κάθε πόλη, συνολικά δώδεκα συμμετέχοντες στο πρόγραμμα. Μέσω του προγράμματος που διήρκησε έξι εβδομάδες οι συμμετέχοντας διερεύνησαν το πώς οι δικτυωμένες κοινωνίες μπορούν να αναπτύξουν μεγαλύτερη συνοχή έτσι ώστε να αντιμετωπίσουν την αβεβαιότητα και τις μεταβολές που χαρακτηρίζουν τον σύγχρονο τρόπο ζωής.
Τα έργα εκτίθενται στην γκαλερί Furtherfield, στην καρδιά του πάρκου Finsbury. Ένας αστικός πράσινος χώρος που χρησιμοποιείται από περίπου 55.000 άτομα κάθε εβδομάδα, το πάρκο Finsbury βρίσκεται στα σύνορα τριών δήμων του Λονδίνου, σε μία πολυπολιτισμική γειτονιά, με περίπου 200 διαφορετικές γλώσσες να ομιλούνται τοπικά από μεγάλες κοινότητες μεταναστών. Συγκεκριμένα, η περιοχή στεγάζει τις μεγαλύτερες τουρκικές και ελληνικές κοινότητες της Αγγλίας και συνορεύει με την μεγαλύτερη σερβική κοινότητα στο Δυτικό Λονδίνο.
Θεόδωρος Καρυώτης, Τόνια Κατερίνη, Στάθης Μητρόπουλος, Nemanja Pantovic και Ana Vilenica
Το έργο διερευνά τις διαδικασίες που οδήγησαν σε ένα μεγάλο κύμα εξώσεων στην Σερβία και το συνδέει με την ελληνική πραγματικότητα όπου το νομικό πλαίσιο για την προστασία της πρώτης κατοικίας είναι προγραμματισμένο να «λήξει» τον Απρίλιο του 2020. Πρόκειται για μία έκδοση που έχει παραχθεί συλλογικά και λειτουργεί ως ένα όχημα πληροφόρησης για τους αγώνες στο πλαίσιο μίας διαρκώς αυξανόμενης παγκόσμιας στεγαστικής κρίσης.
Κατεβάστε και μοιραστείτε τα δικά σας αντίτυπα τώρα
Προβιοτικές Τελετουργίες, Ioanna Man
Οι πόλεις είναι πολύπλοκα οικοσυστήματα και η ανθρώπινη ύπαρξη εντός αυτών εξαρτάται από διαστρωματωμένες σχέσεις φροντίδας. Οι Προβιοτικές Τελετουργίες επιδιώκουν να καθιερώσουν νέες συνήθειες για μία ζωή στην πόλη που δεν συμπεριλαμβάνει μόνο τον ανθρώπινο παράγοντα. Μεγεθυμένα μικρόβια, επαυξημένη πραγματικότητα, ένας διαδικτυακός τόπος και μία σειρά τελετουργιών καθιστούν τον ανθρώπινο παρατηρητή ισότιμο με τον βόμβο της βιόσφαιρας και αναδεικνύουν την εξάρτηση της κοινωνίας από την μικροσκοπική ζωή. Τελετουργίες και εικονογραφίες ποικίλων οργανισμών αναπτύσσουν μία διαδικασία για την βελτίωση της συνύπαρξης με τα μικρότερα στοιχεία της πόλης.
Το ποιείν του εαυτού: επίπεδα του συν-γίγνεσθαι, Yağmur Uyanık
Ένα 3D printed γλυπτό από ψαμμίτη που απεικονίζει έναν υβριδικό χαρακτήρα ο οποίος δημιουργήθηκε από την ένωση των ψηφιακών μοντέλων δύο «αυθεντικών» γλυπτών του Βρετανικού Μουσείου: του Αλεξάνδρου ΙΙΙ του Μακεδόνα (Μέγας Αλέξανδρος), και του Περικλή της αρχαίας Ελλάδας. To έργο συνδυάζει τον ήχο και την γλυπτική, τονίζοντας πως η δημιουργία, η διάδοση και η προστασία της πολιτισμικής πληροφορίας βρίσκονται στα θεμέλια των γεωγραφικών συνθηκών, των μοτίβων εκτοπισμού μετατοπίσεων και της ανιθαγένειας (statelessness). Διερευνά το πώς η ατομική αφήγηση και η συλλογική μνήμη διαμορφώνονται μέσα από την πολιτισμική περιουσία, την πολιτισμική κληρονομιά και τις συμβολικές τους ερμηνείες.
Ροή Συνείδησης / Οι Σπηλιές του Hasankeyf, της Emmy Bacharach
Έχοντας τη μορφή μιας εμπειρίας εικονικής πραγματικότητας, το έργο αυτό εφιστά την προσοχή στην τοπική και διατοπική σημασία του Hasankey, μίας αρχαίας πόλης στην νοτιοανατολική Τουρκία, η ύπαρξη της οποίας απειλείται από το πρότζεκτ Ilisu Dam – που θα προκαλέσει την άνοδο της στάθμης του ποταμού Τίγρη και το επακόλουθο πλημμύρισμα της πόλης. Το έργο αναπαριστά το Hasankey χρησιμοποιώντας φωτογραμμετρία και οπτικό υλικό που έχει συλλεχθεί από την περιοχή, δίνοντας μία γεύση από το μοναδικό περιβάλλον των σπηλαίων, πολλά από τα οποία σύντομα θα πλημμυρίσουν. Ο θεατής βιώνει την εμπειρία από τη θέση του νερού και έτσι, όσο τα σπήλαια σταδιακά βυθίζονται, μία συνθήκη που ομοιάζει με το τραύμα του εκτοπισμένου τοπικού πληθυσμού.
Επάνω στην Πέτρα, της Tamara Kametani
Ως μέρος του GDPR (Γενικός Κανονισμός Προστασίας Δεδομένων της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης) το «δικαίωμα στη λήθη» σημαίνει ότι ένα άτομο μπορεί, υπό ορισμένες προϋποθέσεις, να αιτηθεί να αφαιρεθούν αρνητικές πληροφορίες που το αφορούν από λίστες αναζήτησης. Το Set in Stone αποτελεί έναν ποιητικό διαλογισμό σχετικά με την επίδραση των υλικών σε φαινομενικά άυλες πτυχές των διατοπικών πολιτισμών. Εν μέσω οργισμένων συζητήσεων σχετικά με τις νόμιμες χρήσεις και παραβιάσεις τόσο της ιδιωτικότητας όσο και ελευθερίας έκφρασης στο διαδίκτυο, το λεργο παρουσιάζει φράσεις για τη ζωή των δεδομένων, χαραγμένες με το χέρι σε αθηναΐκά μάρμαρα, με σκοπό την πρόκληση μιας ιστορικής αντανάκλασης, ή έστω μιας υπενθύμισης των συνεπειών των πράξεων εντός και εκτός των δικτύων.
Τέσσερις στάσεις για τα Ταταύλα (Kurtuluş), του Γεώργιος Μάκκας
Το πολλαπλών καναλιών αυτό βίντεο εξερευνά τη γειτονιά των Ταταύλων (Kurtuluş), που είναι γνωστή ιστορικά ως «Μικρή Αθήνα» (“Küçük Atina” στα Τουρκικά), λόγω ενός ελληνικού πληθυσμού μεγαλύτερου των 20,000 ανθρώπων. Η κοσμοπολίτικη αυτή γειτονιά σήμερα αποτελεί στέγη για τουρκικές, ελληνικές, αρμένικες, κουρδικές και εβραϊκές κοινότητες, ενώ η ιστορική ελληνική επιρροή εξακολουθεί να υπάρχει. Το έργο του Μάκκα απαρτίζεται από συνεντεύξεις των Ελλήνων ανθρώπων που ζουν ακόμη εκεί (Rum), ενώ επιδιώκει να διατηρήσει τη μνήμη του «παλιού Kurtuluş» με το να καταγράψει κάτι το οποίο πρόκειται να εξαφανιστεί για πάντα.
Ruth Catlow, Lina Džuverović, Diana Georgiou, Huma Kabakcı
Το Furtherfield είναι το μεγαλύτερο (απο)κέντρο τέχνης και τεχνολογίας του Λονδίνου. Με εμπειρία μεγαλύτερη των 20 ετών, με 50+ εκθέσεις και παραπάνω από 100 διεθνείς συνεργασίες, το Furtherfield ειδικεύεται σε εναλλακτικά συστήματα οργάνωσης και συν-δημιουργίας. Το έργο του έχει προβληθεί στο BBC, το Guardian, το New Scientist, το Wired, το the Art Newspaper και το Hyperallergic. Συνυπάρχοντας στον χάρτη της γραμμής μετρό Piccadilly με κεντρικούς προορισμούς όπως το Παλάτι του Buckingham, η γκαλερί Furtherfield βρίσκεται στον δήμο Haringey – την τοπική αρχή της Αγγλίας με τα υψηλότερα ποσοστά εισοδηματικής ανισότητας. Το Furtherfield επιδιώκει να παράγει έργο που δίνει στους ανθρώπους την αίσθηση ότι είναι κάτοχοι των ζωών και των τοποθεσιών τους. https://www.furtherfield.org/
Το Βρετανικό Συμβούλιο είναι ο διεθνής οργανισμός της Αγγλίας που προωθεί τις διαπολιτισμικές σχέσεις και τις ευκαιρίες εκπαίδευσης με δραστηριότητα σε πάνω από 100 χώρες στα πεδία της τέχνης και του πολιτισμού, της Αγγλικής γλώσσας, εκπαίδευσης και της αστικής κοινωνίας. Η άμεση απήχηση του έργου του Βρετανικού Συμβουλίου τον τελευταίο χρόνο έφτασε τα 65 εκατομμύρια ανθρώπους και τα 731 εκατομμύρια ανθρώπους συνολικά, συμπεριλαμβανομένων διαδικτυακών μεταδόσεων και δημοσιεύσεων. Το Βρετανικό Συμβούλιο συνεισφέρει θετικά στις χώρες με τις οποίες συνεργάζεται, αλλάζοντας τη ζωή των ανθρώπων μέσω της προσφοράς ευκαιριών και του χτισίματος διασυνδέσεων και εμπιστοσύνης. Με έτος ίδρυσης το 1934, το British Council αποτελεί μία Αγγλική κοινωνική προσφορά με Βασιλικό Καταστατικό κι ένα δημόσιο σώμα της Αγγλίας. Λαμβάνει 15 τοις εκατό χρηματοδότηση από την Αγγλική κυβέρνηση. https://www.britishcouncil.org.tr
Το ATÖLYE αποτελεί έναν δημιουργικό οργανισμό του 21ου αιώνα, με ένα Στούντιο Στρατηγικής Δημιουργίας που στεγάζεται σε έναν δημιουργικό κόμβο. Είναι μέλος του Διοικητικού Συμβουλίου των Δημιουργικών Κόμβων Ευρώπης. Το ATÖLYE είναι επίσης μέλος του kyu Collective, ενός συνεταιρισμού δημιουργικών επιχειρήσεων, στόχος του οποίου είναι να αποτελεί πηγή δημιουργίας που προωθεί οικονομίες και κοινωνίες. Η δραστηριότητα του ATÖLYE περικλείει όλα τα πεδία δημιουργικής συμβουλευτικής, όπως στρατηγικές, σχεδιασμός, αρχιτεκτονική και τεχνολογία. Παρέχει τις υπηρεσίες αυτές μέσα από ένα μοναδικό, μοντέρνο δίκτυο συμμετεχόντων. https://atolye.io/en/home/
Το BIOS είναι ένας πολιτιστικός οργανισμός που από το 2002 προωθεί τις τέχνες, τους νέους δημιουργούς και τη νέα επιχειρηματικότητα στην Αθήνα. Στηρίζει τις πρωτοπόρες δημιουργικές δυνάμεις, δημιουργεί πεδία διασύνδεσης των τεχνών, της επιστήμης, της κοινωνικής και επιχειρηματικής ζωής και συμβάλλει /επιδρά στην διαμόρφωση της πολιτιστικής ταυτότητας της πόλης. https://www.bios.gr/
Το Nova Iskra είναι ένας πρωτοπόρος δημιουργικός κόμβος στα Βαλκάνια. Δημιουργήθηκε με την ιδέα να προωθήσει δεσμούς μεταξύ δημιουργικών βιομηχανιών, τεχνολογιών και ανθρώπων, με στόχο να υποστηρίξει την κριτική σκέψη, να ενισχύσει ιδέες, να σχεδιάσει οργανώσεις και να αναπτύξει επιχειρήσεις που καθιστούν ασφαλές το μέλλον, ενώ παράλληλα να παραμείνει ευαίσθητο στο συνεχώς μεταβαλλόμενο παρόν. https://novaiskra.com/en/
Τα πρώτα βήματα για την ίδρυση του Πανεπιστημίου Abdullah Gül έγιναν το 2007 από το Δημοτικό Συμβούλιο και άλλα εξέχοντα πρόσωπα της Πόλης της Καισαρείας. Στόχος ήταν η βελτίωση του εκπαιδευτικού προφίλ της Καισαρείας ώστε να συμβαδίσει με το αναπτυξιακό όραμα της πόλης. Το Πανεπιστήμιο πήρε το όνομά του από τον 11ο πρόεδρο της Τουρκικής Δημοκρατίας, Abdullah Gül, ο οποίος δέχθηκε αυτήν την τιμή. Το πανεπιστήμιο δημιουργήθηκε με στόχο να γίνει ένα υψηλά διακεκριμένο πανεπιστήμιο στην Τουρκία και να συναγωνίζεται τα διεθνή ιδρύματα. Το πανεπιστήμιο ιδρύθηκε επίσημα στις 21 Ιουλίου 2010 ως το πρώτο ίδρυμα της Τουρκίας που υποστήριζε το Κρατικό Πανεπιστήμιο. Δέχθηκε τους πρώτους του φοιτητές την ακαδημαϊκή χρονιά 2013-2014. Η εκπαίδευση λαμβάνει χώρα σε μία περιοχή της Τουρκίας όπου βρισκόταν το πρώτο βιομηχανικό σύμπλεγμα, το οποίο μεταμορφώθηκε από ένα μέρος με μεγάλη ιστορική σημασία σε έναν σημαντικό εκπαιδευτικό χώρο. http://www.agu.edu.tr/
Μετά την απόφαση της Συνόδου Κορυφής στο Ελσίνκι του Ευρωπαϊκού Συμβουλίου στις 10-11 Δεκεμβρίου 1999, με την οποία η Τουρκία έγινε δεκτή ως υποψήφια χώρα, το κύριο πλαίσιο της οικονομικής συνεργασίας Τουρκίας – Ευρώπης άλλαξε και η οικονομική υποστήριξη της Ευρώπης στράφηκε στους στόχους της πορείας ένταξης και τελικά της πλήρους συμμετοχής. Η αλλαγή αυτή οδήγησε την Τουρκία να καθιερώσει ένα “Αποκεντρωμένο Σύστημα Εφαρμογής” (DIS) στα πλαίσια του οποίου λειτουργεί και το CFCU. Το CFCU, ως Εφαρμοστικό Όργανο, είναι υπεύθυνο για τον συνολικό προϋπολογισμό, τις προσφορές, τα συμβόλαια, τις πληρωμές, τους λογαριασμούς και τις οικονομικές πτυχές όλων των υπηρεσιών, των εφοδίων, των έργων και των επιχορηγήσεων στα πλαίσια των χρηματοδοτούμενων από την Ευρώπη προγραμμάτων. Έχοντας την ευθύνη της “Διεύθυνσης για την Εξουσιοδότηση Προγραμμάτων” (PAO), το CFCU διασφαλίζει ότι οι ευρωπαϊκοί κανόνες, νόμοι και διαδικασίες ακολουθούνται και ότι λειτουργεί ένα ορθό σύστημα αναφορών. Το CFCU συνδέεται διοικητικά με το Υφυπουργείο Οικονομικών, που είναι υπεύθυνο για την οικονομική διαχείριση των χρηματοδοτούμενων προγραμμάτων από την Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση. https://www.cfcu.gov.tr/
Ο οργανισμός Yunus Emre είναι ένας δημόσιος οργανισμός που ιδρύθηκε για να προωθήσει την Τουρκία, την τουρκική γλώσσα, την ιστορία, τον πολιτισμό και την τέχνη της χώρας, για να καταστήσει σχετικές πληροφορίες και αρχεία διαθέσιμα προς χρήση στο κοινό, να παρέχει υπηρεσίες διεθνώς σε ανθρώπους που επιθυμούν να λάβουν εκπαίδευση στους τομείς της τουρκικής γλώσσας, πολιτισμού και τέχνης, να βελτιώσει τη φιλία μεταξύ Τουρκίας και άλλων χωρών και να αυξήσει την πολιτισμική αλληλεπίδραση. Ως ένα ίδρυμα που σχετίζεται με τον Οργανισμό Yunus Emre, πραγματοποιεί μελέτες για τη διδασκαλία της Τουρκικής σε πολιτιστικά κέντρα ανά τον κόσμο, με στόχο την προώθηση της χώρας σε πολιτισμικό και καλλιτεχνικό επίπεδο, ενώ επιπλέον παρέχει στήριξη και σε επιστημονικές έρευνες. https://www.yee.org.tr/en
Το Πρόγραμμα Διαπολιτισμικού Διαλόγου Ευρώπης- Τουρκίας διοικείται από το ίδρυμα Yunus Emre και συγχρηματοδοτείται από την Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση και την Τουρκική Δημοκρατία και στόχο έχει να βελτιώσει τον πολιτισμικό διάλογο μεταξύ Ευρώπης και Τουρκίας φέρνοντας κοντά διαφορετικά ιδρύματα με ποικίλα πολιτισμικά προφίλ, μέσω της χρηματικής ενίσχυσης για τις τέχνες και τον πολιτισμό. https://icd.yee.org.tr
Η Emmy Bacharach είναι επαγγελματίας ειδικευμένη σε θέματα χωροταξίας, οπτικοακουστική καλλιτέχνης και DJ και εργάζεται στο σταυροδρόμι της αρχιτεκτονικής, του ήχου, του κινηματογράφου και των τεχνολογιών εμβύθισης. Το έργο της ερευνά τις κοινωνικές, πολιτικές και χωροταξικές δυνατότητες εκμετάλλευσης των ψηφιακών τεχνολογιών. Η Emmy σπούδασε αρχιτεκτονική στο Πανεπιστήμιο του Cambridge και αργότερα ολοκλήρωσε το μεταπτυχιακό της στο Royal College of Art, όπου ξεκίνησε να μελετά την κινούμενη εικόνα, τον ήχο και τις τεχνολογίες εμβύθισης. Το έργο της “Proxy Architecture”, το οποίο παρουσιάστηκε στην έκθεση “Ecologies: Environments, Bodies and Mediated Worlds” στα Ψηφιακά Στούντιο του Goldsmiths, εισάγει τους θεατές σε έναν εικονικό κόσμο, σε μία αιωρούμενη πόλη που αποτελείται από ψηφιακά κομμάτια της Κωνσταντινούπολης και αποτυπώνει σκέψεις για την συλλογική δυνατότητα του εικονικού χώρου. Το ερευνητικό της έργο “Sonic Urbanism in Detroit: Techno as a Spatial Act” ερευνά την επίδραση του αστικού χώρου στην μουσική υποκουλτούρα, συζητώντας για την χωρική παρέμβαση της τεχνολογικής παραγωγής και της ηχητικής συλλογικότητας στα πλαίσια της μετα-βιομηχανικής αστικής κατάστασης του Ντιτρόιτ. Είναι συν-ιδρύτρια του Xcessive Aesthetics, μιας διεπιστημονικής συλλογικότητας που μελετά δεδομένα και ζητήματα εικονικής πραγματικότητας σε κατασκευασμένα περιβάλλοντα.
https://rca.ac.uk/students/emmy-bacharach
Η Ruth Catlow είναι συν-ιδρύτρια και Καλλιτεχνική Διευθύντρια του Furtherfield και ηγετική προσωπικότητα σε πολλά δίκτυα χειραφετητικής κουλτούρας, πρακτικών και λόγου. Έχει συνεπιμεληθεί παραπάνω από 60 εκθέσεις ψηφιακών έργων σχετικά με θέματα επαναδιαπραγμάτευσης του δημόσιου χώρου, εναλλακτικής οικονομίας και πολιτικών κοινότητας. Βασική ομιλήτρια και συγγραφέας αμέτρητων δημοσιεύσεων σχετικών με την τέχνη, την τεχνολογία και την κοινωνική αλλαγή, έχει υπάρξει και επιμελήτρια του διεθνώς αναγνωρισμένου έργου “Artist Re:Thinking the Blockchain”. Το 2019, η σειρά έργων της “DAOWO” που δημιουργήθηκαν με τον Ben Vickers (Γκαλερί Serpentine) κέρδισαν σε Ευρωπαϊκό Επίπεδο το βραβείο NICE για τη Δημιουργική Οικονομία. Διευθύνει τα Καλλιτεχνικά Εργαστήρια “DECAL” στο Furtherfield και αναπτύσσει συνεργασίες για νέα οικονομικά στο χώρο των τεχνών.
Η Dr. Lina Džuverović είναι επιμελήτρια και Λέκτορας της Καλλιτεχνικής Πολιτικής και Διοίκησης στο Κολλέγιο Birkbeck του Πανεπιστημίου του Λονδίνου. Η έρευνά της εστιάζει σε τρόπους με τους οποίους η σφαίρα της σύγχρονης τέχνης μπορεί να αποτελέσει τόπο αλληλεγγύης και ενίσχυσης της κοινότητας. Η Lina δίδασκε παλαιότερα στο Πανεπιστήμιο του Reading στο IZK- Ίδρυμα της Σύγχρονης Τέχνης, TU Graz της Αυστρίας, ήταν Καλλιτεχνική Διευθύντρια στην Οργάνωση Calvert 22, ιδρυτική διευθύντρια στο γραφείο Electra με έδρα το Λονδίνο, ενώ έχει συμβάλλει σε έργα επιμέλειας στο ICA και στο Lux Centre στο Λονδίνο και το Momentum Biennial στη Νορβηγία. Το 2006 έλαβε τον τίτλο “Decibel Mid-Career Curatorial Fellow” στο Συμβούλιο Τεχνών Αγγλίας.
Η Νταϊανα Γεωργίου είναι συγγραφέας και επιμελήτρια με έδρα το Λονδίνο. Στην επιμελητική της πρακτική επιστρατεύει κουήρ, φεμινιστικές και απο-αποικιακές θεωρίες με στόχο τη δημιουργία τόπων συνάντησης που προάγουν τον διάλογο, τον πειραματισμό και την συνεργασία εντός και εκτός θεσμικών παραμέτρων. Το “EcoFutures”, το πιο πρόσφατο πρότζεκτ που συνεπιμελήθηκε (Λονδίνο, 2019), εστίασε στις επιδράσεις των οικολογικών ζητημάτων στο φύλο, τη φυλή και τη σεξουαλικότητα και συμπεριλάμβανε τη συμμετοχή δέκα οργανώσεων και μιας ομάδας πάνω από 70 καλλιτεχνών, θεωρητικών και ακτιβιστών. Άλλα πρότζεκτ της συμπεριλαμβάνουν την έκθεση βίντεο “Transitional States: Hormones at the Intersections of Art & Science” (Λονδίνο, Λίνκολν, Βαρκελώνη, Μπολόνια, 2017-18), το πρόγραμμα “Deep Trash Live Art” (Λονδίνο, 2017-18), το πρόγραμμα “Now You Can Go” με θέμα την φεμινιστική σκέψη, την τέχνη και τον ακτιβισμό το οποίο έλαβε χώρα διαδοχικά στα Showroom, ICA, Space Studios and το Raven Row (Λονδίνο, 2015). Η Γεωργίου έχει διδακτορικό στον Οπτικό Πολιτισμό από το Πανεπιστήμιο Goldsmiths του Λονδίνου, στο οποίο ανέπτυξε μία καινοτόμα προσέγγιση της σχέσης ανάμεσα στη γραφή για την τέχνη και την υποκειμενικότητα, υπό το πρίσμα φεμινιστικών και ψυχαναλυτικών θεωριών.
Η Huma Kabakcı (γ. το 1990, Λονδίνο) είναι μία συλλέκτρια δεύτερης γενιάς, ανεξάρτητη επιμελήτρια και ιδρυτική διευθύντρια του Open Space, που ζει και εργάζεται μεταξύ Λονδίνου και Κωνσταντινούπολης. Η Kabakcı έχει πτυχίο Διαφήμισης & Μάρκετινγκ από το College of Communication του Λονδίνου και μεταπτυχιακό στην Επιμέλεια Σύγχρονης Τέχνης από το Royal College of Art. Έχει δουλέψει σε διάφορες γκαλερί, μουσεία και τόπους δημοπρασιών τόσο στην Αγγλία όσο και στην Τουρκία, συμπεριλαμβανομένων του τμήματος Πωλήσεων Σύγχρονης Τέχνης του Sotheby’s (Λονδίνο), της Γκαλερί Albion (Λονδίνο) και του Μουσείου Πέρα (Κωνσταντινούπολη). Η Kabakcı έχει ιδιαίτερο ενδιαφέρον στην Τουρκική, Μεσανατολική σύγχρονη τέχνη και την αναδυόμενη σύγχρονη τέχνη στο Λονδίνο. Η έρευνά της αναφέρεται σε θέματα όπως η διασπορά, η μετανάστευση, η πολιτισμική ταυτότητα, ο διαπολιτισμικός διάλογος και η μνήμη. Έχει συνεισφέρει σε δημοσιεύσεις όπως στο Border_less, το περιοδικό FAD, το Guggenheim Blog, το IAN (Istanbul Art News) και το Περιοδικό SYRUP. Το 2018 η Kabakcı ολοκλήρωσε μία επιμελητική υποτροφία στo Biennial του Λίβερπουλ. Νεότερα πρότζεκτ της περιλαμβάνουν το “Tender Touches” (Λονδίνο), με τη συν-επιμέλεια της Inês Neto dos Santos, οργανωμένο από το Open Space.
Η Tamara Kametani γεννήθηκε στη Σλοβακία και κατοικεί στο Λονδίνο Σλοβάκα όπου και ασχολείται με οπτικά καλλιτεχνικά έργα σε ποικιλία από μίντια όπως εγκαταστάσεις, βίντεο, φωτογραφία και γλυπτική, με έμφαση στην διαδικτυακή εξειδίκευση. Από τα κυριότερα ζητήματα που την απασχολούν είναι οι σχέσεις εξουσίας, η παρακολούθηση, η ιδιωτικότητα και η πρόσβαση στις πληροφορίες. Ενδιαφέρεται εν μέρει για τον ρόλο που διαδραματίζει η τεχνολογία για την κατασκευή σύγχρονων και ιστορικών αφηγήσεων και οι νέες εμπειρίες που προσφέρουν. Έλαβε μεταπτυχιακό δίπλωμα στηνΣύγχρονη Καλλιτεχνική Πρακτική από το Royal College of Art το2017. Η Kametani έχει συμμετάσχει σε έναν αριθμό καλλιτεχνικών στεγάσεων και σε διεθνείς εκθέσεις. Πρόσφατες δραστηριότητες και εκθέσεις της περιλαμβάνουν το Swayze effect, Platform Southwark, χορηγούμενο από το AGORAMA. Λονδίνο (2019), 404-Resistance in the Digital Age, RAGE Collective, CFCCA, Manchester (2019); For the Time Being, The Photographers’ Gallery, χορηγούμενο από το CCA Royal College of Art, London (2019); Digital Diaspora, Studio 44, Stockholm (2019); Summer Show, Florence Trust, London (2018) και Triennial of Photography, Hamburg (2018). https://www.tamarakametani.com/
Ο Γεώργιος Μάκκας, γεννημένος στην Αθήνα το 1977, έχει ιδιαίτερο ενδιαφέρον για την φωτογραφία από νεαρή ηλικία. Είναι απόφοιτος Φωτογραφίας Ντοκιμαντέρ στο Newport της Αγγλίας. Το έργο του σχετίζεται με τη πληθυσμιακή μείωση της αγροτικής Αλβανίας και κέρδισε το πρώτο βραβείο στο Observer Hodge Award. Το 2010 ο Μάκκας συμμετείχε στο καλλιτεχνικό πρόγραμμα “SETSE” στην Ακαδημία Καλών Τεχνών στο Ποζνάν της Πολωνίας. Το έργο του εκτέθηκε στη National Portrait Gallery στο Λονδίνο, στο Φεστιβάλ Φωτογραφίας Αθήνας, στο Φεστιβάλ MedPhoto στο Ρέθυμνο, στο Fotonoviembrein Valencia, στο Fotografia Europea στο Reggio Emilia, στο Le Voci dell’Inchiesta στο Pordenone, στο DUMBO Arts Festival στη Νέα Υόρκη και στο Design Biennial της Κωνσταντινούπολης, ενώ έργα του βρίσκονται στη μόνιμη συλλογή του Μουσείου Φωτογραφίας Θεσσαλονίκης. Ο Μάκκας ενδιαφέρεται για τη διατήρηση της μνήμης μέσα από την σκοπιά του φακού των μίντια. Οι πρακτικές περιλαμβάνουν τη φωτογραφία πορτραίτου, τη μαγνητοσκόπηση ανθρώπινων ιστοριών και την αποτύπωση του εξαφανισμένου προσώπου των πόλεων. Περισσότερα στο: https://www.gmakkas.com/about/index
Η Ioana Man είναι multidisciplinary designer με παρελθόν στην αρχιτεκτονική, στον σχεδιασμό και στην κριτική πρακτική. Το έργο της παράγει νέες συνδέσεις μεταξύ των πεδίων της αρχιτεκτονικής, της επιστήμης και των τελετουργιών με σκοπό να σχηματίσει, να ανακαλύψει και να φανταστεί εναλλακτικές μελλοντικές καταστάσεις. Πρόσφατα έχει εστιάσει την προσοχή της σε ένα μακροπρόθεσμο έργο που σκοπεύει να φέρει αρχιτέκτονες κοντύτερα στην μικροσκοπική κλίμακα και στους επιστήμονες που την αξιοποιούν μεθοδολογικά. Έργα της έχουν εκτεθεί με τη στήριξη του Open Platform στη Wellcome Collection και στην Αρχιτεκτονική Κοινότητα Λονδίνου. www.ioanaman.com
Ο Θοδωρής Προδρομίδης είναι visual artist και σκηνοθέτης που μένει στην Αθήνα. Έργα του έχουν εκτεθεί σε γκαλερί, μουσεία και φεστιβάλ όπως το Galerja Nova, το State of Concept, την 1η και 5η Biennale Θεσσαλονίκης, την 4η Biennale Αθήνας, το Werkleitz Zentrum Für Medienkunst και το Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt. Από το 2017 είναι Επισκέπτης Καλλιτέχνης στα πλαίσια του προγράμματος Risk Change στο Τμήμα Ιστορίας και Φιλοσοφίας της Επιστήμης του Εθνικού και Καποδιστριακού Πανεπιστημίου Αθηνών και εθελοντής στο Ανοιχτό Σχολείο για Μετανάστες του Πειραιά. Είναι μέλος του Ιδρύματος Ριζοσπαστικής Φαντασίας, της κοινότητας του Δικτύου Σχολικής Αλληλεγγύης, καθώς και υπότροφος του Artworks, του Προγράμματος Καλλιτεχνικών Υποτροφιών του Ιδρύματος Σταύρος Νιάρχος για την περίοδο 2019-2020. www.theoprodromidis.info
Η Yağmur Uyanık είναι καλλιτέχνης από την Τουρκία με έδρα το Σαν Φρανσίσκο, με παρελθόν στα πεδία της αρχιτεκτονικής, των μίντια και της μουσικής. Το έργο της ερευνά την επανάληψη, την πρόοδο και την ασάφεια μέσα από τη δημιουργία οργάνων μετατόπισης με τη χρήση φωτός, ήχου και χώρου κι έχει ως στόχο να εκτείνει τα ψηφιακά μέσα σε τέτοιο σημείο ώστε να καταστούν φυσική εμπειρία. Η Uyanık έλαβε το Μεταπτυχιακό της στη Τέχνη & Τεχνολογία από Ίδρυμα Τέχνης του Σαν Φρανσίσκο ως υποτροφος Fulbright. Το έργο της έχει εκτεθεί σε διεθνές επίπεδο σε θεσμούς όπως το Ars Electronica, το Sonar D+, το Signal Light Festival, το MUTEK, το Exploratorium, την Ακαδημία Επιστημών της California και τη Diego Rivera Gallery. https://yagmuruyanik.com
Η παρούσα έκδοση δημιουργήθηκε με την οικονομική υποστήριξη της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης. Το περιεχόμενο αυτής είναι αποκλειστική ευθύνη του Βρετανικού Συμβουλίου και δεν αντανακλά απαραίτητα τις απόψεις της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης.
Furtherfield Gallery at the McKenzie Pavilion is located in the middle of Finsbury Park in North London, across the children’s playground from the cafe, next to the boating pond. Accessible between the gates near Finsbury Park Station and Manor House Station.
An exhibition of works born of cooperation and knowledge exchange between Turkish, Greek, Serbian and British artists seeking translocal solidarity in a hyper-connected world.
SEE IMAGES FROM THE PRIVATE VIEW
EXHIBITION TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED
Due to universal restrictions from the COVID-19 pandemic, Furtherfield Gallery is currently closed until further notice for the safety of staff and visitors. Please contact us at info@furtherfield.org if you need any information or assistance. Thank you for your understanding and patience. Stay safe.
TransLocal Cooperation exhibition, Connect for Creativity from Furtherfield on Vimeo.
As our world has become hyper-connected it has enabled us to simultaneously occupy or travel through numerous physical and virtual locations. A result of this is that we increasingly each identify with more than one place or culture. This social and cultural aspect of globalisation is often described in terms of ‘translocality’, where the events, conditions, and attachments of one location can rapidly influence and connect with another.
This exhibition and the works within it consider how we might organise for care across distances and differences with and for our translocal communities. It features a selection of artworks from those created by Turkish, Greek, Serbian and British artists during art and technology residences at the creative hubs ATÖLYE in Turkey, Bios in Greece, and Nova Iskra in Serbia. These artworks ask how we might celebrate plural identities and their creative expressions while opening up and sharing these new connections for greater cooperation and empathy.
Selected by our team of translocal Turkish, Greek, Serbian and British curators, the artworks in this exhibition employ a variety of media and technologies, from VR and 3D printing, to probiotic fermentation and ethnographic documentation. The artists visualise the challenges of peoples, cultures, and ideas, displaced over space and time, and explore how to re-evaluate and reconceive them for translocal solidarity and knowledge exchange in a rapidly changing world.
Crossing between the here and now, the there and then, between the flooding and ongoing displacement of people in Hasankeyf in Turkey to the displacement of citizens through evictions in Belgrade, Serbia, the artists use this occasion to examine the effects of globalisation on specific localities, but most significantly, to highlight how local concerns can inform, respond and interconnect across borders and cultures.
Connect for Creativity is an 18-month project led by the British Council, in collaboration with ATÖLYE and Abdullah Gül University in Turkey, Bios in Greece and Nova Iskra in Serbia. The project is part of the Intercultural Dialogue Programme that is led by the Yunus Emre Institute and is co-funded by the European Union and the Republic of Turkey. The project aims to form a network of creative hubs across Europe to foster creative exploration and collaboration that contributes to building a more cohesive, open and connected civil society.
Connect for Creativity’s Art and Technology Residency Programme brought together artists from Greece, Serbia, Turkey and the UK with a focus on the intercultural collaborative experience. Held simultaneously in Athens, Belgrade, and Istanbul, the residency hosted four artists in each city for a total of 12 participants in the programme. Throughout the immersive six-week programme, participants explored how a networked culture can develop cohesion to deal with the uncertainty and change that pervades modern life.
The artworks are presented at Furtherfield Gallery in the heart of Finsbury Park. An urban green space used by roughly 55,000 people per week, Finsbury Park sits at the borders of three London boroughs in a neighbourhood described as ‘superdiverse’ for the nearly 200 languages spoken locally by large migrant communities. In particular, the area is home to the UK’s largest Turkish and Greek communities and sits adjacent to the UK’s largest Serbian community in West London.
An Open Newspaper (You can’t evict a movement) by Theo Prodromidis in collaboration with Theodoros Karyotis, Tonia Katerini, Stathis Mitropoulos, Nemanja Pantović and Ana Vilenica
Addressing the processes that led to a surge of housing evictions in Serbia, this work connects to the Greek context where the legal framework for the protection of primary housing is planned to “expire” in April 2020. This collectively produced printed work acts as a vehicle of information about struggles in an ever-increasing global housing crisis.
Download and distribute your own copies now
Probiotic Rituals by Ioana Man
Cities are complex ecosystems and human existence within them depends on layered relations of care. Probiotic Rituals sets out to establish new customs for a more-than-human life in the city. Scaled up microbes, an AR interface, a website and a series of rituals, bring the human observer on par with the buzz of the biosphere and show society’s dependence on microscopic life. Multi-species rituals and imagery develop a process to improve cohabitation with the smaller elements of life in the city.
Selfmaking: Layers of Becoming With by Yağmur Uyanık
A 3D printed sandstone sculpture of a hybrid character created by fusing the digital models of two ‘original’ sculptures at the British Museum of: Alexander III of Macedon (commonly known as Alexander the Great); and Pericles of ancient Greek. Selfmaking combines sound and sculpture highlighting how creation, circulation and preservation of cultural information underlies geographical contexts, patterns of displacement, and statelessness. It reflects on how individual narrative and collective memory are shaped through cultural property, cultural currency, and their inherent symbolic meanings.
Stream of Consciousness / The Caves of Hasankeyf by Emmy Bacharach
In the form of a virtual reality experience, this work draws attention to the local and translocal significance of Hasankeyf, an ancient city in south-eastern Turkey whose existence is endangered by the Ilisu Dam project – which will cause the water levels of the Tigris river to rise and flood the town. It represents Hasankeyf using photogrammetry and visual material collected from the site, giving people a glimpse into the unique environment of the caves, many of which will shortly be flooded. Experienced from the point of view of the water, the viewer is present as the caves are gradually submerged, an experience that resonates with the trauma of a displaced local population.
Set In Stone by Tamara Kametani
As part of GDPR (The General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union) ‘the right to be forgotten’ means a person can have negative information about themselves removed from search listings under certain arguable instances. Set In Stone therefore forms a poetic meditation on the effect of materials on often immaterial-seeming aspects of translocal cultures. While debates rage about legitimate uses and abuses of both privacy and freedom of speech online, this work presents phrases about the life of data etched by hand onto Athenian marble, to provoke a historic reflection on or even memorialisation of the consequences of actions on and offline.
Four stops to Kurtuluş by Georgios Makkas
This multichannel video explores the neighbourhood of Kurtuluş which has historically been known as ‘little Athens’ ( Küçük Atina in Turkish) thanks to a Greek population of over 20,000 people. Today this cosmopolitan neighborhood is home to Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, and Jewish communities, while the historic Greek influence and population continue to dwindle. Centered around interviews with the Greek (Rum) people still living in the area, Makkas’s work seeks to preserve the memory of the ‘old Kurtuluş’, seizing a chance to document something that is about to disappear forever.
Ruth Catlow, Lina Džuverović, Diana Georgiou, Huma Kabakcı
Furtherfield is London’s longest running art and technology (de)centre. With more than 20 years experience, through 50+ exhibitions, and over 100 international partnerships, they have developed a specialism in alternative systems of organisation and co-creation. Their work has been featured by the BBC, the Guardian, the New Scientist, Wired, the Art Newspaper and Hyperallergic. Highlighted on the Piccadilly Tube Line map of key destinations alongside Buckingham Palace, Furtherfield Gallery is in the Borough of Haringey – the UK’s local authority with the highest levels of income inequality. They strive to produce work that gives people a shared sense of ownership of their lives and localities.
The British Council is the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. They work with over 100 countries in the fields of arts and culture, English language, education and civil society. Last year, they reached over 65 million people directly and 731 million people overall including online, broadcasts and publications. They make a positive contribution to the countries we work with – changing lives by creating opportunities, building connections and engendering trust. Founded in 1934, they are a UK charity governed by Royal Charter and a UK public body. They receive 15 percent core funding grant from the UK government. https://www.britishcouncil.org.tr
ATÖLYE is a 21st-century creative organization with an award-winning Strategic Design Studio that is nested within a creative hub. A is a member of the European Creative Hubs Network and is represented in the Steering Committee. ATÖLYE is also part of the kyu Collective, a collective of strategically curated creative businesses whose purpose is to be a source of creativity which propels economies and societies forward. ATÖLYE’s work encompasses all facets of creative consulting including strategy, design, architecture, and technology. It provides these services through a unique modern network of practitioners. https://atolye.io/en/home/
Bios is the independent cultural organisation of Athens that promotes the arts, new media, young creatives and new entrepreneurship since 2002. Bios supports the innovative creative force of Athens, creates interdisciplinary common space for the arts and science, for social and entrepreneurial life and it influences and contributes in the shaping of the cultural identity of Athens. http://www.romantso.gr
Nova Iskra is a pioneering creative hub in the Balkans. Nova Iskra is created with the idea to incite tangible connections between creative industries, technology, and the people, with the goal to support critical thinking, nurture ideas, design organizations and develop businesses that are future-proof, while remaining sensible to the ever-changing present. https://novaiskra.com/en/
Abdullah Gül University was founded by the Kayseri City Council and other city notables in 2007. The aim was to raise the profile of education in Kayseri in line with the city’s own vision of its development. The University was named after the 11th president of the Turkish Republic, Abdullah Gül, who has accepted this honor, for the university is being dedicated to the quest to become a distinguished high-quality university in Turkey and be able to compete with international institutions. The university was formally founded on 21 July 2010 as Turkey’s first foundation-supported State University. AGU admitted its first students in 2013 – 2014 Academic Year. Education is being conducted at the site of Turkey’s first industrial complex, which is being transformed from a place of great historical significance to be a notable place of education. http://www.agu.edu.tr/
CFCU was established following the decision of the Helsinki Summit of the European Council on 10-11 December 1999 to accept Turkey as a candidate country. The main Framework of Turkey-EU financial cooperation has changed and EU financial assistance was directed towards the pre-accession goals and ultimately full membership. This change led Turkey to establish a ‘Decentralised Implementation System (DIS)’ under which the CFCU is also operating. The CFCU, as the Implementing Agency, is responsible for the overall budgeting, tendering, contracting, payments, accounting and financial reporting aspects of all procurement of services, supplies, works, and grants in the context of EU funded programmes. Under the responsibility of a ‘Programme Authorising Officer (PAO)’, the CFCU ensures that the EU rules, regulations and procedures pertaining to the procurement are adhered to and that a proper reporting system is functioning. The CFCU is administratively linked to the Undersecretariat of Treasury which is responsible for the financial management of EU funded programmes. https://www.cfcu.gov.tr/
Yunus Emre Foundation is a public foundation, which was founded to promote Turkey, Turkish language, its history and culture and art, make such related information and documents available for use in the world, provide services abroad to people who want to have education in the fields of Turkish language, culture and art, to improve the friendship between Turkey and other countries and increase the cultural exchange. As an institution affiliated to the Foundation, Yunus Emre Institute is carrying out studies for Turkish teaching in the cultural centers established abroad to accomplish the purposes of this law as well as conducting culture and art activities to promote our country, and giving support to scientific researches. https://www.yee.org.tr/en
The EU-Turkey Intercultural Dialogue Programme, led by the Yunus Emre Institute and co-financed by the European Union and Republic of Turkey will improve the cultural dialogue between the EU and Turkey by bringing different institutions with different cultural backgrounds together under a financial support allocated for arts and culture. https://icd.yee.org.tr
Emmy Bacharach is a spatial practitioner, audio-visual artist, and DJ working at the intersection of architecture, sound, film and immersive technologies. Her work explores the social, political and spatial possibilities of appropriating digital technologies. Emmy’s background is in architecture, which she studied at the University of Cambridge and later completed her masters at the Royal College of Art, where she began to explore moving image, sound and immersive technologies. Her installation work ’Proxy Architecture’, which was featured at the Volumetric Ecologies: Environments, Bodies and Mediated Worlds showcase at Goldsmiths Digital Studios, immerses the viewer in a virtual world, a floating city composed of digital fragments of Istanbul, speculating on the collective potential of virtual space. Her research project ‘Sonic Urbanism in Detroit: Techno as a Spatial Act’, investigates the impact of urban space on musical subculture, arguing for the spatial agency of techno production and sonic collectivity in the context of Detroit’s post-industrial urban condition. She is a co-founder of Xcessive Aesthetics, an interdisciplinary design collective exploring data and augmented reality in the built environment . https://www.rca.ac.uk/students/emmy-bacharach/
Ruth Catlow is Co-Founding Artistic Director of Furtherfield and a leading authority on emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics. She has co-curated over 60 digital arts exhibitions around themes of placemaking, alternative economies and the commons. Keynote speaker and author of countless publications on art, technology and social change, including editing the internationally acclaimed Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain. In 2019 her blockchain and the arts lab series, DAOWO, produced with Ben Vickers (Serpentine Galleries) and Goethe-Institut won a European Centre for Creative Economy ‘NICE’ award. She heads DECAL, Furtherfield’s DeCentralised Arts Lab, developing cross sector partnerships for new economic models for the arts.
Dr Lina Džuverović is a curator and Lecturer in Arts Policy and Management at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research focuses on ways in which the sphere of contemporary art can become a site of solidarity and community-building. Previously Lina taught at the University of Reading, at IZK –Institute for Contemporary Art, TU Graz, Austria, was Artistic Director of Calvert 22 Foundation, founding director of the London-based agency Electra and has held curatorial roles at ICA and the Lux Centre, London and Momentum Biennial, Norway. She was the 2006 Decibel Mid-Career Curatorial Fellow, Arts Council England.
Diana Georgiou is a writer and curator based in London. Her curatorial practice employs queer, feminist and decolonial practices and theories to generate spaces of encounter that can foster dialogue, experimentation and collaboration within and outside institutional parameters. Her most recent co-curated project EcoFutures (London, 2019) focused on the implications of ecological issues on gender, race and sexuality and involved 10 partner organisations with the participation of over 70 artists, theorists and activists. Selected projects include the touring video art exhibition Transitional States: Hormones at the Intersections of Art & Science (London, Lincoln, Barcelona, Bologna, 2017-18); Deep Trash Live Art Programme (London, 2017-18); the 2-week programme Now You Can Go which considered feminist thinking, art and activism, taking place across The Showroom, the ICA, Space Studios and Raven Row (London, 2015). Georgiou holds a PhD in Visual Culture from Goldsmiths, University of London, offering an innovative account of the relationship between art-writing and subjectivity through the lens of feminist psychoanalytic theories.
Huma Kabakcı (b. in 1990, London) is a second-generation collector, independent curator and founding director of Open Space, living and working between London and Istanbul. Kabakcı holds a BA in Advertising & Marketing from London College of Communication and a MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art. She has worked at various galleries, museums and auction houses, both in the UK and Turkey, including Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Sales department (London), The Albion Gallery (London) and Pera Museum (Istanbul). Kabakcı has a special interest in Turkish, Middle Eastern contemporary art and emerging contemporary art in London. Her curatorial research lies in subjects such as diaspora, migration, cultural identity, cross-cultural dialogue and memory. She has contributed to publications including Border_less, FAD Magazine, the Guggenheim Blog, IAN (Istanbul Art News) and SYRUP Magazine. In 2018 Kabakcı completed a curatorial fellowship at Liverpool Biennial. Most recent project includes Tender Touches (London) co-curated by Inês Neto dos Santos, organised by Open Space.
Tamara Kametani is a Slovak born London based visual artist working across a variety of media including installation, video, photography and sculpture with an emphasis on site-specificity. Amongst the underlying concerns in her practice are the topics surrounding power relations, surveillance, privacy, and access to information. She is particularly interested in the role that technology plays in the construction of contemporary and historical narratives and the new experiences it enables. She received her master’s degree in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art in 2017. Kametani has participated in a number of artist residencies and exhibited internationally. Recent commissions and exhibitions include Swayze effect, Platform Southwark curated by AGORAMA, London (2019); 404- Resistance in the Digital Age, RAGE Collective, CFCCA, Manchester (2019); For the Time Being, The Photographers’ Gallery, curated by CCA Royal College of Art, London (2019); Digital Diaspora, Studio 44, Stockholm (2019); Summer Show, Florence Trust, London (2018) and Triennial of Photography, Hamburg (2018). https://www.tamarakametani.com/
Georgios Makkas was born in Athens in 1977 and had a strong interest in photography from an early age. He graduated from the Documentary Photography course in Newport, UK. His work about the depopulation of rural Albania won the first prize in the Observer Hodge Award. In 2010, Makkas participated in the artist in residence programme ‘SETSE’ at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland. His work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Athens Photo Festival, MedPhoto Festival in Rethymno, Fotonoviembrein Valencia, Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Le Voci dell’Inchiesta in Pordenone, DUMBO Arts Festival in New York and the Istanbul Design Biennial, and also held in the permanent collection of the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography. Makkas is interested in the preservation of memory through lens-based media. His practice involves taking portraits, listening and filming people’s stories and documenting the disappearing face of cities. More at https://www.gmakkas.com/about/index
Ioana Man is a multidisciplinary designer with a background in architecture, set design and critical practice. She produces new encounters between the fields of architecture, science, and rituals in order to shape, invent and reimagine alternative futures. Currently, her focus is on a long-term project that aims to bring architects closer to the microscopic scale and to the scientists that harness it. She has had work commissioned by Open Platform at the Wellcome Collection and exhibited at the Architectural Association in London.
www.ioanaman.com
www.probiotic-rituals.com
Theo Prodromidis is a visual artist and film director based in Athens. His work has been exhibited and screened in galleries, museums and festivals including Galerija Nova, State of Concept, 1st and 5th Thessaloniki Biennale, 4th Athens Biennale, Werkleitz Zentrum Für Medienkunst and Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt.Since 2017, he has been a Visiting Artist under the program Risk Change at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and a volunteer at the Open School for Immigrants of Piraeus. Ηe is a member of the Institute of Radical Imagination and a member of the assembly of Solidarity Schools Network. He is currently a fellow of Artworks, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship Program, 2019-2020. www.theoprodromidis.info
Yağmur Uyanık is a Turkish artist based in San Francisco with backgrounds in architecture, new media and music. Her work explores repetition, process and intangibility through creating instruments of displacement using light, sound and space with an aim to extend the digital media to a point that it becomes a physical experience. Uyanık has received her MFA in Art & Technology from San Francisco Art Institute as a Fulbright scholar. Her work was shown internationally at institutions including Ars Electronica, Sonar D+, Signal Light Festival, MUTEK, Exploratorium, California Academy of Sciences and Diego Rivera Gallery. https://yagmuruyanik.com
This publication was produced with the financial support of the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of British Council and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
Furtherfield Gallery at the McKenzie Pavilion is located in the middle of Finsbury Park in North London, across the children’s playground from the cafe, next to the boating pond. Accessible between the gates near Finsbury Park Station and Manor House Station.
Curated by Sarah Cook together with the Director of Somerset House, Jonathan Reekie.
Economy has re-invented time. Development of industrialism and accompanying its advancements, for example, the invention of the railroad, forced standardisation of time. During 1700-1900 this invention increased methods of moving goods, new technologies and large scale investment in the UK’s countries infra-structure (communications network). The result was a complex transport system including roads, rail, canals and the London Underground.[1] Without socio-economic time discipline, it would have been impossible to progress into modernity. Similarly, capitalism and all its products which are well-known to us today, could not have functioned without the disruption of humans’ natural sleep cycle. The artists in the 24/7 exhibition at Somerset House explore the ways of responding, coping with and resisting the capitalist mechanisms of shrinking and controlling our sense of time.
The main focus in 24/7 are the “non-stop processes” of our contemporary culture, and it recognises sleep as pretty much the only time we can unplug from technology, even this time is becoming scarcer and scarcer. The different sections in the show are inspired by Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. The show is in dialogue with the author’s observations of capitalism’s influence on our everyday lives, creating illusions of timelessness, disorientation and relentless pursuits of capturing, monetising and consuming.
In Marcus Coates’ Self Portrait as Time (2016), the artist’s finger follows the second hand on his wristwatch, creating the illusion of him actually moving it. The work evolves in the space and is a looped video, but also works as a clock, counting time as it passes and constantly reminding the visitors and staff about it. Admittedly, the artistic process at times felt like a trance, and Coates kept loosing the sense of boundaries between himself and the clock.
Benjamin Grosser’s Order of Magnitude (2019), a film containing excerpts of Mark Zuckerberg’s interviews, covering the earliest days of Facebook in 2004 up to Zuckerberg’s appearances before the US Congress in 2018, these recordings reveal what’s changed and what hasn’t changed about the way he speaks and what he says. The film shows him boasting the enormity of Facebook, where the edits present us with him repetitively announcing “more, more, more, growth, more than a billion, much bigger, another billion, more than a hundred billion, more efficient, growing, even more, growing by 50%, billion, more billions, many many more”.
Many have become disillusioned with Silicon Valley and its technology based corporations, and the systems and platforms, which they have co-created at the expense of our privacy. The problem is, we are the silent workforce that these companies feed on. By giving away raw data for analysis and material extraction, we fuel the machine of surveillance capitalism. Unsurprisingly, this is reflected by a significant portion of artworks in the exhibition, which are concerned with what the contemporary meaning of labour is now.
As we enter the age of acceleration and automation, much of our labour is done with the help of machines. As this happens more we will need to keep re-evaluating our position in the process. On the one hand, 24/7 seems to portray humans as slaves to the machines, while our lifestyles are twisted, over full, and packed with too much stuff. Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos presents us with her sculptures of various configurations of empty hands, the fingers arranged to show them presumably texting, holding a phone and sliding up the screen. (Fifteen Pairs of Mouths, 2016-19).
Then we have Tega Brain’s, Unfit Bits (2015), pointing to constant connectedness; relentlessly moving metronomes stimulating smartwatches for those whose insurance forces them to rely on the health and physical performance data, and then Jeremy Bentham’s famous 19th century drawings of the Panopticon.
Many of the artworks in the exhibition work to debunk the myth of immaterial labour. For instance, this is poetically illustrated by Alan Warbuton’s Dust Bunny (2015), a sculpture comprised of finely milled angora-like dust harvested from the inside of ten 3D animation workstations at visual effects studio Mainframe. The volume of dust here represents an estimated 35,000 hours, or 4 years, of constant rendering and processing.
The distressing nature of social media is shown through the lens of architecture rationalising human relations in Pierre Huyghe’s The House Project (2001). The film shows computer-generated high-rise blocks with window lights blinking in the rhythm of the electronic soundtrack by Finnish techno duo Pan Sonic and French sound artist Cédric Pigot. As the track progresses, the beat becomes heavier, faster and the lights begin to run up and down the stairs, across all floors. The two apartment blocks become musical instruments with flashing diodes, generating an eerie and creepy soundtrack.
Among this horde of artworks, there are some which allow space for contemplation. Finnish artist Nastja Säde Rönkkö, one of the Somerset House Studios’ residents, spent 6 months living and working in London without using Internet. Her letters, souvenirs and received gifts are displayed in a glass cabinet, alongside the film documenting her experiences of moving around the city and reflections on the difficulties she had encountered when she refused to use and benefit from the web. In Catherine Richards’ Shroud Chrysalis I (2000), the visitors are invited to be wrapped in a copper blanket by the gallery attendants, and savor time off technology, as the blanket blocks out electromagnetic signals emitted by mobile devices.
The show proposes a retreat and asks us to contemplate the world’s speed and our disconnectedness from a sense of time. At the same time, it overwhelms the space with an abundant amount of artworks, with over 50 beautiful and innovative artworks on display. And, while this diversity is one of the exhibition’s biggest strengths and should be applauded, it is also a weakness. It involved much shifting about and squeezing between displays, and tireless engagement. One’s experience of this ranged from disinterest to awe, as well as disorientation.
The exhibition’s theme is about time. It literally demands a fair chunk of time forcing the visitor to slow down and re-evaluate experiences and perceptions of what time means to us when its so deeply a part of the systems that are accelerating, alongside capitalist means. This big show offers us no way out of the contemporary trappings of capitalism and its intertwined, connections with time. But, it has opened up a space where we can consider it in a context where it involves the mediums and processes of, art, technology, and varied philosophical, political interjections, and observed outlooks. The exhibition presents us the visitor with an opportunity to reflect on the connected world through the experience of disconnectedness which has successfully been woven into the exhibition’s concept. The works shift and turn not with one message, but as oracles, or reminders that, there is a possibility of living differently, where we can create communities in alternative ways and highlight the value of questioning, while critically experimenting with our methods of communication. Time or capitalism, are not the main messages, but it’s more about what we do with them. It is an important and necessary exhibition that needs our immediate attention.
24/7:
A WAKE-UP CALL FOR OUR NON-STOP WORLD
is at Somerset House in London until 23 Feb 2020
somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/247
Featured Image:
‘Slogans for the 21st Century’
Courtesy of Douglas Coupland
and Maria Francesca Moccia, EyeEm
via Getty Images
Introduction
Marc Garrett, curator of the current incarnation of the Children of Prometheus exhibition at the NeMe gallery, interviews artist Joana Moll about the artwork, The Virtual Watchers, developed in collaboration with french anthropologist Cédric Parizot.
This project began in 2010, and looks critically at an online platform group, consisting of 203,633 volunteers surveilling the US-Mexico border, through a social media platform, such as Facebook. The community of The Virtual Watchers existed well before, and briefly, during, President Donald Trump’s signature promise in 2016 to build a wall at the US southern border, to stop more migrants crossing over onto US soil. The project also touches upon the wider online culture of attacks by bots and trolls from clandestine right-wing groups. The interview also explores Joana Moll’s interpretation of the Children of Prometheus exhibition, and briefly discusses other projects such as CO2GLE, which is an attempt to visualize how much carbon dioxide the company is emitting per second.
Interview
Marc Garrett: I remember when I first came across The Virtual Watchers, it left a deeply, unnerving impression on me. It reminded me of how threatening people can be towards others through the Internet. The project illustrates how participatory platforms which have come about, due to the rise of Web 2.0 culture; has not only paved the way for positive forms of mass communications for small groups and individuals to connect with each other, and with families and friends, but, there is also a darker side that people around the world have only in the last few years become aware of.
Out of the many scenarios you have witnessed when studying this virtual surveillance group, what has grabbed your attention the most, or feels most significant to you?
Joana Moll: The platform that gathered this group of people was specifically created to crowdsource national security by allowing citizens to monitor and report illegal activity in the us/mexico border. Ultimately the project shows how citizens can easily, and silently, be militarized by means of free labour, by translating a physical territory into social media, in this case, a border. Personally, what surprised me the most was the fact that most of the users we investigated, were either retired, unemployed or sick and couldn’t leave home.
The platform was a stage which allowed them to socialize and feel useful. A couple of users even claimed that the platform saved their lives, that their days became meaningful again. This use of the platform also revealed something important: according to the authorities, and this was that it was quite ineffective when it came to stop illegal activity around the border. Actually, some Sheriffs claimed that the amount of reports that they received on a daily basis were useless and difficult to process. However, the platform worked quite well in terms of keeping a large number of users monitoring the border. It had more than 200.000 registered users which spent more than 1 million hours securing the border for free.
Marc Garrett: This project and or artwork, has been around for nine years now. Yet, its subject matter was ahead of its time, and looking at it now it feels even more relevant. For example, across the world, the general public is only now coming to terms with the political and social, aspects and consequences behind the varied forms of virtual surveillance, dominating online interaction.
This is also true in regard to climate collapse, which brings me to your essay Deep Carbon (2018 ), where you say, the “amount of users and network connections has increased at a whooping pace ever since. In 2015, the Internet registered 966 Exabytes of IP traffic (1.037.234.601.984 GB) and is expected to reach 1579,2 Exabytes by 20182.”
And, then you say, “despite the growing number of Internet users and information flows, the material representation of the Internet and surveillance economy behind it remains blurred in the social imagination.”
What do you think will help to resolve the difficult issue in respect of material representation, in your terms?
Joana Moll: This is quite a difficult question to answer, indeed! I think there has to be a radical change in the way we produce and consume data, but most importantly, in the way our interfaces and interactions are designed. Even though our internet ecosystem is expansive we only interact with it through interfaces, and I really believe interfaces hold the key to start solving the problem. The energy consumption of most of our interactions in the digital realm are very opaque, we have no idea about all the processes that are taking place beyond the interface (i.e. a website, an app) and where all our data is going. I’m about to launch a project called The Hidden Life of an Amazon User which tries to bring to light all the amount of processes that are triggered by doing a simple purchase in Amazon. The amount of information that is involuntarily being loaded in the user’s browser is massive, let alone its energy consumption and environmental impact.
Since 2015, within the Critical Interface Politics group I founded at HANGAR (Barcelona), we’ve been developing experimental workshops that focus on developing sustainable interfaces. We usually work with a limited energy budget, which means that the interfaces we design can just use a certain amount of energy. It is really amazing how this seemingly small shift radically changes the way we think and design online interactions. If this would be a standard process when it comes to design our online experiences (which it should), would possibly have tremendous collateral positive consequences for the entire internet ecosystem, specially in terms of preventing to collect massive amounts of user data, which consume vast amount of resources. In this sense sustainable websites would be privacy friendly 😉
Marc Garrett: In what way do you think your own work fits into the context of the exhibition?
Joana Moll: It’s always hard to talk about my own work beyond my own work, but I’ll do my best! I feel my work tries to reveal very complex and hard to grasp techno-social arrangements in a very simple way. To allow people to understand the infrastructures and processes that govern their day to day lives without feeling smashed about their complexities it’s a central concern in my practice. I think my work fits in the exhibition in many ways, but I believe that this need to urgently discuss critical implications of our technologies with broader communities is one of the most relevant.
Marc Garrett: The postmodernist, feminist and theorist, Donna Haraway has recently re-emphasized the importance of re-evaluating certain contemporary contexts, especially those involving the patriarchy, politics, and climate change, in the age of the Anthropocene. I consider yourself, and myself, have been exploring our practices in parallel to Haraway’s critical ambitions, in respect that, we share similar values, but express them differently.
Thus, we need to re-examine our relationship with the world in the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, and find new ways to reconfigure our approach and connection to the earth and all its inhabitants.
Could you give us an example of your current works that you feel could be materializing Haraway’s writings, but as part of your own artistic production and or intention, and what the links and differences are?
Joana Moll: I agree, our work involves many of Haraway’s concerns, indeed. As for my practice, I believe politics, patriarchy, climate change and technology are continuously meeting and being questioned, in the sense that I always approach this contexts from different angles, which also talks a lot about my own process of understanding complex contemporary arrangements and how they affect and modify each other. For example, in my latest projects: The Dating Brokers and The Hidden Life of an Amazon User (HLAU), I examine how user activity, or in other words free labour, is heavily monetized by third parties. However in HLAU I also examine the energy costs that such exploitation is involuntarily assumed by the user. Graham Harman said it is very important no to assume that everything is connected, but to continuously trace the connections between things, which is something that I try to remember when I do a new project and I believe that Haraway’s body of work heavily points in that direction. However, I believe that techno-colonialism is a central issue to tackle while re-evaluating technology, politics, environment and most importantly, the way it affects and informs our ability to think and imagine. Together with my colleague Jara Rocha we’ve been recently collaborating in a series of projects and workshops that aim to reveal tangible outcomes of techno-colonialism in our daily lives.
Marc Garrett: The Children of Prometheus exhibition was mainly inspired by Mary Shelley. What elements in the exhibition’s: themes, ideas, and contexts, do you relate to personally?
Joana Moll: I relate to all of them, they are all so relevant and urgent! As for my work, I especially connect with the way invisible processes triggered by human-centered technologies affect our natural habitats. I believe that the exhibition opens highly relevant and urgent discussions about how society has been “Frankensteined” at large. The way our technologies are designed, produced and used are seriously damaging not just our life-giving habitats but also our relationship to them, our ability to imagine habitable ways to inhabit this planet.
Conclusion
When I first began the Children of Prometheus exhibition project, it was called Monsters of the Machine: Frankenstein in the 21s Century. Both titles fit the same curation function, and that is, to examine critically with other the artists in this touring show, Mary Shelley’s questions, that were asked in 1818, today, looking through her eyes.
I can’t imagine what she would think of Trump and all the other extreme right-wing, racist, groups and politicians, and dodgy corporations, exploiting people’s data, whilst adding to the destruction of the planet. However, in the spirit of Shelley, we have individuals such as Joana Moll who can play that role, with other artists doing what Shelley did so well then, but today. Our world is dying and those in power are part of non-friendly systems designed to kill it further, while the poor and oppressed take the brunt of it all. Moll, and the other Artists the exhibition, are presenting us with serious questions. But, accompanying these necessary and urgent concerns, are also answers at the same time. But there’s not much time.
Joana Moll is part of the touring exhibition, Children of Prometheus currently at the NeMe Arts Centre, Limassol, Cyprus 11 Oct – 20 Dec, 2019. This exhibition was originally produced in partnership with LABoral, in Gijon, and is an extension of the Monsters of the Machine: Frankenstein in the 21st Century, 18 Nov 2016 – 21 May 2017. We are currently negotiating other venues, in different countries across the world. Please contact if you’re interested in the exhibition.
Joana Moll will also be leading a workshop, THE INTERFACE, DECONSTRUCTED, and participating in a conversation with Tatiana Bazzichelli, founder of Disruption Network Lab as part of ACTIVATION: Collective Strategies to Expose Injustice, Saturday, 30 November 2019.
Artist Bio
Joana Moll is a Barcelona / Berlin based artist and researcher. Her work critically explores the way post-capitalist narratives affect the alphabetization of machines, humans and ecosystems. Her main research topics include Internet materiality, surveillance, social profiling and interfaces. She has lectured, performed and exhibited her work in different museums, art centers, universities, festivals and publications around the world. Furthermore she is the co-founder of the Critical Interface Politics Research Group at HANGAR [Barcelona] and co-founder of The Institute for the Advancement of Popular Automatisms. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Universität Potsdam and Escola Superior d’Art de Vic [Barcelona].
NeMe and curator Marc Garrett, Co-Founding and Co-Artistic Director of Furtherfield, have the pleasure to invite you to Children of Prometheus at NeMe Arts Centre, Limassol. The exhibition investigates the landscape of a rapidly transforming world and how some of these shifts inform and affect our immediate environment.
The complex nature of the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus has inspired philosophers, authors and artists throughout many centuries and will continue to do so because of the powerful contradictions which it embodies which reflects the ongoing dualities present in both the human mind and physical existence. Acknowledging that the Promethean spirit lives on in the ambitions of science and technology, which in many cases defies the limits imposed upon humanity by nature, the post-modern Prometheus belongs to an organised world focused on the technology of the internet. This rapidly expanding domain, with its presumed ethos of democracy belies the technologies of data mining, fake data, targeted personalised advertising, etc used by global conglomerates to engineer/manipulate people’s perception via media into a state of hyper-real urgency by dislocating the individual from physical realities.
Yet despite the plethora of work in the field, there has not been any sustained attempt to think through the larger philosophical, sociological, economical, political and cultural implications of new technologies. A crucial methodology for this exhibition is to view these themes through the eyes of the artists. Children of Prometheus generates a visual discussion around this persistent narrative that is still very enmeshed into our contemporary context.
This exhibition was originally produced in partnership with LABoral, in Gijon, and is an extension of the Monsters of the Machine: Frankenstein in the 21st Century, 18 Nov 2016 – 21 May 2017.
AOS (Art is Open Source) was born in Italy, in 2004 as an interdisciplinary research laboratory focused on merging artistic and scientific practices to gain better understandings about the mutation of human beings and their societies with the advent of ubiquitous technologies. AOS was created by Salvatore Iaconesi (engineer, hacker, artist, designer, TED Fellow, Eisenhower Fellow, Yale World Fellow, Prof. in Interaction Design at ISIA Design University in Florence), joined by Oriana Persico (social scientist, artist) and now includes more than 200 artists and researchers from across the world.
Alexia Achilleos is a Finnish-Cypriot artist with a background in fine art, archaeology and cultural studies. Her work is concerned with cultural, political and social issues which impact identity, specifically linked with cultural heritage & tourism, colonialism and national identity politics. She explores interactions, hybridisation and power struggles – especially how a cultural object’s function can change according to geography, history and politics, and how it can be suited to the needs and interests of the adopting culture.
Egor Chemokhonenko lives and works in Cyprus. He is a programmer and open source enthusiast, and keen to mix technologies with the arts. Egor has previously collaborated as a developer with fashion and arts projects such as Lumpen Agency and Cosmoscow Contemporary Art Fair. Machine self-portraits is his second programming for an artwork using artificial intelligence.
Anna Dumitriu is a British artist whose work fuses craft, sculpture and bioscience to explore our relationship to the microbial world, technology and biomedicine. She has an international exhibition profile, having exhibited at venues including The Picasso Museum in Barcelona, The Science Gallery in Dublin, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Taipei, and The V & A Museum in London. She is artist in residence on the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at the University of Oxford, a visiting research fellow: artist in residence in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Hertfordshire, and an honorary research fellow in the Wellcome Trust Brighton and Sussex Centre for Global Health at Brighton and Sussex Medical School.
Mary Flanagan is a writer and artist whose practice(s) extend into science, design, psychology, and futures studies. Her encompassing work in theory and criticism, with a wide range of essays and books on digital culture, is in constant dialogue with her use of digital and material platforms to create dynamic, constantly evolving systems that reflect cultural questions and trigger reflection. She is the author of the book Critical Play: Radical Game Design, the poetry collection Ghost Sentence, co-author of Values at Play in Digital Games and Similitudini. Simboli. Simulacri, and co-editor of the collections Reload: Rethinking Women in Cyberculture and Re:Skin. Her essays and articles have appeared in Salon, USA Today, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Huffington Post.
Carla Gannis is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BFA in painting from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and an MFA in painting from Boston University. In the late 1990s she began incorporating net and digital technologies into her work. Gannis is the recipient of several awards, including a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Grant in Computer Arts, an Emerge 7 Fellowship from the Aljira Art Center, and a Chashama AREA Visual Arts Studio Award in New York, NY. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. She is currently Assistant Chair of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Marinos Koutsomichalis is a media artist, scholar and creative technologist. He was born in Athens, GR (1981) and has since lived and worked in various cities around the world. His practice is hybrid, nomadic, and ethnographic, involving field-work, creative coding, critical theory, making, lecturing, live performance, workshopping, artist/research residencies, ‘Doing-It-With-Others’, and hands-on experimentation with materials and technologies of all sorts. His artistic corpus is prolific, yet persistently revolving around the same few themes: material inquiry/exploration; self-erasure; the quest for post-selfhood. He has hitherto publicly presented his work, pursued projects, led workshops, and held talks worldwide more than 250 times and in all sorts of milieux: from leading museums, acclaimed biennales, and concert halls, to churches, industrial sites, and underground venues. He has held teaching and research positions in various academic institutions, has published a book and numerous academic/scientific articles, and is currently a Lecturer in Multimedia Design for Arts at the Cyprus University of Technology (Limassol) where he co-directs the Media Arts and Design Research Lab.
Kypros Kyprianou is an artist based in Bristol. He investigates scientific, political and cultural constructs using materials drawn from official archives, reverse-engineered objects, scenarios from film and hearsay. His practice is often collaborative, culminating in performance, video, publications and site-specific intervention.
Gretta Louw was born in South Africa in 1981 but grew up in Australia. She received her BA in 2001 from the University of Western Australia and Honours in Psychology in 2002, subsequently living in Japan and New Zealand before moving to Germany in 2007. Her work has been exhibited widely, including in public institutions such as the Kunstmuseum Solothurn (CH), Münchner Stadtmuseum (DE), National Portrait Gallery (AUS), UNSW Galleries (AUS), LABoral (ESP), and Galeri Nasional Indonesia (IDN). She was awarded the Heinrich Vetter Preis by the City of Mannheim in 2014 and the Bahnwärter Stipendium by the City of Esslingen am Rhein in 2017, as well as studio scholarships in Munich and Mannheim. In 2017, Louw was an artist in residence at MozFest in London at the invitation of the Tate and the V&A museums in collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation. Louw has also curated thematic exhibitions at museums including the Villa Merkel (DE), Furtherfield Gallery (UK), and Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery (US) and contributed essays to numerous catalogues and publications.
Lynn Hershman Leeson is an artist and filmmaker whose work has been internationally acclaimed over the last five decades. Cited as one of the most influential media artists, Hershman Leeson is widely recognised for her innovative work investigating issues that are now acknowledged as key to the workings of society: the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. Over the last fifty years she has made pioneering contributions to the fields of photography, video, film, performance, installation and interactive as well as net-based media art. ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, mounted the first comprehensive retrospective of her work titled Civic Radar. A substantial publication, which Holland Cotter named in The New York Times “one of the indispensable art books of 2016.” Lynn Hershman Leeson is a recipient of a Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award, Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2017 she received a USA Artist Fellowship, the San Francisco Film Society’s “Persistence of Vision” Award and the College Art Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Joana Moll is a Barcelona / Berlin based artist and researcher. Her work critically explores the way post-capitalist narratives affect the alphabetization of machines, humans and ecosystems. Her main research topics include Internet materiality, surveillance, social profiling and interfaces. She has lectured, performed and exhibited her work in different museums, art centers, universities, festivals and publications around the world. Furthermore, she is the co-founder of the Critical Interface Politics Research Group at HANGAR [Barcelona] and co-founder of The Institute for the Advancement of Popular Automatisms. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Universität Potsdam and Escola Superior d’Art de Vic [Barcelona].
Cédric Parizot is a Researcher at the CNRS. He is an anthropologist of politics and currently works at the Institut d’Etudes et de Recherche sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (IREMAM, Aix en Provence). His research focuses on mobility and borders in the Israeli – Palestinian space. He has recently published with Stephanie Latte Abdallah A l’ombre du mur: Israéliens et Palestiniens entre séparation et occupation, Arles, Actes sud, 2011. He coordinates a transdisciplinary research programme involving social scientists, scientists, artists and professionals in order to elaborate a multidisciplinary approach on the mutations of 21st century Borders in Europe and the Mediterranean at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Marseille, France.
Guido Segni, aka Clemente Pestelli, lives and works somewhere at the intersections between art, pop internet culture and data hallucination. With a background in Hacktivism, Net Art and Video Art, his work is characterized by minimal gestures on technology which combine conceptual approaches with a traditional hacker attitude in making things odd, useless and dysfunctional. Co-founder of Les Liens Invisibles, he exhibited in galleries, museums (MAXXI Rome, New School of New York, KUMU Art Museum of Talinn) and art & media-art international festivals (International Venice Biennale, Piemonte SHARE Festival, Transmediale). Currently he teaches at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Carrara, directs the imaginary REFRAMED lab and he is part of the editorial committee for the project Atypo.
Alan Sondheim is an independent writer/theorist/artist. He co-founded the Cybermind and Wrytingemail lists. He is editor of Being on Line and author of .echo, Disorders of the Real and The Wayward. He is also published widely online and his video/sound work is internationally exhibited. Sondheim is the developer of the concept of code work, wherein computer code itself becomes a medium for artistic expression. He explores notions of the ‘abject’ in the masculine and feminine online, and more recently has dealt with the machinic using the language of computer code to articulate novel forms of identity in cyberspace. His work crosses over between philosophical explorations and sound poetry and more recently he has returned to the language of music using the tonalities of a wide range of ethnic instruments. His current areas of exploration include: the aesthetics of virtual environments and installations; mapping techniques using motion capture and 3D laser scanners; Buddhist philosophy and its relation to avatars and online environments; and experimental choreography.
Featured Image:
Detail from ‘The Garden of Emoji Delights Triptych’ (2014) by Carla Gannis
The OPEN SCORES exhibition brings together 16 practices through which artists articulate their own forms of (digital) commons. From online archives, to digital tools/infrastructure and educational formats, the projects envision a (post-)digital culture in which notions of collaboration, free access to knowledge, sustainable use of shared resources and data privacy are central.
Curated by Creating Commons (Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder)
For the exhibition, artists have developed a SCORE relating to their practice. A SCORE can have different meanings: It can be a general instruction, a working instruction, a performance instruction or an operating instruction. In any case, it is meant to lead to a realization of an intended action and as such is an interface between a human actor and an object/material/machine. And a SCORE can also be linked to a technical HOWTO document, in that it contains information on how to perform a specific task.
Within the exhibition, the newly developed SCORES add an aesthetic layer while pointing to the socio/political impact of the presented projects. The exhibition will also feature the interviews conducted as part of the research project as well as a temporary library on the subject of digital commons. Furthermore, there will be a program of talks, screenings, and workshops.
The exhibition features The DAOWO Open Score for Artworld Commoning by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, Furtherfield/DECAL
DAOWO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation With Others) is the second wave of global artworld restructuring against the toxic cult of the individual artistic genius which first found expression in the punk spirit of networked collaboration called DIWO (Do It With Others).
The DAOWO Open Score is an experimental framework for nurturing the artworld commons after Web3.0, at the intersection of three fields of practice: art, commoning and decentralisation engineering.
Dušan Barok (monoskop.org), Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak (memoryoftheworld.org), Sebastian Lütgert & Jan Gerber (0xdb.org), Kenneth Goldsmith (ubu.com), AAAAARG, Zeljko Blace (#QUEERingNETWORKing), Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett (furtherfield.org), Laurence Rassel (erg.be), Marek Tuszynski (Tactical Tech), Constant (Michael Murtaugh, Femke Snelting & Peter Westenberg), Stefanie Wuschitz (Mz* Baltazar’s Lab), Panayotis Antoniadis (nethood.org), Alessandro Ludovico (neural.it), Eva Weinmayr (andpublishing.org), Spideralex, Sakrowski (curatingyoutube.net), Creating Commons, Johannes Kreidler, Alison Knowles.
SEE IMAGES FROM THE PRIVATE VIEW
Octavia E Butler had a vision of time as circular, giving meaning to acts of courage and persistence. In the face of social and environmental injustice, setbacks are guaranteed, no gains are made or held without struggle, but societal woes will pass and our time will come again. In this sense, history offers solace, inspiration, and perhaps even a prediction of what to prepare for.
The Time Portals exhibition, at Furtherfield Gallery and online spaces, celebrates the 150th anniversary of Finsbury Park. As one of London’s first ‘People’s Parks’, designed for free movement and thought, it is the perfect location to create a mass investigation of radical pasts and futures, circling back to the start as we move forwards.
Each artwork invites audience participation – either in its creation or in the development of a parallel ‘people’s’ work – turning every idea into a portal to countless more imaginings of past and future urban green spaces and beyond.
Time Portals from Furtherfield on Vimeo.
An interactive wall depicting the urban green space of Finsbury Park as a machine for radical re-assemblage. The external billboard can be scanned with an Augmented Reality app to reveal the secret of realising progressive visions for the future. Scan the message in the Gallery to see the billboard image animated.
An interactive machine designed and built to respond to environmental change and inspire new rites for our troubled times. A slideshow of the machine as it is imagined and built will be presented alongside a ritualised unveiling in the Autumn.
Join the Future Machine design team at Furtherfield Commons in Finsbury Park to build a new artwork that will help us to respond to environmental change…as the future unfolds. Sign up to take part in up to 4 workshops that involve talking, thinking & making, using interactive technology and scientific sensors, helping to design and build the Future Machine itself.
Workshop times/dates and sign-ups:
In collaboration with Amanda Wilson (MARA Project/Imperial College) and Professor Daniel Polani (University of Hertfordshire). Supported by EMAP, Arts Council England, and Haringey Council
An underwater robotic installation which explores what ‘life’ might mean in a future transformed by climate change and artificial intelligence. The work is based on new research into archaea, which are single-celled, ancient microbes that can survive in hot, polluted environments, combined with the latest innovations in machine learning. Now living at Furtherfield Gallery the “ArchaeaBot” is the ‘ultimate’ species for the end of the world as we know it.
With creative team: Hugo Stanbury, Nick Lambert, Marius Matesan, Carl Smith, James E. Marks, Chris Szkoda
Through in-depth research James revisits a historical black woman who lived in the Finsbury Park area 150 years ago, embodies and reimagines her then and 150 years into the future. Produced together with Ravensbourne University PlayLabZ and Holotronica, experience time travel and holographic mixed reality at the Furtherfield Gallery throughout the summer.
Part 2 of Circle of Blackness will be revealed later in the summer.
This video work is a complete rendition of the 1960s film version of HG Wells Novella re-edited by Thomson & Craighead into alphabetical order from beginning to end. In doing this, the artists attempt to perform a kind of time travel on the movie’s original timeline through the use of a system of classification.
Future Machine Artwork Workshops:
26 Mar, 20 Apr, 11 May, 18 Jun, 13 Jul, Furtherfield Commons
Book Launch Event for Jugaad Time by Amit S. Rai:
27 Apr 14.00-16.00, Furtherfield Commons
Find a Line to Follow and Face The Future! ‘Walkshops’:
5 May 18 May, 10 Aug, Furtherfield Commons
Free, Fair, and Alive! A People’s Park Play Day:
10 Aug 10.00-17.00, Furtherfield Commons
Future of Money Workshops:
10 Aug, 10.00-17.00, Furtherfield Commons, other dates TBC,
Citizen Sci-Fi 3-Day Artworkers Lab Event:
14-15 Sept, time TBC, Furtherfield Commons
Future Machine Procession in Finsbury Park:
12 Oct, 3:00 pm – 8:00 pm, join at any point
This 3-year programme combines citizen science and citizen journalism by crowdsourcing the imagination of local park users and community groups to create new visions and models of stewardship for public, urban green space. By connecting these with international communities of artists, techies and thinkers we are co-curating labs, workshops, exhibitions and Summer Fairs as a way to grow a new breed of shared culture.
#CitSciFi – crowdsourcing creative and technological visions of our communities and public spaces, together.
Anna Dumitriu is a British artist who works with BioArt, sculpture, installation, and digital media to explore our relationship to infectious diseases, synthetic biology and robotics. She has an extensive international exhibition profile including ZKM, Ars Electronica, BOZAR, The Picasso Museum, The V & A Museum, Philadelphia Science Center, MOCA Taipei, LABoral, Art Laboratory Berlin, and The Museum of the History of Science Oxford. She was the 2018 President of the Science and the Arts section of the British Science Association and holds visiting research fellowships at the University of Hertfordshire, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, and Waag Society, as well as artist-in-residence roles with the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at the University of Oxford, and with the National Collection of Type Cultures at Public Health England. Dumitriu is a renowned speaker and has presented her work at venues including TATE Modern, Princeton University, Imperial College, La Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature, The Mendel Museum and UCLA. Her work is featured in many books including “Bio Art: Altered Realities” published by Thames and Hudson in 2016 and many other significant publications across contemporary art and science including Artforum International Magazine, Leonardo Journal, The Art Newspaper, Art Quarterly, Nature and The Lancet. Dumitriu’s work has a strong focus on the ethical implications of emerging technologies drawing threads across time, exploring future scenarios by reflecting on the past.
Elsa James is a visual artist, activist and producer based in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, who grew up in west London during the 1970s and ’80s. Her solo practice encompasses lens-based performance, language and text, and recently the use of aural and the archive to explore regionality of race; black subjectivity; and the historical, temporal and spatial dimensions of what it means to be black in Britain. She is currently developing work exploring alienation and outsiderness experienced as a black woman living in Essex since 1999. Forgotten Black Essex (2018) embodies two place-specific narratives from our national archives of two overlooked, under-researched and recognised black women in Essex. Her social practice includes advocating for the inclusion of marginalised communities in the arts sector. New Ways of Seeing, Telling and Making (2018), a visual provocation and participatory lab at the Social Art Summit, asked questions about how we can ‘genuinely’ address barriers to participation and involvement in the arts for BAME communities. In 2015 she was commissioned to research the asylum and refugee community in Southend. This culminated in a 38-page report exposing the council’s lack of provision for the needs of asylum seekers, failed asylum seekers and refugees living in Southend.
Rachel Jacobs is an artist, researcher and games designer. She co-founded the artist-led collective Active Ingredient in 1996 and the commercial games company Mudlark Production Company in 2007. She completed a Doctorate in Computer Science in 2014. Rachel is a practising artist exhibiting nationally and internationally, and a Research Associate at the Horizon Digital Economy Institute, University of Nottingham. Her artworks include the award winning ‘Heartlands (Ere Be Dragons)’ one of the first mobile games that took place on city streets in Sao Paulo, Yokhama, Berlin, Paris, Cambridge, Bristol and Nottingham; ‘A Conversation Between Trees’, a touring artwork and schools exchange using environmental sensors to connect forests in the UK and Brazil; and ‘The Prediction Machine’, an interactive installation that predicts the future impacted by climate change. Rachel is currently developing a series of artists interventions ‘Creating Rituals for When The Future Comes’, alongside a mobile interactive artwork the ‘Future Machine’.
Dr Nick Lambert is Director of Research at Ravensbourne University London, where immersive environments and mixed reality experiences are being developed. He researches the application of technology in contemporary art and visual culture. He has written on the history of computer art and engaged with artists and theorists in this field. He has also created artworks for immersive environments including fulldome, and interactive exhibits.
James E. Marks, PsychFi – A natural born new media pioneer, award winning social video, & dimensional computing arts for good maker, curator & speaker. With 4 decades of hands-on experience & experimental knowledge collaborating on Brand / Crowd / Arts Council funded “Sub & Pop Culture Mixed Up Reality Experiences”. Recent collaborations include V&A, London Design Festival, Boomtown Fair, Mobile World Congress, Ravensbourne University, Bethesda, SubPac, Modern Panic, Sci-Fi-London & BBC Click
Marius Matesan is creating narratives using real and virtual installation art, noted mostly for his work on theatre stages across Europe and more recently for his Mixed Reality experiences. Mixing reality with the imaginary, using sound, projection mapping, spatial computing and virtual reality. His work revolves around pushing the boundaries of perception, awareness and reality, creating installations that are often addressing social issues with a psychedelic twist.
Alex May is a British artist creating digital technologies to challenge and augment physical and emotional human boundaries on a personal and societal level in a hyper-connected, software mediated, politically and environmentally unstable world. He works with light, code, and time; notably algorithmic photography, robotic artworks, video projection mapping installations, interactive and generative works, video sculpture, performance, and video art. Alex has exhibited internationally including at the Francis Crick Institute (permanent collection), Eden Project (permanent collection), Tate Modern, Ars Electronica (Austria), LABoral (Spain), the Victoria & Albert Museum, Royal Academy of Art, Wellcome Collection, Science Museum, Bletchley Park, One Canada Square in Canary Wharf, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas (Venezuela), the Science Gallery in Dublin, Princeton University, University of Calgary (international visiting artist 2016), Texas A&M University, and the Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine. Alex is a Visiting Research Fellow: Artist in Residence with the School of Computer Science of University of Hertfordshire, and a Digital Media Arts MA sessional lecturer at the University of Brighton.
http://www.alexmayarts.co.uk
Antonio Roberts is a new media artist and curator based in Birmingham, UK. He uses technology-driven processes to explore issues surrounding open source software, free culture and collaborative practices. His visual and performance work has been featured at galleries and festivals including databit.me in Arles, France (2012), Glitch Moment/ums at Furtherfield Gallery, London (2013), Loud Tate: Code at Tate Britain (2014), glitChicago at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago, US (2014), Permission Taken at Birmingham Open Media and University of Birmingham (2015-2016), Common Property at Jerwood Visual Arts, London (2016), Green Man Festival, Wales (2017) and Barbican, London (2018). He has curated exhibitions and projects including GLI.TC/H Birmingham (2011), the Birmingham editions of Bring Your Own Beamer (2012, 2013), µChip 3 (2015), Stealth (2015), and No Copyright Infringement Intended (2017).
Carl H Smith is Director of the Learning Technology Research Centre (LTRC) and Principal Research Fellow at Ravensbourne University London. His background is in Computer Science and Architecture. He has 17 years experience conducting R+D into the application of hybrid technologies for perceptual, cognitive and creative transformation. He has worked on a number of large-scale FP7 and Leonardo Life Long Learning European projects. He is currently working on 4 EU projects including the Horizon 2020 project ‘[WEKIT] Wearable Experience for Knowledge Intensive Training’ which aims to create ‘Wearable Experience (WE)’ – an entirely new form of media. His research interests include Embodied Cognition, Spatial Literacy, Perceptual Technology and Hyperhumanism. His other projects involve Context Engineering, Umwelt Hacking, Natural Media, Sensory Augmentation, Memory Palaces, Artificial Senses and Body Hacking. He is co-founder of the London Experimental Psychonautics Club and co-founder of the Cyberdelic Society. Both organisations explore the myriad of ways it is possible to produce and examine Altered States of Consciousness. He has previously worked at the Computing departments at London Metropolitan University, Glasgow University and Sheffield University. The Learning Technology Research Centre (LTRC) conducts design research into the application of information and communication technologies to augment, support and transform cognition.
Hugo Stanbury has worked in the event and entertainment industry for over a decade. Inspired most by the area where cutting edge technology is used for properties rather than purpose, he works hard to balance sound technical delivery with new creative concept. He currently works as Operations Director at Holotronica – the UK company behind Hologauze. Hologauze is the world leading gauze for holographic effects with clients from BMW to Beyonce. Holotronica are specialists in a range of holographic displays, analogue holography and 3D content.
Studio Hyte is a London based multidisciplinary design studio who place research and concept above medium. Working between graphic design, interaction and emergent forms of visual communication, we aim to create meaningful and thought provoking work. Formed of a small group of individual practitioners, Studio Hyte is the middle ground where all of our interests and practices meet. As such our collective practice and research covers a broad spectrum of topics including; language, inclusion & accessibility, egalitarian politics & alternative protest and technology & the human. With an emphasis on process, we often create critical narratives through our work in order to conceptualise through making. Collectively, our visual practice is a means through which we can plot out a conceptual landscape in order to understand and explore real-world scenarios. Studio Hyte works on self-directed research projects, commissions and client-led projects for a small pool of like minded organisations and individuals.
Chris Szkoda, Kaws Infinity – Games Designer/ VFX Artist, works on designing mixed/virtual reality apps for a social mixed reality experience playground at Ravensbourne University London. Keen to support social good & diversity projects, working directly with students and helping them make their creative ideas a reality. He has expertise in immersive technology, VR modelling and painting in Google Tilt Brush and MasterpieceVR software.
Jon Thomson (b. 1969) and Alison Craighead (b. 1971) are artists living and working in London. They make artworks and installations for galleries and specific sites including online spaces. Much of their recent work looks at live networks like the web and how they are changing the way we all understand the world around us. Having both studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Jon is Reader in Fine Art at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, while Alison is a reader in contemporary art and visual culture at University of Westminster and lectures in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University.
http://www.thomson-craighead.net/
This 3-year programme supports our Platforming Finsbury Park initiative. Between 2019-2021 we will produce exhibitions and events that combine citizen science and citizen journalism by crowdsourcing the imagination of local park users and community groups to create new visions and models of stewardship for public, urban green space. By connecting these with international communities of artists, techies and thinkers we are co-curating labs, workshops, exhibitions and Summer Fairs as a way to grow a new breed of shared culture.
#CitSciFi – crowdsourcing creative and technological visions of our communities and public spaces, together.
The Time Portals exhibition, held at Furtherfield Gallery (and across our online spaces), celebrates the 150th anniversary of the creation of Finsbury Park. As one of London’s first ‘People’s Parks’, designed to give everyone and anyone a space for free movement and thought, we regard it as the perfect location from which to create a mass investigation of radical pasts and futures, circling back to the start as we move forwards.
Each artwork in the exhibition therefore invites audience participation – either in its creation or in the development of a parallel ‘people’s’ work – turning every idea into a portal to countless more imaginings of the past and future of urban green spaces and beyond.
For this Olympic year we will consider the health and wellbeing of humans and machines.
For this year of predicted peak heat rises we will consider how machines can work with nature.
In 2019 we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Finsbury Park, and we time travel through its past and future with the launch of our Citizen Sci-fi programme and methodology. Dominant sci-fi franchises of our time, from Black Mirror to Westworld, have captured popular attention by showing us their apocalyptic visions of futures made desperate by systems of dominance and despair.
What is African-American author, Octavia E. Butler’s prescription for despair? Sci-fi and persistence. Sci-fi as a tool for getting us off the beaten-track and onto more fertile ground, and persistent striving for more just societies.The 2015 book Octavia’s Brood honoured her work, with an anthology of sci-fi writings from US social justice movements and this inspired us to try a new artistic response to the histories and possible futures of Finsbury Park.
Furtherfield’s Citizen Sci-Fi methodology combines citizen science and citizen journalism by crowdsourcing the imagination of local park users and community groups to create new visions and models of stewardship for public, urban green space. By connecting these with international communities of artists, techies and thinkers we are co-curating labs, workshops, exhibitions and Summer Fairs as a way to grow a new breed of shared culture.
Each artwork in the forthcoming exhibition invites audience participation – either in it’s creation or in the development of a parallel ‘people’s’ work – turning every idea into a portal to countless more thoughts and visions of the past and future of urban green spaces and beyond.
So where do we start? Last year we invited artists, academics and technologists to join us in forming a rebel alliance to fight for our futures across territories of political, cultural and environmental injustice. This year both our editorial and our exhibition programme are inspired by this alliance and the discoveries we are making together.
To kick off this year’s Time Portals programme at Furtherfield, in April we will host the launch and discussion around Jugaad Time, Amit Rai’s forthcoming book. This reflects on the postcolonial politics of what in India is called ‘jugaad’, or ‘work around’ and its disruption of the neoliberal capture of this subaltern practice as ‘frugal innovation’. Paul March-Russell’s essay Sci-Fi and Social Justice: An Overview delves into the radical roots and implications of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). This is a topic close to our hearts given our own recent exhibitions Monsters of the Machine and Children of Prometheus, inspired by the same book. Meanwhile we’ve been hosting workshops with local residents exploring our visions for Finsbury Park 150 years into the future. To get a flavour of these activities Matt Watkins’ has produced an account of his experience of the Futurescapes workshop at Furtherfield Commons in December 2018.
In May we will open the Time Portals exhibition which features several new commissions. These include Circle of Blackness by Elsa James. Through local historical research James will devise a composite character to embody the story of a black woman from the locality 150 years ago and 150 years in the future. James will perform a monologue that will be recorded and produced by hybrid reality technologist Carl Smith and broadcast as a hologram inside the Furtherfield Gallery throughout the summer. While Futures Machine by Rachel Jacobs is an Interactive machine designed and built through public workshops to respond to environmental change – recording the past and making predictions for the future while inspiring new rituals for our troubled times. Once built, the machine occupies Furtherfield Gallery, inviting visitors to play with it.
Time Portals opens on May 9th (2019) with other time traveling works by Thomson and Craighead, Anna Dumitriu and Alex May, Antonio Roberts and Studio Hyte. Visitors will be invited to participate in an act of radical imagination, responding with images, texts and actions that engage circular time, long time, linear time and lateral time in space towards a collective vision of Finsbury Park in 2169.
From April onwards, a world of activities, workshops with local families and their enriching noises, reviews, interviews and an array of experiences will unfold. Together we dismiss the dystopian nightmares and invite communities to join us in one of London’s first “People’s Parks” to revisit and recreate the future on our own terms together.
Marc Garrett will be interviewing Elsa James, about her artwork Circle of Blackness, and Amit Rai about his book Jugaad Time. Both will soon be featured on the Furtherfield web site.
What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?
Bertolt Brecht
Transient Hole (Variations) is a hybrid curatorial project and symposium by Viennese artist and curator Alexander Felch. The project`s title refers to a concept for a media artwork, that cannot, properly speaking, be materialized for it deals with a moving void – a transient hole.
Across the floor of a white, three-dimensional room a little black hole is constantly and randomly moving. The hole is simultaneously there and not there. It is a portal to nowhere. But is it really? Might it not lead to transcendence, to another reality, or perhaps our reality can only be understood through this liminal presence of nothingness?
The participants are invited to provide their own interpretation for this problem and develop means to represent it, whether through art or science, to display processes that cannot be depicted in reality. The aim of the project is obviously not to find a solution to this existential paradox but to bring about a reflection on the topic from a myriad of disciplines and different perspectives, which explore the limits of representation. The various responses to the THR problematic will be gathered in a collected volume that is in itself a reflection on the boundary between art and science, reality and fantasy.
The project appears – just like the transient hole – in different cities popping up in various forms and is accompanied by lectures, talks and (sound-) performances.
Contributions by:
Atzgerei Productions, Arnold Berger, Ryan Mc Donagh, Sophie Dvorak, Alexander Felch / Aisek Ifraimov, Mariana Ferreira / Dayjon Edwards, Christoph Höschele, Hrvoje Hirsl, Harald Hund, Sandy Leong, Stefan Lutschinger, Nicholas Moloney, Anja Nowak, Jaysha Obispo, Shinji Toya, Jeroen van Amelsvoort, Anna Vasof, Stefan Voglsinger, Jan Vormann, Yilin Wang, David Wauters, Hui Ye.
Featuring concepts developed by students of Middlesex University London – BA Digital Media and BA Media and Cultural Studies
Monday 12 November – Friday 16 November 2018
Middlesex University
FREE
Saturday 17 November 2018, 11:00 – 16:00
Furtherfield Gallery
FREE
13:00
Opening
14:30
Introduction and Guided Tour
Alexander Felch “Transient Hole Research – Instationarity as an artistic concept / a scientific particularity”
Saturday 17 November 2018, 16:00 – 21:00
Furtherfield Commons
FREE
16:00
Limehouse Hole Atlas Datathon
Navino Evans and Sean McBride (http://histropedia.com/)
18:00
Sound Performances
Karl Salzmann (A) is a sound & visual artist, curator and researcher currently based in Vienna / Austria. Within process-oriented and experimental setups, he develops and presents works that study the materiality of sound and its social, cultural and metaphorical levels of meaning. His artistic activities mainly concern the interaction between sound and visual arts and often relate to works and topics of (sound) art history.
http://www.karlsalzmann.com/
T_A-Z (Paul Gründorfer) (A) is using process-related setups to explore sonic worlds and to realise site specific interventions, developing real time audio systems, that act autonomous or in reference to the spatial constellation. While considering the encounters between analog and digital, structured or improvised elements, he is focusing on the abstract occurrence of sound and its physical impact.
Electronic circuits are interconnected to cause semi-natural entities, autonomous organisms. Voice and articulation are generated through loops in feedback networks. Onomatopoeia.
His artistic activities examine variable connections between transmitter-receiver networks, which function as a conceptual framework for experimentation with sound and transmission of information.
http://tricx.net/
Monsterfrau Lena Wicke Aengenheyster (A/D) – MONSTERFRAU PJ (Performance Jockey) – Part III of the performance serial MONSTERFRAU The voices’ bodies: MONSTERFRAU triggers, mixes and morphes dance music rythms, samples and sounds with her movement. STAATSAFFAIRE: Production of and reflection through artistic projects in music and performance art. Beyond that it is the common optimisation of production environments and network.
http://www.staatsaffaire.com/
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Visuals:
Simon Sarginson (live coding) (UK)
London edition curated by Alexander Felch + Stefan Lutschinger
Realised in cooperation with Cybersalon, Middlesex University London and the Austrian Cultural Forum London – with kind support by the Federal Chancellery Of Austria.
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www.facebook.com/transienthole/
www.mdx.ac.uk
www.cybersalon.org
www.furtherfield.org
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SEE IMAGES FROM THE PRIVATE VIEW
Feature image: Jeremy Hutchison, Movables, 2017. Photo courtesy of the artist.
We live in a time of stark and often violent paradoxes: the increasing liberalisation of social values in some parts of the world compared to increasing fundamentalism in others; the wealth of scientific discovery and technological advances in contrast to climate denialism, “post-factual” and conspiracy-driven politics; freedom of movement for goods and finance while individual movement is ever more constricted and subject to law; a drive towards agency, legibility and transparency of process while automation, computerisation and digitisation, render more of the world opaque and remote. At every level, mass movement of peoples and the rise of planetary-scale computation is changing the way we think and understand questions of geography, politics, and national identity.
These ever-increasing contradictions are seen most acutely at the border. Not merely the border between physical zones and between nation states, with their differing legal jurisdictions and requirements for entry and residency, but also the border between the physical and digital, when we apparently – but perhaps misleadingly and certainly temporarily – cross over into a different zone of possibility and expression.
This contradiction is also clear in the balkanisation of newly independent and fragmenting states, and in the rising current of nationalism across Europe, which seems to run in parallel to, and might even be accelerated by, digital connectivity. Some of the most outwardly regressive powers themselves employ what Kremlin theorist Vladislav Surkov has called “non-linear strategy”: a strategy of obfuscation and deliberate contradiction clearly indebted to the convolutions and confusions of the digital terrain – and of art. As ever more varied expressions of individual identity are encouraged, revealed, made possible and validated by online engagement, so at the same time a desperate rearguard action is being fought to codify and restrain those identities – online and off. These new emergent identities are, inevitably and by necessity, transient and contingent, slippery and subject to change and redefinition.
The artists featured in Transnationalisms address the effect of these pressures on our bodies, our environment, and our political practices. They register shifts in geography as disturbances in the blood and the electromagnetic spectrum. They draw new maps and propose new hybrid forms of expression and identity. In this exhibition Transnationalisms acknowledges and even celebrates the contradictions of the present moment, while insisting on the transformative possibilities of digital tools and networks on historical forms of nationalism, citizenship, and human rights. While the nation state is not about to disappear, it is already pierced and entangled with other, radically different forms. Alternative models and protocols of citizenship, identity, and nationhood are being prototyped and distributed online and through new technologies. Transnationalisms examines the ways in which these new forms are brought into the physical world and used to disrupt and enfold existing systems. It does not assume the passing of old regimes, but proclaims the inevitability of new ones, and strives to make them legible, comprehensible, and accessible.
Raphael Fabre CNI, 2017
On April 7th, 2017, Raphael Fabre submitted a request for a French ID card. All of his papers were deemed to be legal and authentic and so the demand was accepted and a new national ID card was issued. In fact, the photo submitted to accompany this request was created on a computer, from a 3D model, using several different pieces of software and special effects techniques developed for movies and video games. Just as our relationship with governments and other forms of authority is increasingly based on digital information, so the image on the ID is entirely virtual. The artist’s self-portrait suggests the way in which citizens can construct their own identities, even in an age of powerful and often dehumanising technologies.
Jeremy Hutchison Movables, 2017
The starting point for this work was a found photograph, taken by police at a border point somewhere in the Balkans. It showed the inside of a Mercedes, the headrests torn open to reveal a person hiding inside each seat. This photograph testifies to a reality where human bodies attempt to disguise themselves as inanimate objects, simply to acquire the same freedom of movement as consumer goods. Movables translates this absurdity into a series of photo collages, combining elements of high-end fashion and car adverts, enacting an anthropomorphic fusion between the male form and the consumer product. The results are disquieting yet familiar, since they appropriate a visual language that saturates our everyday urban surroundings, highlighting the connections between transnational freedoms and limitations, and international trade.
They Are Here
We Help Each Other Grow, 2017
Thiru Seelan dances on an East London rooftop, looking out towards the skyline of the Canary Wharf financial district. His movements are inspired by the dance form Bharatanatyam, traditionally only performed by women and taught to Thiru in secret by his younger sister. Thiru is a Tamil refugee and when he arrived in the UK in 2010, following six months of detention in Sri Lanka during which he was tortured for his political affiliations, Canary Wharf was his first home. His movement is recorded by a heat sensitive camera more conventionally used as surveillance technology and deployed to monitor borders and crossing points, where bodies are recorded and captured through their thermal signature. The song ‘We’ve helped each other grow’, composed and performed by London based Mx World, was chosen with Thiru to soundtrack the performance. Mx is a prefix that does not indicate gender. In the UK, it can be used on many official documents – including passports. The repeated refrain, ‘We’ve helped each other grow’ suggests a communal vision for self and social development.
Daniela Ortiz
Jus Sanguinis, 2016
Jus sanguinis, meaning ‘the right of the blood’, is one of the main ways in which people acquire citizenship: from the blood of their parents. Daniela Ortiz is an artist of Peruvian descent living in Spain, where only babies with Spanish blood are recognized as subjects with the right to the nationality at the moment of the birth. As a result, her child would not have access to Spanish nationality. In this performance, undertaken when Ortiz was four months pregnant, she receives a blood transfusion from a Spanish citizen, directly challenging the racist and nationalist regime of citizenship which would classify her Spanish-born child as an immigrant.
The Critical Engineering Working Group (Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev)
VPN, 2018
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have come into increasing demand in recent years, providing route encryption through hostile networks. In China, Vietnam, Turkey and Pakistan they also serve to mitigate government censorship, so that foreign sites otherwise blocked by state firewalls are made available to VPN users (Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, activist sites and digital libraries being the most common).
Vending Private Network takes the form of a condom vending machine, such as those typically seen in toilets. Equipped with mechanical buttons, a coin-slot and USB ports, it offers 4 VPN routes, each adorned with an animated graphic depicting a fantasy destination. Audiences are invited to insert a USB stick into the slot, and a coin into the machine, then to select a VPN destination by pressing a mechanical button, a unique VPN configuration file is then written onto their USB stick. Special instructions (in the form of a README.txt) will also be copied to the USB stick that explain how to use the VPN in a special ‘sheathed’ mode that evades detection methods (namely Deep Packet Inspection, or DPI) used by corporations and state-controlled infrastructure administrators. This is the only means known to work against state controlled firewalls, for instance and requires an extra install of freely available, open source software and leverage economic and cultural privilege to benefit those not included. With each VPN config generated, another is covertly shipped to contacts in Turkey, China, Vietnam and Iran (and other countries to be confirmed).
Jonas Staal New Unions, 2016
Jonas Staal’s New Unions is an artistic campaign supporting progressive, emancipatory, and autonomist movements all over Europe, and proposing the creation of a “transdemocratic union” which is not limited by the boundaries of nation states. The New Unions map illustrates the recent, massive rise in social movements and new political parties which are creating new models of political assembly and decision making while challenging traditional national and institutional structures. From the civil initiative in Iceland to collectively rewrite the constitution after the economic crash, to regional independence movements and pan-European solidarity groups, these emerging political experiments propose new forms of transdemocratic practices. This map is the first in a series which is continuously updated to reflect the evolving geography of transdemocracy.
The Critical Engineering Working Group is a collaboration between Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev. Their manifesto begins: “The Critical Engineer considers Engineering to be the most transformative language of our time, shaping the way we move, communicate and think. It is the work of the Critical Engineer to study and exploit this language, exposing its influence.”
criticalengineering.org
Raphaël Fabre works on the interference of fictions and narrative storytelling in the real world, using techniques ranging from digital 3D technologies to set decoration. Born in 1989, he lives and works in Paris.
raphaelfabre.com
Jeremy Hutchison works with situational performance. Operating in sites of production and consumption, he often collaborates with factory employees, migrant labourers, online workers and jobseekers to examine the structures that limit human existence. How are unequal human relations constructed by global capital? How do consumer products function as portraits of exploitative material structures? In the process of developing these works, each context becomes a stage; a metaphor for the production of reason. To some extent, his projects are rehearsals for an uncertain kind of freedom. He was recently a member of the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.
jeremyhutchison.com
Daniela Ortiz (Cusco, 1985) lives and works in Barcelona. Through her work, she generates spaces of tension in which the concepts of nationality, racialization, social class and gender are explored in order to critically understand structures of inclusion and exclusion in society. Her recent projects and research revolve around the issue of migration control, its links to colonialism, and its management by Europeanwhite states and societies. At the same time, she has produced projects about the Peruvian upper class and its exploitative relationship with domestic workers. Daniela gives talks and participates in discussions on Europe’s migration control system and its ties to coloniality in different contexts.
daniela-ortiz.com
Jonas Staal lives and works in Rotterdam (NL). He has studied monumental art in Enschede (NL) and Boston (US) and received his PhD for research on Art and Propaganda in the 21st Century from the University of Leiden (NL). His work includes interventions in public space, exhibitions, theater plays, publications and lectures, focusing on the relationship between art, democracy and propaganda. Staal is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit and, together with BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (NL), of the New World Academy.
jonasstaal.nl
They Are Here (f. 2006) is a collaborative practice steered by Helen Walker and Harun Morrison. They are currently based in London and on the River Lea. Their work can be read as a series of context specific games. The entry, invitation or participation can be as significant as the game’s conditions and structure. Through these games, they seek to create ephemeral systems and temporary, micro-communities that offer an alternate means of engaging with a situation, history or ideology. In parallel, they initiate multiyear socially engaged projects that become generative spaces for further works. They Are Here work across media and types of site, particularly civic spaces.
theyarehere.net
James Bridle is an artist and writer working across technologies and disciplines. His artworks and installations have been exhibited in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia, and have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of visitors online. He has been commissioned by organisations including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Barbican, Artangel, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, the Istanbul Design Biennial, and been honoured by Ars Electronica, the Japan Media Arts Festival, and the Design Museum, London. His writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Frieze, Wired, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, and many others, in print and online, and he has written a regular column for the Observer. “New Dark Age”, his book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, is forthcoming from Verso (UK & US) in 2018. He lectures regularly on radio, at conferences, universities, and other events, including SXSW, Lift, the Global Art Forum, Re:Publica and TED. He was been a resident at Lighthouse, Brighton, the White Building, London, and Eyebeam, New York, and an Adjunct Professor on the Interactive Telecommunications Programme at New York University.
jamesbridle.com
Furtherfield is an internationally-renowned digital arts organisation hosting exhibitions, workshops and debate for over 20 years. We collaborate locally and globally with artists, academics, organisations and the public to explore digital culture and the changing world we live in. From our unique venues in Finsbury Park we offer a range of ways for everyone to get hands on with emerging technologies and ideas about contemporary society. Our aim is to make critical digital citizens of us all. We can make our own world.
Furtherfield Gallery
McKenzie Pavilion
Finsbury Park, London, N4 2NQ
Visiting Information
This project has been funded with the support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Transnationalisms is realised in the framework of State Machines, a joint project by Aksioma (SI), Drugo More (HR), Furtherfield (UK), Institute of Network Cultures (NL) and NeMe (CY).
The Alternative UK write about Transnationalisms: We live in an age of transnationalisms. At Furtherfield, artists test all the borders
Way back in 1995, the artist collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), said “What your data body says about you is more real than what you say about yourself. The data body is the body by which you are judged in society, and the body which dictates your status in the world.” These words now haunt us, and take their place alongside numerous other ignored warnings about global threats to the wellbeing of our societies and the planet.
In this interview with curator Dani Admiss, we discuss how the data-driven gamification of life and everything has shaped the development of Playbour – Work, Pleasure, Survival at Furtherfield and why the Gallery is currently being transformed into a psychological environment.
Gallery visitors are presented with a series of game-like installations, which are the result of the shared and collective cognitive labour of artists, curators and gallery staff. First the artists, and then the public (as players) are invited to test the processes and experiences offered by new mechanisms of play and labour. Each ‘game’ simulates an experience of how some techniques and technologies of gamification, automation, and surveillance, are at work in our everyday lives, in order to capture all forms of existence.
Marc Garrett: Before the exhibition, you initiated an open call for a Lab. You invited participants to join a three-day art and research lab at Furtherfield Commons, Finsbury Park, London. Could you elaborate why you did this and how it informed the exhibition?
Dani Admiss: A couple of months before the exhibition, I ran a 3 day co-research lab that brought together artists, designers, activists, and researchers. I like to refer to it as a performative, temporary exhibition in the form of a lab. There were discussions, performances, interventions, games, and exercises. We had discussion with Jamie Woodcock on gaming and digital labour, he walked us through an interview session with gamers on the Twitch platform. Steven Levon Ounanian held a performative experiment where we thought about how we might render the suffering online in the real world, Itai Palti worked with us to think about design principles and neuroscience. FUN! The idea was that we would collectively explore, discuss and define key issues that we thought were important to then take forward to develop into games and experiences to share with the public. The aim was to play off each other in a live context to generate new perspectives and ideas.
Building on this, I decided to hold an open call for participants. In my most idealistic moment, I’d say I wanted to try and find ways to expand who gets to produce, stage and display, how we define what these issues actually are for wider audiences. Can this lead to new stories about art, tech, society? Like any project it is never exactly as you imagined it, but I think the majority of people got a lot out of working like this. I did. Working with people that aren’t always the people you expect to be attached to a project always throws up unexpected experiences. Everyone brought their best themselves with them. Open. Interested. Warm. Prepared. Ready to listen, and for fun!
I’d make the lab longer next time, so it wasn’t as intense, and I’d try to have more people join the open call.
MG: The open-curation process you have developed is core to the realisation of the Playbour lab and exhibition. It resonates strongly with Furtherfield’s DIWO ethos. It turns on its head, the traditional approach to curating thematic group shows. Please can you tell us about the process and say why this new approach is important at this time?
DA: DIWO definitely informed Playbour! I think the spirit of co-creative discovery is a powerful tool that curators should use more. I refer to it as co-research, which is ultimately a way to research-with others. What separates it from more traditional approaches to curating is the unclear distinction between author/researcher and subject/participant. The aim is to achieve closer equality between the participant and subject area, in the form of valuing a person’s idea’s and lived-experience as much as other ‘expert’ forms of knowledge. Historically, it has roots in a highly specific context of the radical Left in post-war Italy with Operaismo. This is where the seeds of debate on post-immaterial labour emerged, arising from Hardt, Negri, Bifo, Terranova, etc, and why I originally was interested in working in this way because of the subject matter of the project, however, it became something so much more.
For me, as a curator, creating projects about complex subject areas that bring together embodied and embedded social relations with technical worlds, is something that needs to be done with people rather than to them. I think the most interesting works of art being produced today are treated less like things and instead draw into the very making of the ways in which we get to know what we know. You can see this in works from Cassie Thornton’s project Collective Psychic Architecture (an exploration of “bad support” in Sick Times) 2018, where she extends the responsibilities of the gallery or institution through performative means, or in the high-profile modeling and mapping practices coming out of the Forensic Architecture network. How can curating exist in a wider space than before? I’m trying to work in much more extended and expanded ways with the primary intention to include more end users into the areas we are looking at.
Adopting a co-research model (in the lab, in the show, in the publication, in the micro-commissions) meant that the aim of the exhibition shifts, it becomes less about what the topic is and how it works and more about how it came to be. Brian Holmes once wrote that making an image remakes the world. Yes, but it also distances us from it. Playbour asks people to consider how the world organises us by facilitating moments where people can identify with particular phenomena. I feel this is more fitting and has more potential to create moments of personal learning and change than trying to represent it through curatorial practice. Why do we need this in an age of information? My thinking is that knowledge-projects are not simply objective processes but deeply subjective ones that are enacted through and with others. Finding ways for people to identify in more meaningful ways with the subject will hopefully lead to greater chance that people will gain greater perspective and agency over their own worlds.
MG: The term Playbour brings attention to critiques of gamification and to the extraction of value via social media platforms. But your subtitle then opens up a whole other world of reflection. What are you discovering about the relationship between “work, pleasure and survival”?
DA: The project is exploring the role of the worker in the age of data technologies, but this looks less at the “future of work” and chooses instead to focus on the shifting roles and blurred boundaries of work, play and well-being – how do we place value on these areas, how do we work with and against them?
Quite often when we talk about opaque terms like immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism we fail to grasp the production processes of these phenomena. Immaterial labour depends on the self and our social relations. We are asked to ‘post’, ‘share’, ‘network’, ‘emote’, ‘communicate’, ‘know’. Not so much ‘understand’. These acts inform the control and creation of our subjectivity. At the same time, very little discussion is happening about the fact that so much exploitation -physical, ecological, economical- sits behind the new commons we are all talking about.
Opening the project out to think about work, pleasure, survival, is a provocation. On one level, it is a nod to the fact that this conversation is for a privileged few. Many choose what they do and this ‘choice’ is supposed to operate as an expression of one’s personality. On the other, it’s human nature to get swept up in what is considered the norm, so it’s also a challenge to think about what are your own limits, returning to the idea of inviting people to find moments of identification with these broader issues to their own lived experience.
MG: Why is it important that the work being prepared for Furtherfield gallery is conceived of more, as a series of game experiences, than a display of discrete art objects, or a didactic exhibition on the topic of Play and Labour? Has the gallery’s location in a public park influenced your thinking at all?
DA: Well, first off, it has been a collective process and so I wanted to show that process to people. Secondly, you have to invest part of yourself in play. The more I research the areas of digital and immaterial labour the more I’m keen to work with others to understand the not yet completed transformations of body, society, and world, into a global capitalist system. These are suffuse and pervasive and nudge our behaviours all of the time. Organising the exhibition as experiences is a way for us all to live-out (at least temporarily and in a safe, playful space) the tentacular effects of immaterial labour and economies of knowledge and information. This is not to say let’s walk away from a highly networked society, it’s an invitation back into perspectival agency.
MG: You’ve chosen to put together three themes for the exhibition, ranging across work, pleasure, and survival. Why was it important to choose these three themes in particular?
DA: I’m fascinated by how we are involved in the making of worlds we are then conditioned by. From the learnings in the lab, my own research and collaborations leading up to Playbour, I think gamification, automation, and surveillance are three key areas that scaffold a lot of the debate on digital and immaterial labour.
1) SURVEILLANCE. How we are measured and how we measure ourselves? Traditionally, government control used to come from top-down surveillance techniques, such as the type Michael Straeubig’s Hostile Environment Facility Training (HEFT) is looking at. However, I think we should be talking about how forms of control are exercised through our own self-monitoring processes – self-improvement culture is a perfect example of this. Cassie Thornton’s Feminist Economics Yoga (FEY), is a wonderful remedy for this.
2) AUTOMATION. How technology is removing decision-making from us in the pursuit of a frictionless universe. In Harrison-Mann’s Public Toilet he is talking about how automation is used to address the need of social issues. The starting point is the lack of public services offered in Finsbury Park and how that is altering how we use and experience the public space of the park. He is interested in making a connection between this and how metrics can often end up being exercised in controversial and even arbitrary ways inhibiting people getting what they need, such as disability benefits in the UK.
3) GAMIFICATION. How are rewards and competition embedded into our online interactions and interfaces? Jamie Woodcock has this excellent term that describes gamification-from-above and gamification-from-below. Like the Situationist socialism-from-below. How we might use gamification for our own positive manipulations, diversions and distractions? I think a lot of media and new media practice has long been engaged in gamification-from-below. Marija Bozinovska Jones’ piece Treebour (201) plays on this, transferring manipulation of social relations levelled at online interactions to the “natural” networking of trees.
MG: After visitors have experienced the exhibition, what emotions, thoughts and understandings, would you like them to leave with?
I think you introduced the show in an interesting way in your opening text with the notion of the data body and the extension of our bodies into new spaces with unknown consequences. These happen inside the screen, at the edges of the world, in transit, at the end of the supply chains. At the same time, they also operate on semi-conscious refrains, in our behaviours, actions, thoughts and emotions about the world. Taking part, thinking-with, making-with, are strategies to find ways to open up discussions about how we are all involved in making and unmaking our worlds via different actions. Something like digital and immaterial labour is not a discrete issue reservable for experts who work in this area, the connections and consequences weave in and out of our lives and impact us all. We are constantly reacting to thing around us, taking in these cues and pushing them back out into the world.
In terms of emotions, I don’t want to spread fear and despair, I’m hoping that some visitors will identify with some of the ideas in the show and relate them to something in their life that perhaps they’d not thought of in that way before.
Notes: Main top image by Marija Bozinovska Jones, Treebour 2018.
DIWO – Do It With Others: Resource
archive.furtherfield.org/projects/diwo-do-it-others-resource
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Featuring Katriona Beales and Fiona MacDonald.
The exhibition and research project Are We All Addicts Now? explores the seductive and addictive qualities of the digital.
Artist Katriona Beales’ work 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 AWAAN re-imagines the private spaces in which we play out our digital existence. The exhibition includes glass sculptures containing embedded screens, moving image works and digitally printed textiles. Beales’ work is complemented by a new sound-art work by artist and curator Fiona MacDonald : Feral Practice.
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’.
For Furtherfield, Beales has constructed a sunken ‘bed’ into which visitors are invited to climb, where a glowing glass orb flutters with virtual moths repeatedly bashing the edges of an embedded screen. A video installation, reminiscent of a fruit machine, displays a drum of hypnotically spinning images whose rotation is triggered by the movement of gallery visitors. Beales recreates the peculiar, sometimes disquieting, image clashes experienced during her insomniac journeys through endless online picture streams – beauty products lining up with death; naked cats with armed police.
Glass-topped tables support the amorphous curves of heavy glass sculptures, which refract the multi-coloured light of tiny screens hidden inside. Visualisations of eye-tracking data (harvested live from gallery visitors) scatter across the ceiling. On the exterior wall of the gallery, an LED scrolling sign displays text Beales’ has compiled, based on comments from online forums about internet addiction.
Where Beales addresses the near-inescapability of machine-driven connection, Feral Practice draws us into the networks in nature. Mycorrhizal Meditation is a sound-art work for free download, accessed via posters in Furtherfield Gallery and across Finsbury Park. MM takes the form of a guided meditation, journeying through the human body and down into the ‘underworld’ of living soil, with its mycorrhizal network formed of plant roots and fungal threads. It combines spoken word and sound recordings of movement and rhythm made in wooded places. Feral Practice complicates the idea of nature as ‘ultimate digital detox’, and alerts us to the startling interconnectivity of beyond-human nature, the ‘wood-wide-web’ that pre-dates our digital connectivity by millennia. (Download Mycorrhizal Mediation here)
Are We All Addicts Now? has been developed in collaboration with artist-curator Fiona MacDonald : Feral Practice, clinical psychiatrist Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones, and curator Vanessa Bartlett.
Glowing light of screens makes us #addictsnow – they are the mini-suns we bask in to keep away the dark https://t.co/jedrDUE2ZWpic.twitter.com/BmTTbFckFp
— furtherfield (@furtherfield) July 27, 2017
View more of the comissioned gifs and tweets here
In the run up to the exhibition, artists Charlotte Webb and Connor Rigby have been commissioned to produce a series of gifs and tweets to stimulate debate around the designed-for-addiction nature of digital devices, and the ethics and politics that surround this. Join the conversation @furtherfield on Twitter and Instagram using the hashtag #addictsnow
Accompanying the exhibition, a book designed by Stefan Schafer and edited by Vanessa Bartlett and Henrietta Bowden-Jones, brings together Beales’ and MacDonald’s artwork and writing with essays from contributors in the fields of anthropology, digital culture, psychology and philosophy. This book is the first interdisciplinary study of the emerging field of internet addiction. Contributors will discuss their essays at a symposium convened by Vanessa Bartlett at Central Saint Martins in November 2017. Advanced copies of the book are on sale at the Liverpool University Press website https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/100809
Beales’ work ‘Entering the Machine Zone’ has been co-commissioned with Science Gallery London. An iteration of the work will be presented as part of HOOKED, the opening season of the new Science Gallery London, curated by Hannah Redler.
Exhibition Tour of Are We All Addicts Now? with Ruth Catlow and Katriona Beales
Saturday 16th September 2017, 2-4 pm
Furtherfield Gallery
Join Furtherfield co-director Ruth Catlow and artist Katriona Beales to find out more about the works featured in the exhibition Are We All Addicts Now? and to discuss the issues that it raises around digital addiction and online behaviour.FREE | booking essential
Late Night Opening & Film Screening
Friday 29th September 2017, 5 – 8.30pm
Furtherfield Gallery & Commons
A late night opening of the Are We All Addicts Now? exhibition, followed by a screening of artists’ moving image work that has informed the development of the exhibition.
Gallery Open: 5 – 7pm
Screening: 7 – 8.30pm
FREE | booking essential
Mycorrhizal Event with Fiona MacDonald : Feral Practice
Saturday 21st October 2017, 2 – 4pm
Furtherfield Commons
Fiona MacDonald: Feral Practice presents a lecture, a performance, and a fungi walk. Informed by the history, art and science of human-fungal relations, these experiences explore themes of reciprocity, intuitive and nonverbal interconnection between people, psychedelic consciousness, fungal songs, shamanic journeying, and plant communication.
FREE | booking essential
Visual Matrix Workshop with Vanessa Bartlett
Thursday 2nd November, 4 – 6.30pm
Furtherfield Commons
Join curator Vanessa Bartlett for a research workshop responding to works in the Are We All Addicts Now? exhibition. The visual matrix is a new psychosocial research technique that we are using to generate audience response to this project. Content generated during this session will inform our evaluation of the exhibition.
For more information and to book your place contact info [at] vanessabartlett.com
FREE | email v.bartlett [at] unsw.edu.au to book your place.
Are We All Addicts Now? Symposium and Book Launch at CSM
Tuesday 7th November, 6.30-9pm
Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, 1 Granary Square, London, N1C 4AA
This event celebrates the publication of Are We All Addicts Now? Digital Dependence edited by Vanessa Bartlett and Henrietta Bowden-Jones and will feature presentations from many of the book’s key contributors who include:
During the symposium, psychologists, philosophers and artists come together to discuss the emerging diagnosis of internet addiction. Taking into account our precarious economic and political climate, they will ask whether internet addiction should be understood as a form of illness, or simply a sensible adaptation to our current environment? As increasing numbers of people struggle to moderate their online behaviours, this event will also explore artists’ strategies for counteracting the seductive, addiction-making qualities of digital space.
Convened by curator Vanessa Bartlett
Presented in partnership with Central Saint Martins Art/Design and Science Research Group
The book, ‘Are We All Addicts Now?’ is available from Liverpool University Press: liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/100809
See photos from the Symposium and Book Launch
See a recording of the Symposium and Book Launch – Part 1 | Part 2
£4 – £7 | booking essential
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
Fiona MacDonald is an artist, curator and writer specializing in human-nonhuman relationship. As Feral Practice, she works in co-production with a collective of human and nonhuman persons. Current projects include Foxing, (see PEER London, 2017) Ant-ic Actions (see Ethical Entanglements, Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming) Homo Mycelium, and Wood to World (London, Kent, Aberdeen 2015-17).
www.feralpractice.com
Vanessa Bartlett is a researcher and curator based between Australia and the UK. She studies and teaches at UNSW Art & Design, Sydney where her research investigates connections between digital technologies and mental health through reflective curatorial practice. Her recent exhibition Group Therapy: Mental Distress in a Digital Age showed at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), UK in 2015 and opens at UNSW Galleries Sydney in September 2017.
www.vanessabartlett.com
Dr. Charlotte Webb is an artist and deviant academic. She speaks and exhibits internationally, focusing on the web as a medium for creative practice, critical thinking and collective action.
Furtherfield is an internationally renowned arts organisation specialising in labs, exhibitions and debate for increased, diverse participation with emerging technologies. At Furtherfield Gallery and Furtherfield Lab in London’s Finsbury Park, we engage more people with digital creativity, reaching across barriers through unique collaborations with international networks of artists, researchers and partners. Through art Furtherfield seeks new imaginative responses as digital culture changes the world and the way we live.
“There is no other gallery like Furtherfield. Situated in the middle of Finsbury Park they attract people from all walks of life and focus on contemporary technology and how it affects the lives of people and the world we live in.” (Liliane Lijn, artist)
Furtherfield Gallery
McKenzie Pavilion
Finsbury Park, London, N4 2NQ
Visiting Information
Thanks to:
The Wellcome Trust
Arts Council England
Science Gallery London
Central Saint Martins
BF Skinner Foundation
Haringey Council
Bruce Marks (glass artist)
Rob Prouse (raspberry Pi and AV technician)
A late night opening of the Are We All Addicts Now? exhibition, followed by a screening of artists’ moving image work that has informed the development of the exhibition.
The exhibition and research project Are We All Addicts Now? explores the seductive and addictive qualities of the digital.
Artist Katriona Beales’ work 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. The exhibition includes glass sculptures containing embedded screens, moving image works and digitally printed textiles. Beales’ work is complemented by a new sound-art work by artist and curator Fiona MacDonald : Feral Practice.
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’.
Part of the NEW WORLD ORDER exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery
BOOKING ESSENTIAL – Limited places available for this FREE workshop
A day of design-based research using the GeoCoin platform to explore novel ways of reconsidering and reinventing currency through location-specific value transactions. How can money be reprogrammed to interact with or react to everyday practices of value exchange in and around the city? Explore these and more questions with the Design Informatics team from the University of Edinburgh.
This workshop is part of the ESRC funded research project After Money lead by Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
Saturday 24 June, 11-1pm and 2-4pm, Furtherfield Gallery
Ever wanted to join your partner in bitcoin matrimony? Or wanted to join another partnership for a short time only? You’ve come to the right place. For this day only, you can record your short-term bitcoin union via Handfastr on the blockchain in an immutable and ever growing ledger of bitcoin marriages at the Furtherfield Gallery.
This project is part of the ESRC funded research project After Money lead by Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
DOWNLOAD PRESS RELEASE (.pdf)
For her exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery, Alison Ballard presents Offline Is The New Luxury a collection of works exploring our relationship with technology and the Internet. When daily encounters are increasingly mediated by online technology, how is this affecting our experience of live-ness, presence, and time?
With live streaming, instant replays and video chat technologies, concepts of time, space, and distance, are changing. We ‘hang out’ together online, we ‘live chat’ with computer algorithms, watch cat videos over and over again and share world political events as they happen, ‘in real time’. Contemporary Western culture has become now-centric. Social media offers more ways than ever to ‘go live’ meaning we no longer have to share our experiences with others in the past tense (a photograph we took on holiday or a video of the event we attended last week). Instead, we share our every moment instantaneously in a continuously unfolding now.
The Narrator Is Present is an audio work with narrative ambiguity and a sinister underbelly. How can we distinguish fictional narrative from truth among the multitude of disembodied voices on the Internet? Who is it that is speaking to us and what do they want? Existing simultaneously in Furtherfield Gallery and online, the work also explores the dualistic experiences of the virtual and the physical, and the ways in which these two spaces contribute to a single reality.
In Live Stream of Consciousness Ballard asks; can the Internet be good for our health? Spending time in parks can improve mental and physical wellbeing by relieving stress, reducing depression, improving memory and cognitive function, and boosting creativity. Can the same mental and physical health benefits of visiting a park be achieved via meditation, online? Ballard attempts to find out with this 20-minute seated meditation, originally broadcast as a live stream from Chalkwell Park, Southend-on-Sea, in 2016. By displaying this work inside Furtherfield Gallery, the artist invites us to reflect upon the physical and mental health benefits that Finsbury Park brings to our day-to-day lives.
Through these works and more, Ballard reflects upon the current state of hyper-reality; the context-collapse of the real and unreal, the distinction between what is simulated and what seems ‘real’, and invites us to reconsider our view of reality.
Online Live Stream of The Narrator Is Present
Available online during gallery opening times, from 6 April
http://bit.ly/2mExQ0v
The Narrator Is Present exists live; in the gallery, and online. Visit Furtherfield Gallery to be physically complicit in the work or watch online to be a distanced voyeur.
Online Exhibition Walkthrough with Ruth Catlow Co-Founder and Co-Director of Furtherfield
Available from 7 April 2017 on Alison Ballard’s YouTube Channel, in 2D video and Google Cardboard via the YouTube App.
http://bit.ly/2mExQ0v
Also available to view in the Gallery. Please ask a member of staff
Everyday Fiction / NetPark
Open Day 11:00 – 16:00, Saturday 15 April 2017
Metal, Chalkwell Hall, Chalkwell Park, Southend-on-Sea, Essex, SS0 8NB
A chance to experience Alison Ballard’s geo-locative audio work Everyday Fiction; a heart-breaking story of loss, grief, and mental illness that explores the ambiguity between reality and fiction that we encounter in everyday life. Site-Specific to Chalkwell Park, it forges a relationship between the audio, the location, and your presence within it. A moving experience with content that some listeners may find challenging.
Just one of the many app-based experiences on offer as part of NetPark; a collection of site-specific digital artworks commissioned by Metal. Find out more on the NetPark website: http://www.netpark.zone/artist-projects
If you have a smart phone, we recommend downloading the App before your visit and connecting to the free NetPark WiFi upon your arrival, to improve your GPS signal.
Download for Apple iOS: http://apple.co/2moPeWA
Download for Android: http://bit.ly/2mEFuI
Don’t have a smart phone? That’s OK, you can borrow an iPad from Metal on the day, free of charge.
Alison Ballard explores the ambiguity between fiction and reality, the real and unreal, and the known and the imagined, through temporal works of film, installation, audio, performance, and geo-locative technologies.
Derived from everyday experiences and observations, coupled with an interest in the dislocated relationship of image and sound, and phenomenology, she seeks to produce cross-disciplinary artworks that question our relationships with people, places, and objects, and the shifting meanings of time, presence, and liveness.
Alongside her practice, Alison is Associate Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University and a freelance producer in London and Nottingham. More information can be found on her website: http://alisonballard.com/
Furtherfield was founded in 1997 by artists Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow. Since then Furtherfield has created online and physical spaces and places for people to come together to address critical questions of art and technology on their own terms.
Furtherfield Gallery
McKenzie Pavilion
Finsbury Park, London, N4 2NQ
Visiting Information
Two years after his death, Harun Farocki continues to maintain an archetypal role in the world of the visual arts. Many mourned for the loss of a gifted artist who was as not just a filmmaker but a critic, activist and philosopher en masse. Farocki succeeded his German New Wave filmic predecessors as his work would seamlessly and at once command hilarity, disparagement and intellect. A project-retrospective collaboration of his work was undertaken, just two years after his death, with its first part at The Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) named ‘What is at Stake’, and more recently the second-part titled ‘Empathy’at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies compiled of at least 8 works focusing on an analysis of labour within the framework of capitalist demands.
The title of the exhibition, ‘Empathy’ originates from Ancient Greek; ‘εμπάθεια’ is a compound of ‘έν’ and ‘πάθος’ meaning ‘moved by passion’. In German, empathy translates to ‘Einfühlung’ and was ironically exploited by Farocki in 2008 as the title for his text and reads:
‘A compound of Eindringen (to penetrate) and Mitfühlen (to sympathize). Somewhat forceful sympathy. It should be possible to empathize in such a way that is produces the effect of alienation.’
Taking into account Farocki’s liking of Brechtian ‘distanciation’, he formulated rather quickly that to ‘empathise’ means to project one’s own feelings, therefore infiltrating objective opinion. The notion of ‘empathy’ for Farocki was carefully tailored to a synthesis that gave him the patience to be simultaneaously attentive and austere towards his subjects’ predicaments. As paradoxical as it may seem, empathy and distance are nurtured companions. With Farocki’s interpretation of empathy in mind, I entered the dark bunker where the retrospective took place. A space usually leaking brightness from the glass roof was now transformed into an industrious zone of projections, obsolete TV sets and the mellifluous humming of those operative machines. Farocki’s filmic oeuvre overflowed from devices onto white surfaces, accentuating the techno-capitalistic condition of labour operating eradically for our Western communities.
As you enter, the video-installation of Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006) dominates the center. Twelve TV monitors are laid out in a horizontal line, juxtaposing chronologically the moment where the worker leaves the factory in Farocki’s twelve chosen films – among them, Workers Leaving the Lumiére Factory in Lyon (1895), Deserto Rosso (1964) and Dancer in the Dark (2000). Here, the excerpts are used as a mnemonic tool as Farocki’s montage gravitates around the entrance of each factory. Each scene extrapolates the repetition of entering as a rhetorical techne, an emphatic mimesis of organising and preserving power through the image of the factory and its systems of subjugation. Yet, distance and empathy are circular and procedural.
Curated to encourage a clockwise movement following the introductory piece, A New Product (2012) is being televised to the left. It commences during a mundane corporate board meeting for a consulting company violently regurgitating neoliberal logic. The goal of the meeting is to amplify competition and ascertain efficiency of their employees in the workplace by creation of a new product. Through the repetitive flipping of charts and reports, Farocki succeeds in capturing the vocabulary of rationalisation regarding their employees’ assets while unfolding the dynamics of the team and its public presentation. The narrative’s structure being static and unobtrusive, in conjunction with the ascetic use of the camera implies a degree of distancing from the subject. Still, the absence of Farocki’s own evaluation additionally contains the capability to bolster the viewer’s assessment of the situation thus achieving the artist’s desired equilibrium between empathy and distancing.
There existed a sense of rituality by which the projections were transmuted from a seemingly simple and observational nature, to one which was filled with the allegory of transparency and distance. Re-pouring (2010) was an ode to Tomas Scmidt’s Cycle for Water Buckets (or Bottles) from 1959. The original piece was a carefully choreographed mise-en-scene by which Scmidt poured one glass, a bottle of bucket of water into another. The act of pouring for Schmidt was one which indicated a simple and natural process of vaporisation with each pouring. Farocki had programmed machines to perform the artistic gesture for him, a re-pouring of the performative fluxus notion. A paradoxical act, since as human beings our navigational processes depend heavily on our cognitive ability, the mechanical hands were able to seamlessly perform the act of re-pouring. Farocki’s hyperrealism allows him to jump to a certain scale of futurity whilst also being rigorous of scrutinizing reality. The act of programming robots to perform a ritualistic and performative task goes undoubtebly implies distancing from the artistic practice of Fluxus. The Fluxus movement was predominantly a practice governed by experimental notions of performativity which were heavily conceptual. It therefore comes into stark contrast to the idea that such act could be thought by algorithm machines as notions of ‘thinking/feeling machines’ in contemporary society are rudimental and dreams of a future imagination. Farocki, able to perform the task himself such as with Indistinguishable Fire, does not. He steps out, physically distances himself from undertaking the task himself but maintains his empathy to former Fluxus activities but also expressing a empathy towards machines who today perform most human labour.
Amidst one of the spectacular accummulations of Farocki’s body of work, the apogee of the retrospective would be Labour in a Single Shot, shown for the first time in Spain. The project was initiated in 2011 by Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann, co-curator of the retrospective. Located in an entirely different bunker, the work was compiled from a series of workshops whereby a fixed camera filmed paid, unpaid, material and immaterial labour from fifteen workshop locations. Projection screens are hanged in a room, most facing eachother whilst the noise of all labour taking place floods the space. Harmonious parallels are created as sequences from butcher shops and surgeries face eachother. The repetitive looping and sequencing of labour is used as a means of distancing and signifies non-judgmental watching as an active practice of iconic power. Our lasting impression is a call-girl sucking on a lollipop explaining how her artifice encourages clients into believing the gratification she provides is sincere. Here, we understand that just as she, through sex, retains empathy and distance in unison, Farocki’s empathy can thrive.
DOWNLOAD PRESS RELEASE (.pdf)
SEE IMAGES FROM ACCOMPANYING EVENTS
LISTEN to a recording of the conversation with John Conomos and Steven Ball at Furtherfield Gallery
Deep Water Web is a free exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery in London’s Finsbury Park, connecting opposite sides of the Earth to understand human impacts on the environment and the wider consequences for people living in both locations.
Artists Steven Ball (London, UK) and John Conomos (Sydney, Australia) have collaborated to present a multi-projection installation where London and Sydney are continuously connected across time zones. The exhibition is an immersive experience which the artists have termed a ‘hyperlandscape’ including real time streaming waterscapes and multiple local manifestations of global ecologies with their own sonic environments and narrated reflections.
Deep Water Web is a poetic meditation around contemporary and historical geopolitical contexts, underscored by London and Sydney’s situation around large bodies of tidal water in the forms of the River Thames and Sydney Harbour. These bodies of water bear material evidence of the local impact of global warming, such as rising tide levels caused by melting ice caps, leading to flooding, and increasingly extreme climate fluctuation. Both cities are also centres of neoliberal capitalism, inscribing the effects of privatisation, fiscal austerity and deregulation of markets across the planet.
Deep Water Web weaves rhetorical explication of postcolonial relationship, elaborating the precarious material forms of climate change, and post-labour late capitalist neoliberal urban developments of waterfronts of former Docklands, considered within the geological and rhetorical ecology of the Anthropocene.
The age of global warming and global neoliberal capitalism are figured here as critical rhetorical realms. These phenomena can be described as what Timothy Morton has called hyperobjects, objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localisation. While they are impossible to comprehend at scale, hyperobjects exert a profound effect at a local level.
Deep Water Web will also become a catalyst for a workshops series at Furtherfield Commons, which will extend its themes through media based excavations. [dates and full details to be confirmed]
Both artists both have long standing moving image based practices and an interest in landscape and the representation of place. As a hyperlandscape this project suggests that questions of relationship to place, and the construction of landscape, can in the Anthropocene no longer be considered as simply pictorial representation or subjective experience, but is constituted from a range of critical, ethical, ecological, and political positions and concerns.
+ MORE INFO: http://deepwaterweb.net
Deep Water Web is supported by Arts Council England.
Exhibition Tour with artist Steven Ball
Tuesday 4 October 2016 – 5:30-6:15pm – Furtherfield Gallery
Revolutions and Complex Systems
Every Tuesday for 6 weeks
6:30 – 8:30pm at Furtherfield Commons – from 27 September 2016
BOOKING ESSENTIAL
A conversation with John Conomos and Steven Ball
2-3pm Saturday 29 October – Furtherfield Gallery
Booking is essential for this free event
Furtherfield in partnership with the antiuniversity and Radical Think Tank are proud to present this new 6-part course led by Graham Jones.
Aimed at people with an interest in social change, the course will apply concepts from complex systems theory to understanding revolutions and social movements. Sessions will involves a mix of speaker presentation and participatory discussions/activities, covering subjects such as ecology, network theory and new materialist philosophy.
Graham Jones is an activist based in East London, working with groups such as Radical Assembly, Radical Housing Network and Radical Think Tank. Booking Essential.
Steven Ball is an artist, writer and academic based in London, working with audio-visual media engaged with landscape and spatial representation, in local and global, social, political and post-colonial spheres. Since 2003 he has been Research Fellow at Central Saint Martins and was instrumental in developing the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection.
John Conomos is an artist, critic and writer based in Sydney, Australia. His books, essays and artworks are framed within four traditions of contemporary art: Anglo-American and Australian cultural studies, critical theory and post-structuralism. He is a New Media Fellow of the Australia Council for the Arts, and Honorary Professor at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Furtherfield was founded in 1997 by artists Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow. Since then Furtherfield has created online and physical spaces and places for people to come together to address critical questions of art and technology on their own terms.
Furtherfield Gallery
McKenzie Pavilion
Finsbury Park, London, N4 2NQ
Visiting Information
Furtherfield Gallery is supported by Haringey Council and Arts Council England
When looking at the many artistic projects focused on how and why we use the internet, it’s easy to find yourself lost in a field which doesn’t show obvious, strong ties with what we normally know as “traditional art history”. This is due to historical and social reasons that emerged between the 80s, 90s and early 2000. These artists were at the vanguard of art culture and pushed at the edges of what art could be, whilst living in a post-punk and postmodernist era, and on tip of this, the arrival of the Internet in 94 changed everything. Many artists took on the challenge of what the Internet offered the world creatively, and explored it not merely as a marketing tool or a place to upload images and videos, but as a medium in its own right, inventing new technically informed, artistic tools and also building grass root led, networked art groups with new infrastructures as cultural platforms. Turning away from anything relating to the mainstream art world and what was seen as outmoded and tired traditions.
In the last decade, we’ve seen the expansion of the Internet and its use by younger generations where the medium is no longer something you exploit to change the culture, but more to integrate in traditional terms, canonical contexts.However, artist Jan Robert Leegte (born in 1973) is a very important figure to reflect upon, in order to understand this transition; while other artists of his generation were taking the internet for a non-hierarchical distributed system, he chose to explore it from a classical studies background that forged the cardinal points of his artistic research. He reflects an Internet art influenced practice which not only exists online but also in physical space. In fact, we can safely say he can be considered as one of the first Post-Internet artists. This makes him a pivotal figure in this historical segment and it’s under this light that one must visit the online exhibition On Digital Materiality (Carroll / Fletcher Onscreen, 3 August-12 September 2016). It’s a retrospective show presenting some of the most important and representative works of the Dutch artist, who wrote for the occasion an essay in which describes some of the most important aspects of his work.
Leegte says, the “materials I first used were basic HTML objects, buttons, scrollbars, frame borders, table borders, and also plain color fields and found images. I questioned what it was that rendered this practice similar to making installations rather than collages. At first it was the simulacrum of real world interactive elements (buttons, window frames, etc.). The operating system extended this haptic strategy with traditional paper-based forms, like check boxes, text fields, lists, etc, and, along with the form elements and the interactive document, led to an ecosystem of fake 3D, interactive objects.”
The work fluctuates between working on the surface and thinking in three dimensions. The same difference can be found with his use of Photoshop and HTML. If in the former case an image editing software operates directly on the final result, for the latter there is the need to know how to write code while at the same time imagine what the potential results will bring via its translation in the public space, the internet. In this sense, we do not hesitate to define Leegte as an artist who studies and uses the tools of the sculptor; he wonders how to place objects in the space, he feels the problem of contextualising a work in relation to a public and physical environment.
The perception of a substantial difference between surface and space is also proven with his interest in the basic elements of composing the digital interface (scrollbars, mouse pointers, etc). His research examines the artificial environment built by Microsoft and Apple designers. The colours and the shapes were designed to not be perceived as evident mediating agents between the user and the content – in this sense, it is interesting to note that Microsoft has often chosen a minimalist style (shades of grey, square shapes) while with Apple systems the style is usually more exuberant.
However, we should not look at the former as a less culturally relevant product. In the same way, we should not take the white cube exhibition space as a synonym of neutrality (unless we want to think that the whiteness and emptiness stay for an objectivity). This is an aspect that the artist does not seem to detect (in the text, he writes that he “preferred the aesthetics of the Windows classic interface design because of its minimalistic design – no rounded corners and ribbings like the OS 9 design, but simple beveled grey rectangles and a button object was merely a highlight and a shadow, nothing more”).
The artist reflected on how specific design elements may in some sense be preserved, as reflections and products of a particular aesthetic and cultural taste: “In Memory of New Materials Gone” (2014) is a work made by a print of the OS9 scrollbar placed in a transparent case in the same way you would do with an object no longer fashionable. This project and all the other works belonging to The Scrollbar Composition Series programmatically address the perception of virtually anonymous and transparent objects on the screen in a three-dimensional space. In a situation where their significance must be noticed; it’s the artist himself who begs to not see in this a disruptive act, an action that reveals the subtle ways in which they influence us. It is, however (but not “in opposition to”), a reflection on the artist’s activity; as we previously noted, these works are shown on the internet in the same manner in which they would be set up in a gallery space.
Perhaps, the highest point of the artist’s reflection on the differences you meet working on a surface or in three dimensions is The Photoshop Marquee Selection Series. “Random Selection in Random Image” (2012), in which a randomly generated selection marquee is shown within an image randomly obtained from the net. It is the most important work of this series because it opens three-dimensional gaps which have been created sculpturally in two-dimensional images – a dynamic that has echoes of “Scrollbar Composition” (2000), in which the Web browser’s monodimensional space is broken down and reassembled in many windows, many independent spaces sharing only the mathematical material they are made of.
The works featured in this exhibition are related to questions that go beyond the historical and cultural contingency in which they have been created. This makes many of them feel very much alive even 20 years after their creation (a novelty in digital art, I would say). This allows a healthy dialogue between different generations of artists to exist as common ground. It also engages art experts who want to be introduced to artistic issues linked to the internet. It is a dynamic that makes this exhibition a special opportunity for us all to relook at this so-called digital culture and its traditional and non-traditional art theories and its practice under a peculiar and exciting light.
On Digital Materiality – an Internet exhibition is online at Carroll / Fletcher Onscreen until 12 September 2016
Featured image: ToolsForAction.net / Artúr van Balen and QueerSport.info / Zeljko Blace, ‘POP-UP RAINBOW’, 2014
Zeljko Blace is working in(-between) contemporary culture, media technologies and sport, cross-pollinating queer, media and social activism. He is one of the initiators and a co-curator of the project ‘contesting/contexting SPORT 2016.’
to reclaim the field with art and activism
exhibition and program in Berlin (08.07-28.08.2016)
at nGBK and KunstraumKreuzberg/Bethanien
http://ccSPORT.nGbK.de
www.facebook.com/cc.sport.2016/
www.twitter.com/CcSPORT2016
The exhibition and program contests the field of SPORT through critical art and activist practices. Coming from feminist and queer practices, the project aims to challenge discrimination and encourage emancipation. SPORT is contextualized from its declarative neutrality and autonomy, rendering diverse influences, but also experiences and conditions of SPORT realities visible.
Organized by the ccSPORT international working group of the nGbK including also: Caitlin D. Fisher, Carmen Grimm, Mikel Aristegui, Sarah Bornhost, Stuart Meyers, Imtiaz Ashraf, Andreea Carnu, with support from: Tom Weller, Alexa Vachon, Ilaa Tietz, Tabea Huth, Barbara Gruhl, Steffy Narancic, Tristan Deschamps, Coral Short, Gegen Berlin, Schwules Museum, and advisors: Alex Brahim, Jennifer Doyle, Philippe Liotard, Jules Boykoff, Stephane Bauer and †Frank Wagner.
BOSMA: The ‘contesting/contexting SPORT 2016’ exhibition and program shows a wide range of uncommon perspectives on sports, questioning cultural systems embedded in them we hardly ever think about. Why did you make this exhibition?
BLACE: In this ‘networked’ and globalized time we paradoxically live out a multiplicity of highly fragmented realities, niched in specialized interest groups, while ‘others’ feel they can not contribute or even relate to them. It felt like this to me in my work during the late/post 90s with tactical and net media activism/art – fully disconnected from queer politics and sports organizing for which I had an increasing interest. In general the field of sport has not been part of the lives of many intellectuals, activists and creatives. Many had bad (even traumatic) experiences with sport in childhood and adolescence, feeling alienated, or simply not recognizing it as a possible field to develop work in (unlike right-wing populists in tribal fan cultures). Simply put, the sport system has been taken for granted in its current form. Hence, my first curated sport exhibition title, paraphrased ‘sport hater’ Chomsky, in ‘Another SPORT is possible?!.’ (2012, Galerija NOVA, Zagreb, Croatia). My Berlin colleagues and ccSPORT co-founders Caitlin Fisher, Tom Weller and Carmen Grimm felt the same about the separation of sport from arts, activism and academic research. Together (with the support of exhibition spaces nGbK and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien) we made plans to instigate and support intersections, cross-pollinate practices and perspectives between these fields through an exhibition, program and media work. We strongly felt the field of sport would never become self-critical and reform, nor would it engage with a wider audience beyond a given consumerist mode, if left to the managerial mentalities and the opportunism of its leaders. We need to reclaim the field of sport together to change it.
Is this the first ever exhibition criticizing the cultural and political dimensions of sports, and if not, how does your perspective relate or differ from earlier approaches?
I can not say with complete certainty what other group exhibitions on sport critique have taken place before. There have been many on a small scale, marginal in comparison to the huge exhibitions that ‘celebrate’ sports and are used as decor and entertainment accompanying sport spectacles (a notable exception is the seminal work ‘Electronic Café’ by K. Galloway & S. Rabinowitz at the 1984 LA Olympics, that actually provides space for interaction/discussion in between different city locations). There were also a few archival exhibitions looking at historical artifacts and documentation critically, as well as some that were experimental and playful (such as the Fluxus Olympiad, scripted as non-competitive multi-sports event) but these approaches were somewhat one-sided. We aspire to create a basis for both critical reflection and informed envisioning of possible developments, by looking at personal perspectives and artistic visions, next to grass-root alternatives and interventions.
The main threads in the exhibition seem to be gender, queerness and the connection between culture, commerce and rules in sport. Are these the main issues at hand?
Indeed our starting points were feminist and queer positions, but we were also very interested in the wider range of intersections and systemic issues within the field of sport that we could connect, rather than focusing on single-issues like homophobia or racism as is often done in mainstream sport campaigns. We decided very early on that the project would not be about identity politics, but rather about the multiplicities of axes of discrimination. There is a spectrum of emancipation efforts and practices that inspire us to think outside of gender norms, result-focused competitions, spectacle creating events and omnipresent ‘development’ narratives – which ignore for example that women had more access to certain sports historically in different geographies then they did in past 30 years of globalized neoliberalism.
augmented_profile from Diego Grandry on Vimeo..
How do you see the role of the media in the perception of sport?
Traditional broadcast media are the key stakeholder in the Olympics and similar sporting-spectacles. They have made the organizers of large sport events addicted to their huge broadcast contract revenues, but then inherently push for the spectacle of mega-events even further at the cost of other aspects. Newer sports that have evolved around this economy of attention have often sexed athletes (most visible with female beach volleyball) or at least contributed to enforcing gender stereotyping (like the feminization of soccer/football to the point that there are almost no short haired players at the Olympics). Instead of actively evolving with the progressive trends in sport, most broadcasters deepen the stereotypes; too often commenting on the marital status and appearance of female athletes, or referring to them as girls. Athletes from smaller countries, and sports that receive the least coverage are often looked down on, projecting neo-colonial relations on them (or hosts as in Brazil).
With internet networks and ‘social’ media the situation it is more complex as the interactive nature of media often allows for feedback and multiple standpoints in the same, or various foras. These media diversity brings to the surface and exposes critical minority voices and individuals who are able to argue against norms and question their necessities. For example, the tokenizing of muslim female athletes during these last Olympics received great reactions including historical facts about muslim women winning medals in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Also the outing of gay athletes by one reporter, was widely criticized online and the media hype reboot around Caster Semenya was compensated by internet and hybrid media (i.e. AJ+) publishing numerous expert articles and even giving voice to many (including former opponents critics converted to supporters as in case of Australian runner Madeleine Pape).
The connection between rules and cultural systems in sports is fascinating to me. You have worked as an organizer/curator in Multimedia Institute/MaMa before focusing on sport. What is your perspective on the rise of technological systems in the enforcement of rules, like for example drug testing or electronic goal-line and court line tracking?
Actually, the technological aspects of sport are the ones that still need to be addressed more specifically (technology centered single sport competitions exist since years, with The Cybathlon as their olympics premiere in Zurich, October 8th 2016). They not only re-enforce certain types of (measurable) norms, but also reduce the complexity into what appears to be arguable ‘logic’ and ‘common sense,’ while hiding other aspects (psychological and even aesthetic). Drug testing is an important measure of control, but is usually focused on the supra-performance of medal-winning athletes, rather than concerning itself with more generally applicable questions: what are the drugs, who has access to them and why. As long as the prevalent ‘production’ of results at all costs is dominating sports, the goal of ‘clean’ sports regardless of technological advancements in control will remain impossible. Gender policing at the Olympics has had a lengthy technological path, starting with visual and medical inspections, moving on to DNA and hormone testing and nowadays being fully questioned. Measuring and tracking technologies have the most interesting potential, not only for confirming line calls but for reshaping sports into allowing potentialities of variable norms and measuring based on generative fields/infrastructures. However, this kind of innovation is more likely to develop in the edges of eSports industry (that is pushed by novelty rather than burdened by traditions and conventions) and then maybe get normalized into traditional sport competitions once existing sport federations and regulatory bodies start losing young markets.
It was important for us to initiate conversations and collaborations that were not in place before, especially between those excluded from the mainstream sport system. We stirred up some interest from academic researchers for immediate follow-ups, but also informed some activists and artists of each other’s work. Ideally this could be developed further to elevate the critical and creative work in the field of sport and address issues in multifaceted ways.
We hope the exhibition and program enabled visitors to develop a more articulate position rather than just LOVING / HATING SPORTS, maybe supporting our platform — and ideally also inspired them to build personal or collective proactive relationships to sports. Maybe through practices of engagement against mega-spectacles and hyper-commercialization of sports, while supporting/partaking in grass-root sports or reforming the mainstream system.
Now we look forward to have the time for reflection after the intense work of materializing the exhibition and the extensive events program, as well as to see what future sport events could be interesting to contest and/or contextualize. One of the most important follow-ups is establishing an online space for sustainable communication, exchange and sharing information, know-how, methods, most likely using wikis, maps and media that came out of our research and workshops during the summer exhibition program.
This will be ncluding video of closing lecture by prof. Jennifer Doyle on art, sports and questioning the origins and need for the gender segregation in sports! More info will be appearing on our working website http://www.ccSPORT.link/
FREE Exhibition Tour and Artists Talk: Sat 18 June, 2-4pm
DOWNLOAD PRESS RELEASE (.pdf)
SEE IMAGES FROM ACCOMPANYING EVENTS
Featuring Gretta Louw, Lily Hibberd, Brook Andrew, Curtis Taylor, Jenny Fraser, Sharon Nampijinpa Anderson and the Warnayaka Art Centre.
Networking the Unseen is the first exhibition of its kind to focus on the intersection of indigenous cultures and zeitgeist digital practices in contemporary art.
While digital networks manifest physically as tonnes of cabling, and electrical or electronic devices, the social and cultural impacts of the networks remain somehow invisible, eroding clearly felt boundaries of geography, place, culture and language.
Together with artist and curator Gretta Louw, Furtherfield presents an exhibition and event series that brings together concepts and experiences of remoteness and marginalised cultures, with art-making in contemporary society.
Five culturally and geographically disparate Australian artists – Gretta Louw, Jenny Fraser, Lily Hibberd, Brook Andrew, and Curtis Taylor – and artists, including Neil Jupurrurla Cook, Isaiah Jungarrayi Lewis, and Sharon Nampijinpa Anderson from the Warnayaka Art Centre in Central Australia, present work situated at the intersection between avant garde digital, media, and installation art, the sociological study of digital and networked culture, and activism.
Networking the Unseen proposes a radical rethinking of widely accepted stereotypes concerning the impact of networks on contemporary global cultures, digital art, the avant garde, and indigenous art-making.
It tackles subjects ranging from digital colonialism and cultural marginalisation (or, conversely, diversity/empowerment) within an increasingly connected, online world to universal concerns around cultural change as a result of technological migration.
The exhibition extends our focus to the extremities of the global digital network. It subtly proposes ways to claim power back from centralising forces of control to use these tools for positive change; for intercultural exchange and empowerment for marginalised communities.
The Phone Booth Project, by Paris-based Australian artist Lily Hibberd and Martu indigenous filmmaker and artist Curtis Taylor, is a multimedia installation that demonstrates the intricate relationship between community and technology and how this is uniquely affected by local circumstance and environmental factors. Phone booths have all but died out in urban environments, and yet this beautiful and nuanced work, created in the Western Desert region of rural Australia with the indigenous Martu communities, highlights the vital role that they continue to play at the edges of the network – where cell phone reception is often non-existent, and landline phone connections in every house are an infrastructure expense that neither the locals nor the government is willing or able to carry.
Brook Andrew is an internationally recognised Australian artist whose practice in installation, print, neon, and performance often draws on his Wiradjuri indigenous heritage. In Costumes for the Cell (2012) Andrew’s instantly recognisable digitally-facilitated contemporary revision of a traditional Wiradjuri pattern – a powerful example of the blending of old and new culture; tradition and technology – becomes a moving installation as it is worn by performers at the opening.
Gretta Louw’s ongoing collaboration with artists from the Warnayaka Art Centre has produced the two video works Digital Desert and Is the Desert Still the Desert in a Digital World? in 2012, followed in 2014 by the YAMA project – an immersive, on-site multimedia installation built in the remote central Australian desert. The immersive installation at Furtherfield manifests the physical installation in wall paintings, screens, and light. It invites us to explore the nature of cultural change brought about by the arrival of advanced digital technologies.
Name That Beach, a video work by a fore-runner of the indigenous digital art movement Jenny Fraser, is programmed alongside works by emerging artist Curtis Taylor in a fascinating and inspiring insight into contemporary digital media art-making in Australia.
The works in the exhibition invites reflection by non-indigenous audiences on the techno-cultural change within their own society, and their individual relationship to internet technologies.
Exhibition Tour and Artists Talk
Saturday 18 June 2016 – 2-4pm – Furtherfield Gallery & Commons
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 (register)
Free family workshops at Furtherfield Commons
Every Saturday from 23 July to 27 August, 2-4pm
Fun, interactive workshops for local families aged 5 upwards.
Details to be confirmed – Register your interest here
Young digital artists residency at Furtherfield Commons
25 July – 5 August, Monday-Friday, 11am-4pm
Adventures in arts and technology for young people 13-18 living in or attending school in Islington.
Details to be confirmed – Register your interest here
Networking the Unseen – Selfies and Alterity
Thursday 4 August, 6-8pm – Furtherfield Gallery & Commons
6-6.45: Gretta Louw will give a tour of the exhibition Networking the Unseen at Furtherfield Gallery.
7-8 join us at Furtherfield Commons where she will present preliminary work on a Warlpiri (First Nations Australian) selfie and photo editing app, a collaboration with the Warnayaka Art Centre, and discuss the ways in which your emojis are not innocent, digital colonialism, and how selfies, social media, and alterity can be used for social good.
FREE – Limited places, booking essential (register)
Do It With Others – Art and Solidarity in the Age of Networks
Saturday 6 August, 12-5pm – Wysing Poly, Wysing Arts Centre, Bourn, Cambridgeshire.
With Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Gretta Louw, Tim Waterman and They Are Here
This day long symposium explores art as a commons (defined as the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society) in the age of networks and neoliberalism. How can the practices, circulation, appreciation and stewardship of arts be emancipated for all? Exploring tensions between digital inclusion and cultural diversity in the digital global hegemony.
FREE – Limited places, booking essential (register)
Brook Andrew is an internationally acclaimed Australian artist of indigenous (Wiradjuri) and Celtic descent. He has had significant exhibitions at world class institutions like the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and the Tate Britain, and been part of numerous international showcases, such as the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art and the Asian Art Biennial. Andrew’s practice is intensely research-based, resulting in interdisciplinary works and immersive installations.
Jenny Fraser is a screen-based artist, curator, and educator. Her work utilises popular cultural references as a bridge to challenge viewers’ frames of reference. She redefines the art of curating as an act of sovereignty and emancipation, and founded the groundbreaking cyberTribe online gallery over a decade ago. A Murri of mixed ancestry, Fraser has received many accolades for her trailblazing work, most recently being awarded a prestigious Australia Council Fellowship in 2012 for her project Midden.
Lily Hibberd is an Australian artist and writer, working between Sydney and Paris. Her practice centres on marginalised people and histories and the restoration of memory through interdisciplinary collaborative social practice. Hibberd’s recent project include major exhibitions at the Musée des art et métiers (2015-16), Paris, and Spaced 2: Future Recall for Perth International Arts Festival (2015).
Gretta Louw is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer exploring the potential of art as a means of investigating cultural and psychological phenomena, particularly in relation to new technologies and the internet. Born in South Africa, she grew up in Western Australia and is currently based in Germany. Her work has been exhibited widely – in New York, Berlin, Jakarta, and Tel Aviv, amongst others – including in a number of public institutions such as the Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Stadtgalerie Mannheim, and Kunstverein Ludwigshafen.
Sharon Nampijinpa Anderson is an artist and educator and one of the directors of the Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation. Born near Mt Doreen in the Tanami Desert, Nampijinpa holds a degree from Bachelor College in Darwin, Australia has exhibited her art work widely, including at Galerie Yapa in Paris, Cooee Aboriginal Art Gallery in Sydney, and at the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair. Nampijinpa is passionate about preservation of Warlpiri culture and has been involved in numerous projects to this end, such as the Arts Workers Extension Program in Australia and the production of the 2013 publication Warnayaka Art Centre: Life in the Digital Desert (Ed Gretta Louw).
Curtis Taylor is an emerging Martu Australian filmmaker and video artist. He has had screenings of his work at the National Gallery of Australia, the Fremantle Arts Centre, the Western Australian Museum of Art, and many more public institutions. Taylor is also currently involved in the VR film project, Collisions, which is debuting at the Sundance Film Festival.
Warnayaka Art Centre is a nationally renowned Australian indigenous (Warlpiri) art centre. The centre is home to a number of internationally successful Warlpiri painters including Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves and Molly and Rosie Napurrurla Tasman. Neil Jupurrurla Cook is the lead media and installation artist; he is the Director of the Warnayaka Art and Aboriginal Cultural Corporation and has shown his sculptural and media installations at the Darwin Art Museum.
Furtherfield was founded in 1997 by artists Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow. Since then Furtherfield has created online and physical spaces and places for people to come together to address critical questions of art and technology on their own terms.
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)
There is a common sense in place about the fact that civil rights are undermined by a various amount of ‘exceptions’; exceptions which are based on a system, in which governmental decision-making processes are increasingly determined by the rule of money, or else the market. The idea of a constant ‘crisis’ leads to a ‘state of exception’. Regardless of established legal standards – in the name of financial, economical or security measurements – civil rights are constantly taken away. As a result, the social and legal relations between the different members of society and between nation states are increasingly out of balance. This creates an endless pool of watering down legal standards in postdemocratic societies and produces harmful sociopolitical asymmetries. The exhibition “As rights Go By” which took place in freiraum Q21 this spring 14th April – 12th of June 2016 aimed to exactly pinpoint these asymmetries and to unfold the irregularities of a ‘regular legal system’.
The 15 works in the exhibition, curated by Sabine Winkler, focused directly on the complex dynamics between the sources and consequences of disappearing civil rights under the global neoliberal umbrella. The show, which was very well set, had strong internal and external references and what really could struck somebody was the content. The exhibition could be experienced as a single piece, inviting the visitors to discover more more than just the visible tips of the il/legal iceberg and to bring these issues of discussion to schools, universities, festivals, shopping malls and the mainstream media. Of course this doesn’t mean not to exhibit – but it means not to stop there.
As Rights Go By was an exhibition which stays in mind ; the visitors could produce their own individual collages, making sense of the gravity of the problematics involved.
The works presented were the following:
Silvia Becks, who worked with the privileges in the art world, presented an installation which discussed how the special rights in place, like the information accessibilities, the funding resources and the leveling up of the societal status, are at the same time leading to a certain loss of legal rights.
James Bridle, with his video animation “Seamless Transitions”, tried to visualize the physical spaces of the unknown arrest, the legal decision making processes and the juridical judgments involved, offering a virtual insight into the secret spaces of il/legality. His work questioned not only the surveillance strategies of physical space but also the secrecy about trading agreements and legal treaties.
George Drivas’ film‚ “Sequence Error” referred to a typical business setting where a sudden crisis has lead to a collapse. A fictional situation with a more than real deal: The crisis serves as the exception for legal rights to be erased.
Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt, overlaid the portraits of the hundred wealthiest people of the world fading into one collage of one single passport image projected to the wall. A symbol for lost identities and unidentifiable legal entities.
Adelita Husni-Bey video documentation gave a very detailed insight into an urban planning process in Cairo (“Land”) including gentrification processes, which go not only against Egyptian law but actually threaten a huge amount of informal dwellings. The notion ‘participations’, in particular, delivered a learning lesson about contemporary urban development strategies and their methods.
Nikita Kadan used a “Popular Medical Dictionary” of the Soviet era in his work “Procedure Room”. Painting torture methods on ceramic plates, he showed how physical and psychological violence can be justified for a ‘higher’ political order.
The Collective Migrafona reported via Comic strips about the Austrian migration politics. Imaginary Heroes are delivering identities in order fight for political rights.
Vladimir Miladinovic’s research focused on multinational companies and their strong connections to pre- and post-war power structures. His work discussed the power relations, which are in place during setting up regulations between states and their legal standards.
In his film “1014” Yuri Pattison mixed fictional Hollywood scenes with documentary footage from the hotel room where Edward Snowden gave his first interview. The work offered an insight into the conscious loss of legal rights when fiction becomes reality and vice versa.
Lorenzo Pezzani and Charles Heller raised the question about acting against human rights while being aware of the refugee tragedies based on surveillance technology. Their forensic reconstruction of a boat disaster offered a clear insight into the thin borderline between socio political responsibilities and legal settings.
Julien Prévieux work “What Shall We Do Next? 2006-2011“ showed how close technology, law and our bodies are connected; the fact that international corporations obtain patents for specific movements such as scrolling moves on a tablet shows how unaware we are about our daily il/legal routines.
Andrea Ressi related the notion of loss onto her work; loss of living space, loss of rights, loss of freedom, loss of security and represented these losses in her pictograms with modules of exception.
Judith Siegmund’s text based installations produced discomfort. Newspaper quotations about violence against refugees were set up opposite to philosophical text fragments, triggering associations about the relation between violence and competitiveness assuming that people take advantages from others who find themselves in a lawlessness situation.
Lina Theodorou’s project was one of the most intriguing works in the show. Her board game club offered a playful insight into the crisis in Greece and the social and legal consequences of austerity measurements up leading to losing well established rights. The setting would be funny if it wouldn’t be real.
Carey Youngs’ work “Obsidian Contract” transformed the visitor into an affiliate. The public space and the legal space were imagined and lost rights were reconstructed fictionally while watching the contract text through a mirror.
The exhibition did not refer directly to any political action, artivism, hacktivism or any other form of resistance but it implied the embedded hegemonic power structures pointing where it all begins.The exhibition was not a subversive act but it showed how subversion as an act of societal struggle became something illegal. Up to around 15 years ago the notion of ‘subversion’ was relatively easy to connect to counter-cultural productions. But a subversive act wasn’t nesessarily illegal – it was done in a grey shadow light between established settings in order to shake up presumably fixed sociopolitical surroundings. An unclear task under clear conditions.
In the era of global capitalist hegemony, shadows turned straight into black or white areas; no grey is involved anymore. Subversion dissolved into two parts: the legal one, which consists of what is now understood as innovation – or ‘creativity’ as the motor for an ‘idea based economy’- and the illegal one, what now labels all the ‘unwanted’ realities: terror, refugees, homeless; etc. Therefore subversive thinking and acting is no longer part of a cultural discourse but is simply illegal. Why?
The unlimited governmental practices which are today in place show that decisions are made as it happens in the financial markets; everything becomes a derivate, something to speculate with. The future has consequences on the present before anything happens. In times where potentials are seen as threats, the subversive process is turned upside down: subversions themselves become clearly defined and legal settings are turned into grey areas. A clear task under unclear conditions.
The exhibition encouraged, motivated and gave an insight into the power of rights including the absence of it. Focusing on how rights are either set or (il/legally) undermined by their exceptions and on how well these tendencies are sold as (inter)national necessities, it underlined the urge for a collective awareness of these i/legal practices and their consequences.
‘As Rights Go By’ was a very important exhibition; as mentioned above – what was visible was just the tip of the iceberg. As in many shows which include a huge amount of artistic research, a retrospective view in the future will show that this is just the beginning of a different kind of political engagement which most of all is a call for action.
Rights go by and are not falling from the sky.
Featured Image: With 69.numbers.suck by Browserbased
Athens Digital Arts Festival (ADAF) returned this year on the 19th to the 22nd of May with its 12th edition to bring Digital Pop under the microscope. Do machines like each other? Does the Queen dream of LSD infused dreams and can a meme be withdrawn from the collective memory?
Katerina Gkoutziouli, an independent curator and this year’s program director together with a team of curators proposed a radical rethinking of digital POP, placing the main focus on the actors of cultural production. From artists to users and then to machines themselves, trends and attitudes shift at high speed and the landscape of pop culture is constantly changing. What we consider POP in 2015 might be outdated in 2016, as the Festival’s program outlines, and that is true. But even so, in the land of memes, GIFs, likes, shares and followers what are the parameters that remain? ADAF’s curatorial line took it a step further and addressed not just the ephemerality of digital POP. It tackled issues related to governance and digital colonialism, but in a subtle and definitively more neon way.
450 artists presented their work in a Festival that included interactive and audiovisual installations, video art, web art, creative workshops and artist talks. Far from engaging in the narrative of crisis as a popular trend itself though, ADAF 2016 was drawn to highlighting the practices that reflect the current cultural condition. And the curated works were dead-on at showcasing those.
How are we “feeding” today’s digital markets then? Ben Grosser’s sound and video installation work “You like my like of your like of my status” screened a progressive generative text pattern of increasingly “liking” each others “likes”. Using the historic “like” activity on his own Facebook account, he created an immersive syntax that could as well be the mantra of Athens Digital Arts Festival 2016.
Days before the opening of the exhibition, Ben Grosser was asked by to choose the image that defines pop the most. No wonder, he replied with the Facebook “like” button. What Ben Grosser portrayed in his work is the poetics of the economy of corporate data collectors such as Facebook with its algorithmic representation of the “Like” button as the king pawn of its toolkit, that transform human intellect as manifested through the declaration of our personal taste and network into networking value.
Speaking of taste, what about the aesthetics? From Instagram and Snapchat filters to ever updated galleries of emoticons available upon request, digital aesthetics are infused with social significance. In the Queen of The Dream by Przemysław Sanecki (PL) the British politics and the Royal tradition were aestheticized by the DeepDream algorithm of Google. In an attempt to relate old political regimes and established technocracies, the artist places together hand in hand the political power with the algorithmical one, pointing out that technologies are essential for ruling classes in their struggle to maintain the current power balance. The representation of the latter was placed there as a reminder that it’s dynamic is to obscure this relation, rather than illuminate it.
However, could there be some space for some creative civil disobedience? Browserbased took us for a stroll in the streets of Athens, or better to say in the public phone booths of Athens. There, the city scribbles every day its own saying, phone numbers for a quick wank, political slogans, graffiti, tags and rhymes. With 69.numbers.suck Browserbased mapped the re-appearance and cross-references of those writings, read this chaotic network of self-manifestation and reproduced it digitally in the form of nodes. Out there in the open a private network emerged, nonsensical or codified, drawn and re-drawn by everyday use, acceptance and decline.
Can virality kill a meme? Yes, there is a chance that the grumpy cat would get grumpier once realized that its image would be broadcasted, connoted and most possibly appropriated by thousands. But how far would it go? The Story of Technoviking by Matthias Fritsch (DE) was showcased at the special screenings session of the Festival. It is a documentary that follows an early successful Internet meme over 15 years from an experimental art video to a viral phenomenon that ends up in court. Once the original footage was uploaded, it remained somehow unnoticed until some years later that it was sourced, shared, mimified, render into art installation, even merchandised by users. As a cultural phenomenon with high visibility it fails to be deleted both from servers around the world and from the collective memory even though that this was a court’s decision. In his work Matthias Fritsch mashes up opinions of artists, lawyers, academics, fans and online reactions marking the conflict between the right of the protection of our personality to the fundamental right of free speech and the direction towards which society and culture will follow in the future in regard to the intellectual property.
It’s the machines alright! Back in the days of Phillip K. Dick’s novels the debate was set over distinctions between human and machine. Since then the plot has thickened and in memememe by Radamés Ajna (BR) and Thiago Hersan (BR) things were taken a step further. This installation, situated in one of the first rooms of the exhibition, of two smartphones seemingly engaged in a conversation between them through and incomprehensible language built on camera shots and screen swipes is based on the suspicion that phones are having more fun communicating than we are. Every message is a tickle, every swipe a little rub. In memememe the fetichized device was not just a mechanic prosthesis on the human body, it was an agent of cultural production. The implication that the human might not cause or end of every process run by machines was promoted to a declaration. Ajna and Hersan have built an app that allows as a glimpse into the semiotics of the machine, a language that we can see but we can’t understand.
How many GIFs fit in one hand? If one were to trace all subcultures related to pop culture, then he or she would have to stretch time. Since they are multiplying, expiring and subcategorized not by theorists but by the users themselves and with their ephemerality condemning most of which into a short lived glory. Lorna Mills (CA) explores the different streams in subcultures through animated GIFs and focuses on found material of users who perform online in front of video cameras. In her installation work Colour Fields she is obsessed on GIF culture, its brevity, compression, technical constraints and its continued existence on the Internet.
Global pop stars, a blueprint on audience development. Manja Ebert (DE) in her interactive video installation ALL EYES ON US, one of the biggest installations of the Festival, embarked on an artistic analysis of the global pop star and media phenomenon Britney Spears. Based on music videos of the entertainer that typecast Spears into different archetypical female characters, Ebert represented each and every figure by a faceless performer. All nine figures were played by a keyboard, thus allowing the users to recompose these empty cells decomposing Spears as a product into its communicational elements.
Going through the festival, more related narratives emerged. Privacy and control, the representation of the self and the body were equally addressed. People stopped in front of the Emotional Mirror by random quark (UK/GR), to let the face recognition algorithm analyze their facial expression and display their emotion in the form of tweets while they were photographing and uploading in one or more platforms the result at the same time.
Τhe Festival presented its program of audiovisual performances at six d.o.g.s. starting on May 19 with the exclusive event focus raster-noton, featuring KYOKA and Grischa Lichtenberger.
ADAF 2016 brought a lot to the table. Its biggest contribution though lies in offering a great deal of stimuli regarding the digital critical agenda to the local digital community. ADAF managed to surpass the falsely drawn conception of identifying the POP digital culture just as a fashionable mainstream. On the contrary it highlights it as a strong counterpoint.
SEE IMAGES FROM THE PRIVATE VIEW
Furtherfield Gallery is proud to present Dimensioning – Live Architecture an exhibition of new digital artworks by Italian artist Chiara Passa, part of Furtherfield’s Open Spot programme.
Passa’s concept of «super places» and her search for new dimensions, or “campo piu’ in là” (a “further field”) underpin her work using architecture as an interface to understand the possibilities of the digital dimension. She uses augmented and virtual reality (AR & VR) to create interactive installations in which the technologies punch through and pull out a new sense of place in combinations of interior, architectural and natural environments.
In this exhibition visitors can explore her new digitally mediated perception of space and time in an animated multi-dimensional ‘trompe l’oeil’ of the gallery rooms as 3D wireframe view. Visitors stand in the middle of the “window-camera” view of the software, which has also been used to build the animations on display. They use augmented reality to “travel through” the walls, into the diagrams.
“Worlds open the doors to other worlds and synthetic shapes become design, structure, architecture and reality.”
Passa’s work offers a refreshingly passionate approach to experimental and philosophical play with technologies. We think that this is especially valuable in an age where our expressive range and behaviour is increasingly pre-determined by the digital tools, techniques and devices that we use daily, and the interests, experiences and values of those who create them.
Also for this exhibition visitors will experience her VR 3D animation using a Google Cardboard viewer.
Chiara Passa talks about Dimensioning – Live Architectures at Furtherfield Gallery in the video below
Chiara Passa, media artist (Rome 1973). Graduated at Fine Arts Academy of Rome; master in new audio-visual mediums at the Faculty of Modern Literature.
Her artwork combines many media and platforms analysing changes in ‘liquid space’ through a variety of techniques, technologies and devices – often constructed using augmented reality and the virtual reality technologies. She works with animation and interactive video-installation; digital art in public space as site-specific artwork and video-mapping; video-sculptures and objects; art-applications and widgets for mobile platforms.
She explores the potentials offered by the intrinsic languages of these emerging platforms to experimenting in a rigorous and personal way with the full expressive range and “unknown creative possibilities that the new media are continuously offering to me”. She received the E-Content Award (2012). Her work is regularly exhibited internationally in galleries and at festivals, conferences and institutions including ISEA, Vortex Dome (USA), Media Art Histories Conference (DE), Electrofringe (AU), FILE | Electronic Language International Festival(BR), CCCB – Centro de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (ES).
Furtherfield is a leading organisation for art, technology and social change. Furtherfield Gallery and Commons spaces in the middle of London’s Finsbury Park explore complex themes relating to digital culture, inspiring diverse people to get involved with arts and technology on their own terms. Debate is facilitated amongst an active international community of artists and thinkers via online platforms, combined with accessible art shows and labs to enable co-creation and widen participation. Furtherfield is a not-for profit, artist led organisation, an Arts Council England National Portfolio organisation, supported by Haringey Council.
The Furtherfield ‘Open Spots’ programme of self-initiated and self-funded exhibitions and events support the presentation of new work and artistic invention, to discover new perspectives on the horizon of a wider networked society.
Curators and artists that meet Furtherfield’s selection criteria can showcase work at Furtherfield Gallery in the heart of London’s Finsbury Park. Open Spot projects can reach a new, diverse audience of gallery visitors, park users and Furtherfield’s online participants.
Featured Image: Black Shoals: Dark Matter’, Joshua Portway, Lise Autogena, Big Bang Data.
Big Bang Data is a major travelling exhibition currently set within London’s Somerset House. That a large institution is presenting a journey via data capture through ‘selfies, surveillance and infographics’ is in itself an interesting patchwork of intent and realisation. The aim of the exhibition is to ‘demystify data’. This is a grand, summative and in actuality slightly awkward claim which, in my view, encapsulates the character of an interesting, textured exhibition in an unintentionally astute way.
As Big Bang Data is dedicated to revealing data comprehensively through its various architectures and iterations, it makes sense for the underrepresented materiality of information to have prominence early on. This materiality, perhaps inevitably, was compromised in the gallery space. Entering the first room brings you face to face with Timo Arnall’s Internet Machine, which takes the form of multiscreen video documentation of not just the machines, but also the architecture, which supports mobile telephony.
I would have loved to have experienced the spaces shown more intimately and walked around one of these structures; the installation was illuminating but I was still most certainly watching at a remove. This initial interplay of removal and involvement is central to the way we experience data. How can people begin to understand something which exists as multiple codes and flows, on a scale and at a speed which is not concerned with making itself understood by humans? What form could an understanding of data possibly take? When learning about something this far from our grasp, it seems that ‘understanding’ must be replaced by ‘awareness’. Rather than seeking one answer via one route the visitor to Big Bang Data has to build an impression, obviously subjective and subject to change.
In its quest to expose and explain data’s social and cultural uses, it presents a fairly overwhelming amount of information. It is interesting to walk through the space thinking about how this information has been channeled by each specific project. Some representations, such as Owen Mundy’s ‘I Know Where Your Cat Lives’, link distant people and spaces via connected points, while others such as Phillip Adrian’s ‘One Second’ capture in great detail one specific point in time and space.
Julian Oliver’s ‘Transparency Grenade’ brings together graphical, console and physical representations of data to offer a transportable means of leaking information as a response to impenetrable governing systems. Each of the works on display demonstrates a negotiation between temporality, materiality and spatiality, and often one is sidelined in favour of the other. Again, considering the exhibition in this way is also to consider the world of data in all its contrariness.
Data manifests itself at the same time locally and globally. As well as addressing specificity, the projects shown in Big Bang Data dwell repeatedly on scale. Works such as Tejka’s ‘London Data Streams’ and Nicholas Felton’s ‘Annual Reports’ pit scales against each other to cast light on the filters through which data is processed.
Ingo Günther’s ‘World Processor’ and Forensic Architecture’s ‘Liquid Traces: The Left-To-Die Boat Case’ are examples of resonant, atypical data visualisations which mutate familiar imagery and present alternative summaries of events. The section entitled ‘Data For The Common Good’ shows some of the ways data is being actively used in society to empower citizens with works such as Safecast’s ‘bGeigie Nano’ and IF’s ‘Data Licenses’, while a series of video interviews with journalists and other professionals working with data illuminate the processes through which information becomes communication.
The previously mentioned tension between object and their presentation recurs at various points throughout the exhibition, a great example being the array of undersea telephone cables, presented in cases of wood and glass which could have been magpied from a display of historical artifacts (each cable segment has a number next to it which corresponds to a factual description). It felt strange not being able to touch them. A work which I felt fully occupied, and knowingly played with, its surroundings was Ellie Harrison’s vending machine, which sits unassumingly in the gift shop; its secret is that when search terms connected to the recession make the headlines, free snacks are dispensed. Its presence in a exhibition on data in a gallery space felt appropriate.
Big Bang Data, which runs alongside a programme of events and has previously been exhibited at CCCB in Barcelona, comes at a moment where large organisations are more frequently bringing concepts such as surveillance, open source and free software into public spaces. There is a great need to bring the concepts and processes surrounding data more wholly into the public eye, and this exhibition strikes me as, overall, a big step in a good direction. It makes real and challenging efforts to bring together world-spanning processes, complex concepts and extremely diverse content into an exhibition space. The task of the exhibition’s curatorial and production teams must have been difficult.
Of course the challenges they faced have been dealt with before many times in many ways, and of course the practical decision-making involved in producing an exhibition invariably creates tension points. The reason I’ve dwelt on the problems of the organisers here is that the tensions evidenced within the space at Somerset House say much not just about the response of the publicly funded arts to data but also about the nature of data itself. The exhibition turns into at times a museum, a bedroom, a classroom, an information point, a scruffy new gallery space and a state of the art new media space. In bringing together the story of data the exhibition also brings together the story of representation in space more generally.
In writing about Big Bang Data I have had to choose to highlight certain works and not others. Your interpretation will be entirely different from mine, which is as it should be where data and cultural inclusion is concerned. What’s important is that the exhibition’s prominence and texture opens up conversation and critique. The exhibition is detailed, procedural and expansive. It is also alive with contrariness, generality and awkwardness. Perhaps one of the great things about the show is that these qualities are left to jostle for space. For me, reading this exhibition as a performative event was useful; others may leave Somerset House with an entirely different view having taken an entirely different route. This is inevitable where data is concerned – learning is incremental and procedural, but not traditionally linear.
French artists Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion contribute three pieces to The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies exhibition. Gold and Glitter is a painstakingly assembled installation of collaged GIFs. Previous installations have featured the GIFs displayed on a gold iPad atop a pile of collected gold trinkets; at Furtherfield Gallery now a single golden helium balloon hovers in front of a floor to ceiling projection. Nakamoto (The Proof) is video documentation of the artists’ efforts to try and place a face on the elusive Bitcoin creator, Satoshi Nakamoto (but is it his face in the end? We don’t know). Untitled SAS is a registered French company without employees and whose sole purpose is to exist as a work of art.
Brout and Marion’s work can be situated among artists and art practices who have grappled with how to think about value and objects—or more precisely, how objects are inscribed (and sometimes not) into an idea of what is valuable. In a recent article for Mute Magazine, authors Daniel Spaulding and Nicole Demby point out that “Value is a specific social relation that causes the products of labor to appear and to exchange as equivalents; it is not an all-penetrating miasma.”1 Value is a process by which bodies are sorted and edited but it is not a default spectrum on to which all bodies must fall in varying degrees. This clarification makes explicit the fact that while the relationships productive of value allow “products of labor to appear and to [be exchanged]”2 this is not an effect that is extended to all products of labor. Attempts to isolate the underlying logic of this sorting mechanism are often at the heart of art practices dealing with questions of value and commodification. Like Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes or Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, these artworks become interesting problematics for the question of art and value for the ways in which they are able to straddle two economic realms—that of the art object and the commercial object—while resisting total inclusion in either.
The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies picks up these themes in an art context and repositions them alongside digital cultures and emerging digital economies. In Brout and Marion’s work alone, concepts of kitsch, identity, and human capital have been inhabited and imported from their originary realms into the digital. Answering questions remotely, Brout and Marion were kind enough to give us some insights into their work and process. My goal here has been to draw out some points about the operation of value that are at work in Brout and Marion’s practice, as well as to point towards an idea of how value is transformed, or even mutated, in the digital age.
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Brout and Marion open up with an interesting provocation. They explain, “When we showed the project [Glitter and Gold] in Paris this year, people stole a lot of objects, even if they were very cheap. Gold has an incredible power of attraction.”
It is telling, to some extent, that Brout and Marion’s meditations on gold have an almost direct link to the visual metaphor used by Clement Greenberg in his 1939 essay Avante-Garde and Kitsch to describe the relation between culture—epitomized in the avant-garde—and the ruling class. Greenberg writes, “No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold.”3 This relation is subverted in Gold and Glitter, which takes for its currency—its umbilical cord of gold—a kind of unquantifiable labor that is seemingly (and perhaps somewhat sinisterly) always embedded in discussions of the digital.
For Greenberg, kitsch always existed in relation to the avant-garde; one fed and supported the other, even if the way in which that relation of sustenance worked was by negation. And while Greenberg’s theory relies on his own strict allegiances to hierarchical society, privileged classes, the values of private property, and all the other divisive tenets of capitalism that we now know all too well can be destructive. Kitsch remains useful to us for the ways in which it allows the means of production to enter into a consideration of aesthetics. Here the recent writing of Boris Groys can be useful. In an essay written for e-flux titled Art and Money, Groys makes a compelling case for why we should persist in a sympathetic reading of Greenberg. He argues that Greenberg’s incisions amongst the haves and have nots of culture can be cut across different lines; that because Greenberg identifies avant-garde art as art that is invested in demonstrating the way in which is it is made and it doesn’t allow for its evaluation by taste. Avant-garde art shows its guts to us all, and on equal terms—“its productive side, its poetics, the devices and practices that bring it into being” and inasmuch “should be analyzed according the same criteria as objects like cars, trains, or planes.”4
For Groys this distinction situates the avant-garde within a constructivist and productivist context, opening up artworks themselves to be appreciated for their production, or rather, “in terms that refer more to the activities of scientists and workers than to the lifestyle of the leisure class.”5 In this way Glitter and Gold, like Brout and Marion’s other artworks, is to be appreciated not for any transcendent reason but rather for the means by which it came into existence. ‘The processes of searching and collaging golden GIFs sit side by side with the physical work of accumulating the golden trinkets for display: “We collected these objects for a long time” the artists explain, “some were personal objects (child dolphin pendant, in true gold), others were given or found in flea markets, bought in bazaars … We wanted to have a lot of different types and symbols, from a Hand of Fatima to golden chain, skulls, butterflies, etc.”
Furthermore, Glitter and Gold can be understood as the product of compounding labors: the labor of Brout and Marion in collecting their artifacts, the labor necessary to create the artifacts, the labor of GIF artists, the labor of searching for said GIFs, the labor of weaving a digital collage. These on-going processes forge, trace, and re-trace paths during which, at some point, gold takes on the function as aesthetic shorthand for value. As Brout and Marion explain, “Here the question is more about the intrinsic values we all find in Gold, even when it just looks like gold. Gold turns any prosaic product into something desirable. [Gold and Glitter] is less about economics than about perceived value.”
Groys provides his reading of Greenberg as a means of pointing towards a materiality that is always in excess of existing coordinates of value. If value always reveals the products of labor as they enter into a zone of exchange, it is something else proper to contemporary art that reveals another materiality beyond this exchange. For Groys, this something else is at work in the dynamics of art exhibition, which can render visible otherwise invisible forces and their material substrates. This is certainly a potential that is explored by Brout and Marion. In Nakamoto (The Proof), the viewer can watch the artists’ attempt at creating a passport for the infamous and elusive Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. At present, it is unclear whether Nakamoto is a single person or group of people, though the Nakamoto legacy as creator of Bitcoin, a virtual currency widely used on darknets, is larger than life. Adding to this myth, after publishing the paper to kickstart bitcoin via the Cryptography Mailing List in 2008, and launching the Bitcoin software client in 2009, Nakamoto has only sporadically been seen participating in the project with others via mailing lists before making a final, formal disappearance in 2011, explaining that he/she/they had “moved on to other things.”6 Nakamoto’s disappearance, coupled with the fact that Nakamoto’s estimated net worth must be somewhere in the hundred millions Euros, has given rise to the modern-day myth of Nakamoto, and with it an insatiable curiosity to uncover the identity and whereabouts of the elusive Bitcoin creator.
Brout and Marion make their own attempt to summons the mysterious Nakamoto back to life by putting together the evidence of Nakamoto’s existence and procuring a Japanese passport using none other than the technologies that Nakamoto’s Bitcoin both imparted and facilitated. When asked if they feared for their own self-preservation in seeing this project through, Brout and Marion answered, “Yes, even if we were pretty sure that it would be easy to prove our intention to the authorities, and that the fake passport couldn’t be useful to anybody, buying a fake passport is still illegal.” They add, “But we also wanted to play the game entirely, so we made every possible effort to preserve our anonymity during our journey on the darknets.”
However Brout and Marion have yet to receive the passport; as they explain, “The last time we received information, the document was in transit at the Romanian border.” When asked if they expect to receive the passport, they respond, “No, today we think we will never receive it. We are completely sure that it has existed, but we’ll surely never know what happened to it.” What, then, will they do if they never receive the passport? “Maybe just continue to exhibit the only proof of it we have!” they exclaim. “There is something beautiful in it: we tried to create a physical proof of the existence of a contemporary myth, using digital technology and digital money, and the only thing we have is a scan!”
If Brout and Marion’s nonchalance seems unexpected then it is because the disappearance of the passport for the artists marks just another ebb in the overall flow of their piece; a flow that began with Nakamoto, coursed through their clandestine chats via a Tor networked browser and high security email, and now continues to trickle on while we wait in anticipation for the next chapter of the Nakamoto passport to reveal itself. In this respect, the anticipation of the passport is a poetic and unforeseen layer added to the significance of the piece: “Maybe it is even better [that the passport should not arrive]” Brout and Marion comment. “It’s like it was impossible to bring Nakamoto out of the digital world.”
If value is always formed by way of a social relation, then how do digital modes of sociality also deliver this effect? This becomes a particularly fraught question when considering that, as Anna Munster has written, the sociality that takes place on the internet can be understood as the interrelation of any number of subjectivities, both organic and inorganic. Brout and Marion’s ambivalence to the purloined passport highlights just such an expectation: “Here the lack of identity delivers a lot of value. Look at Snowden: journalists ask him more about his girlfriend than about his revelations. Making something as big as Bitcoin and staying perfectly anonymous? These are strong attacks to two of the most important issues of our societies: banks and privacy.” What their statement suggests is how a collective movement towards transgression, here seen as compounding maneuvers of avoidance of physical world boundaries and institutions, might hold within it the promise of its own set of value coordinates. As Brout and Marion further explain: “For us, Nakamoto is absolutely fascinating. The efforts he made to prevent himself from being turned into a product are incredible. Especially when you know the importance of [Bitcoin’s] creation, and that only a few men in the world are smart enough to create something like this. Adding to that the fact that Nakamoto is probably a millionaire, you have one of the only true contemporary myths, something hard to find credible even if it was just a fictional character in a movie. So this somewhat absurd attempt to create a proof of Nakamoto’s existence was, for us, an attempt to make a portrait of him, to put light on his figure. And, in some ways, a tribute.”
Brout and Marion mount a final probe into questions of value in their piece, Untitled SAS. Untitled SAS is the name for Brout and Marion’s corporation whose purpose and medium is to exist as a work of art. In France SAS means société par actions simplifée, and is the Anglophone equivalent of an LTD. SAS companies have shares that can be freely traded between shareholders. Untitled SAS, in Brout and Marion’s own words, “has no other purpose than to be a work of art: it won’t buy or sell anything, there won’t be employees, its existence is an end it itself. The share capital of the company is 1 Euro (the minimum), and we edited 10,000 shares owned by us (5,000 for each one). Everybody can freely buy and sell shares of this company.” Brout and Marion are clear: in no uncertain terms, “Untitled SAS is a work of art where the medium is a real company, and the corporate purpose of this company is simply to be a work of art.”
Untitled SAS is a tongue in cheek commentary on the situating of artworks as outside of the rational space of the market while still being subject to selective norms of economic behavior. Brout and Marion explain, “Untitled SASis obviously a metaphor for the art market, and the market in general: it is a true, fully legal, and functional speculation bubble. Companies usually try to create some concrete value, they are means. The art world has fewer rules than the regular market, the price of some artworks can radically change in few days without any logical reason: their intrinsic value is completely uncorrelated to their market value. We wanted to reproduce and play with these systems in the scale of an artwork.” At this level, what Brout and Marion uncover is further proof of the condition of the contemporary art period as Groys sees it: a time in which “mass artistic production [follows] an era of mass art consumption” and by extension “means that today’s artist lives and works primarily among art producers—not among art consumers.”7
Crucially, the effect of this condition is that contemporary professional artists “investigate and manifest mass art production, not elitist or mass art consumption.” This is the mode of art making precisely employed by Brout and Marion in the creation of Untitled SAS. It has the added effect, too, of creating an artwork that can exist outside the problem of taste and aesthetic attitude. Companies tend to eschew taste qualifications in favor of brand associations. Untitled SAS becomes readable as an artwork, as Untitled SAS, when the expectations and regulations of a nationally recognized business are made to butt up against the inconsistencies of the artworld as an economic sphere. The art object then becomes rather a means of accessing the overlapping paths of art and value as they are uniquely enabled to circulate in and out of the art & Capitalist markets.
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Brout and Marion note that, “In our work we often use algorithms and generative ways to produce things, but here we wanted to something no machine can do, something hand-made, too, finally a simple and traditional work of art.” These kinds of generative technological processes and sorting algorithms have been central to many debates on how contemporary culture is absorbing the boon of big data: from ethical questions on predictive policing to dating apps and ride-hailing startups. As one Slate article posed the question in relation to Uber, these algorithms are more than just quick and efficient modes of labor—they are reflections of the marketplace themselves.
So what, then, might it mean that both values and services in the digital age are predicated on the power to sort and categorize, and that this power is ciphered through its own dynamic of social relations, but that in one scenario what emerges is a sphere of the valuable and in the other a software that asserts itself as benign and at the behest of an impartial, impersonal data? Perhaps the rationality of value and market circulation vis a vis the art object was always going to be a little too tricky to take on: too many exceptions, too many questions of subjectivity, taste, and judgment. But as the works exhibited for The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies might suggest the rationality of value and the products it chooses to incorporate is of high importance. If value works precisely because of the specific interrelating of social subjects then we can consider the realm of the digital as a concentrated form of such a relation.
Against this we must consider the new subject that is produced and addressed by the intersecting of these discussions. Spaulding and Demby make the case that, that “Art under capitalism is a good model of the freedom that posits the subject as an abstract bundle of legal rights assuring formal equality while ignoring a material reality determined by other forms of systematic inequality.”8 Karen Gregory, in The Datalogical Turn, writes, “In the case of personal data, it is not the details of that data or a single digital trail that are important, it is rather the relationship of the emergent attitudes of digital trails en mass that allow for both the broadly sweeping and the particularised modes of affective measure and control. Big data doesn’t care about ‘you’ so much as the bits of seemingly random information that bodies generate or that they leave as a data trail”.
The works of Brout and Marion exhibited at the Human Face of Crypotoeconomies exhibition places the intimacy of the body front and center. They speak to the shadow and trace of the body by appropriating the paths of the faceless, or by giving a face to the man (or entity) without a body, to becoming the human face of the market player par excellence by inserting themselves into a solipsistic art corporation. Brout and Marion’s practice understands that while value may not be an all-penetrating miasma, this is not also to say that the effect of value is not still inscribed on the flesh of each and all, organic or not.
1 Demby, “Art, Value, and the Freedom Fetish | Mute.”
2 Ibid.
3 Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 543.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 “Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto?”
7 Groys, “Art and Money.”
8 Ibid.
Furtherfield content is published
