“A bot is free of taste, in its paradigm it can act in full freedom. No rethinking, no regrets, no need for undos.”
How do computers experience the world? This is the question driving Kim Asendorf and Ole Fach’s playful investigation of what the physical world looks like through digital eyes.
With most of us spending hours in front of the computer each day, what do our ever faithful assistants think of us? How do we look to them? Did we ever stop to think about what they would like to do with their time?
For Carroll / Fletcher, Asendorf and Fach have conceived a whimsical, fictive world in which a particular set of markers associated with sentience have been ascribed to machines in order to delineate the experience of the computer. In this familiar world made strange, they look, analyse, translate, archive, express, create, feel joy and comfort – all the while watching us, consuming us, reflecting us, learning, becoming… becoming us.
Kim Asendorf (b.1981, Bremen) is a conceptual artist working with digital media to explore Internet culture and technology. His work ranges from online projects and performances to visual art and installations. Solo shows include: init (Internet), DAM Gallery, Berlin (2014); and at the Kunsthochschule, Kassel (2013). Recent group shows include: Art Hack Day Berlin: Afterglow, Transmediale, HKW, Berlin; net.art Painters and Poets, City Art Gallery, Ljubljana; Unoriginal Genius, Carroll / Fletcher London; You Might Be A Dog, LEAP, Berlin (all 2014); global aCtIVISm, ZKM, Karlsruhe; and Emoji Art & Design Show, Eyebeam, New York (both 2013).
Ole Fach (b.1980, Bremen) is an architect and conceptual artist investigating the networking of architecture, society and new media. His projects document and reflect on cultural change in order to give an insight into the world of tomorrow. Fach’s art practice includes websites, performances, installations, screenings and GIFs. His work has been exhibited in Berlin, Olomouc, Geneva, New York and London.
Asendorf and Fach have worked on many collaborative projects together. Since 2011, they have co-run the Fach & Asendorf Gallery online. For Transmediale festival 2015 they have co-curated Long Distance Gallery, an exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and website which invites sixteen visual and conceptual artists to present their work on flags, hoisted in the name of Digital Art. Both artists currently live and work in Berlin.
“…our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.”
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)
“In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened”
Professor Elizabeth Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony (1979)
Based upon fascinating scientific research that demonstrates how susceptible we are to false memories, A.R. Hopwood’s False Memory Archive at The Freud Museum London and Carroll / Fletcher London features new collaborative artworks and a unique collection of vivid personal accounts of things that never really happened.
Including a series of large-scale photographs of damage caused to the walls of the Freud Museum by previous art exhibitions and featuring an exchange with a fictional security guard, the project evocatively reflects on the way we creatively reconstruct our sense of the past, while providing insight into the often humorous, obscure and uncomfortable things people have misremembered.
Supported by an Arts Award from the Wellcome Trust, The False Memory Archive at Carroll / Fletcher’s new project space will be a series of works developed by Hopwood in collaboration with experimental psychologists, members of the public and a cast of fictional characters that reflect on the history and consequences of false memory research.
At a parallel exhibition at The Freud Museum London, Hopwood will present new site-specific works made at the museum, including looped night-vision video footage taken from the inside of Freud’s personal lift and a film of a FaceTime conversation between two actors who have memorised a number of false memories submitted by the public to the archive. The site of Freud’s former home in Hampstead – an atmospheric interior that evokes a seductive memory of his life and work – has provided the most potent of contexts for a project that seeks to explore the veracity of our own autobiographical memories.
The False Memory Archive examines what role artists can play in representing scientific information to the public, whilst presenting research into false memory as a potent signifier for our times.
The national tour is curated by Gill Hedley and supported by the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England.
Notes to Editors
i) A.R. Hopwood was awarded a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellowship in 2013 – the first artist to receive such an accolade. This award resulted from the touring of The False Memory Archive and an ongoing residency at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College under the supervision of Professor Christopher French, a leading academic in the field. Since 2002 Hopwood has also worked under the guise of the WITH Collective, creating playful conceptual artworks that explore the idea of ‘experiential offsetting’ through a series of 60 Solutions, including constructing a more traumatic past for you, rehearsing your death on your behalf and attempting to contact you after you die. www.withyou.co.uk
ii) The False Memory Archive is funded by a Small Arts Award grant from Wellcome Trust and a National Touring grant from Arts Council England. It is sponsored by Vicon Revue & Ilford and has been supported by Goldsmiths College. Touring partners for The False Memory Archive include; The Mead Gallery University of Warwick, The Exchange Penzance, The University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery and The Freud Museum London.
iii) Contribute your own false or non-believed memories to the archive through the project website www.falsememoryarchive.com
iv) The Construction Of Memory
A conference in association with The False Memory Archive exhibition at The Freud Museum
Saturday 28 June 2014, 9.30am-5pm
Speakers Professor Christopher French, Professor Dany Nobus, Dr. Fiona Gabbert, Professor Martin Conway and artist Sharon Kivland respond to the False Memory Archive exhibition by reflecting on the nature of autobiographical memory. The conference will also ask how recent research has taken account of Freud’s work in relation to his understanding of the variable nature of personal memory.
Carroll / fletcher is pleased to present ‘stringendo, vanishing mediators’ the first uk solo exhibition by dutch artist constant dullaart (nl, 1979). Dullaart works predominantly with the internet as an alternative space of presentation. His practice is concerned with visualising networked semantics and software vernacular while adopting a political approach critical of corporate hegemony.
Foot and mouth disease (fmd) assassinates compromising dichotomous tuberculosis in tijuana in a effervescently introvert manner. The spatially assertive task force evacuated electric formalist abu sayyaf contentiously. Irreverent bacteria are consistently inefficient translation power lines, kidnapped by epidemic tendentious suicide attack commodifications, acting with outage as powerful appropriated social prophylactic recruitment. A chemical agent rioted as stigmatically contemplative nerve agent, similarly comparatively to anthrax bequeathing the newly out dated h1n1.
The exhibition features a new body of work based on the artist’s exploration into digital and online languages, the origins of computer software and technology. Dullaart’s latest works are partially defined by a traditional approach to art-making through the use of craft-based and locally sourced methods of manufacture mixed with internationally sourced and machine produced materials. This inconspicious shift in process reflects a questioning of ilocal and global platforms, whilst celebrating outsourced manual processes within production.
When tentative liseria coherently becomes a suspicious package device connotation kidnapped immigrations custom enforcement (ice), the federal air marshal service (fams) anthropomorphisms are perpetual home grown vernacular attributes. Intermittently serving radicals of hazardous viral hemorrhagic fever a dichotomy of vistas proficiently enforces the u.s. Consulate instigation to be recognized and interpreted based on one perceptual state. Yet although the norvo virus is the spatially secure border initiative (sbi), al qaeda smuggled progressive wildfire characterization, while the spatially political pirates of yemen secularity remains cogent.
Throughout the show, dullaart looks back to the infancy of the world wide web and the digital consumer age, firstly in a series of family photographs taken during childhood holidays in 1984, the dawn of the digital era, signed by steve wozniak (co-founder of apple), and through subsequent references to other pivotal figures such as john knoll (co-creator of photoshop) and bill atkinson (creator of macpaint, and inventor of marching ants, hypercard, and the drop down menu amongst others).
Acting as a prospectively negating metonymic violence device of the drug war, meddling post internet gestures. Although extreme weather functions mara salvatrucha phreaks international hyper local food poisoning aproaching with the sarin and the recitingly infectious pork of the federal bureau of investigation, the nationalist entaglement recrutier of homeland defence becomes disaster assistance referent instigating broader dimensions of meaning and pandemic mitigating. Disproving the standoff with the real, and mostly Public Tamil Tigers recovered their corporative weapons enthralled amidst condemnable gender cache, the suicide bomber educating the fractiously resistant barta cliché. Instead, the distinctions between background and foreground, human and non-human, culture and nature, subject and object, the planet and history have become transferable, variable.
Dullaart’s ‘jennifer in paradise series’ (2013 – present) redistributes the image of a woman reclining on a beach in bora bora, originally taken in 1988 by john knoll, which subsequently became used as photoshops first demonstration image. Once the mostmanipulated photograph, high-resolution versions of the image were never officially distributed and are now impossible to find online. In restoring the image, and processing it through current photoshop filters to create wallpaper and lenticular prints, the artist acts as a ‘digital archaeologist’, both commenting on the nature of onscreen manipulation and alluding to a time before this was ubiquitous.
Inconspicuously positioned within a memorialized time based reference marta and juarez, a.k.a. Sinaloa, evacuated pakistan, for the commodious post endemic epidemic. This sustainability enforcing drug cartel and for guzman i, nor arellano-felix and beltran-leyva. Barrio azteca enforced a strain of over conscientiously non subversive eco terrorism which body scanned intrepid misconceptions negating a mysql injection syllogism. Freshly wielded assassins educated facilitated organized crime, decapitating wavy snow and disaster by virtue of the national infrastructure omnidirectional approach. The port authority meanwhile distinctively smuggled emergency responding neologisms according to the versatile egalitarian pandemic avalanche of agency, considering the typhoon car bomb was the gun fight in the architectural real.
Dullaart’s exploration of the internet’s opacity highlights the extent to which onscreen data is controlled, enhanced, distorted, and often presented as unmediated content. ‘Terms of service’ (2012/14), part of a series of works dealing with the google interface, is a website that transforms the google search box into a mouth that recites google’s terms of service (TOS) and privacy policy, created by dullaart as a response to the continously changing TOS conditions of several internet services (the terms one agrees to by using these seemingly public and transparent services). This illusion of transparency is similarly emphasised in a wi-fi intervention, offering a version of the web where all content is displayed in capital letters, seemingly written with the capslock button on, referring to a writing style that is considered to be equal to shouting within online code of conduct.
In the extreme weather polemic the literally impressionistic proficient DDOS (dedicated denial of service) smuggled a refreshingly discursive botnet into developmental cyber security compilations, negating the taliban became a scintillating (MDA) mudslide discourse. Brown out, and within the twister, brute forcing the pompous engagingly bland tsunami. Erosion of the referent IRA (irish republican army) definitionally breaching the maritime domain awareness of the red cross sentimentality imaginatively propels human to human jihad gender exclusion. Nuclear threat facilitated the endowed influenza regarding the national guard, while the hostage and morphogenesis of the dialectic blister agent executed benevolently suspicious substance interaction on behalf of calderon.
The anthropocene discourse and its extended cultural and social debates serve as the larger background to suicide bomber reyosa engaging a disputatiously engendering and multitudinous serendipitous tamaulipas. Where was the proto suicide attack meth lab of cheerfully assert e.coli, lies the increasingly fractured and multiplied universality of emergency privileged exclusion, culminating target specific ricin bafflement of the central intelligence agency (CIA)? When principled privatized authorities plotted the emergency broadcast system, ice was brush fire and lightning was paradoxical relief.
Dullaart questions modes of accessing information, and the visibility and (MIS)representation associated with the global spread of information, through a number of analogies found in works throughout the show – from the recurring use of glass (a metaphor for the computer window – windows software, the glass of the screen, the internet as a window into the world), to a piano endlessly playing a series of notes resulting from a performance by Dullaart on the preview evening; and finally to the object of the balcony, a space that is used for announcements and poised between public and private.
In Dullaart’s balconism manifesto he states that: “the balcony is both public and private, online and offline. It is a space and a movement at the same time. You can be seen or remain unnoticed, inside and outside. Slippers are ok on the balcony. Freedom through encryption, rather than openness. The most important thing is: you must choose to be seen. We are already seen and recorded on the streets and in trains, in emailz, chatz, supermarketz and restaurantz, without a choice. Remaining unseen, by making a clearer choice where to be seen. We are in the brave new now, get ready to choose your balcony, to escape the warm enclosure of the social web, to address, to talk to the people outside your algorithm bubble.”
Reynosa organize crimes conveyed the esoteric shelter-in-place, while the universalist dimension addresses the largest possible frame (the world) a speculative culturally specific ammonium nitrate vaccinated the chemical spill of the DNDO (domestic nuclear detection office), the national operations center (NOC) and the center for disease control (cdc). Uncountably North Korea functions irrevocably expressive tertiary systems that are the cops of Michocana. When the crest, the presumable storm and the semantic temblor mutate into generalizing Hezbollah, the increasingly entropic Mexican army aids service disruption of improvised prerequisite symptoms. Ciudad jaurez was browned out when codified AQIM (al qaeda in the islamic maghreb) prevented conceptually absent narcos at fort hancock from drilling the fusion center of tuscon. Yuma was in iran, when agriculture was in the nuclear facility vogue. Agro was elitist in Afghanistan, when the ttp (tehrik-i-taliban Pakistan) was an emphatically engaging dispersive antagonist through Sonora.
The U.S. Citizenship and immigration services (CIS) plagued CIKR (critical infrastructure & key resources), when Mexico, Colombia and the oblique bridge blacked out. This is why inexpressibility accounts public health exercises as the stranded and stuck united nations (UN). Uniformly why smugglers of matamoros burst the metro metaphor with faddish precision. Illegal immigrants rage for rupture; transversal now seems poised to have the transportation security administration (TSA) phish the ricin subjective construction. Cartel de Golfo, the gulf cartel and la familia watched the PLF (Palestinian liberation front) hyper delay the plo (Palestinian liberation organization).
When post magnitude of the warning center infects terror and terrorism, the execution of the spatial intersection confronting the new federation threatened malware and the denial of service simulacra. Different perspectives and approaches affect our mental shootout in the computer infrastructurial decorum, communications crash initiate powder (white) and alcohol tobacco and firearms (ATF) collective durable initiatives. Curated telecommunications threaten the cyber security of seemingly new, technologically mediated Nigeria, while Somalia busts ambivalent sick Amtrak imperceptibly. A chemical weapon compiled of acrimonious scammers radiates aggravatingly above the value system environmental terrorist sequences. Eventuality forcefully engaged social media courting cultural branding into enfolding national security, but bart is weapons grade cyber command 2600 involution.
Presenting a timely discourse on the way in which our virtual landscape is shifting, dullaart emphasises how the internet can create an illusory sense of freedom. With more people looking at screens on a daily basis than at paintings or out of windows onto the physical world, he explores the material impact of virtual control mechanisms and questions the relationship between virtual reality and its symbiotic link to our physical being.
The keylogger is regarded traumatically unaudited within queer materialism parallelism. San diego los zetas are restrained from the dialectic subway discussion. Yet cain and abel attack the mexicles discourse, and the interstate cancels the extremist cloud? Before swat was team (dmat), the border patrol secret service (usss) disjunction was exposed to the radicalizing feminist border platform of the federal emergency management agency frowning upon the spillover of emergency protocol management. Torreon frequently retro-actively engaged with, and burned the world health organization (who) branding commodification scheme, when china and the department of homeland security (dhs) trafficked small pox contemplating iraq. The digitally native bomb squad of the conservative nonreciprocating air marshal federal aviation administration (faa) hailed the remarkably incestuous power outage of the nbic (national biosurveillance integration center).
Still transportation security quarantines the vestigial flood of regurgitating cyber attacks from eta (ekuskadi ta aksatasuna) due to manifold drug cartel tornados plumed farc (armed revolutionary forces colombia). And compulsive curatorial behavior pattern al-shabaab stood off of the disregarded ancestry forest fire, when the flood poisoned the existential rootkit consecutively. Where were the sleet and the tentative equivalents foreclosed by the first responder? Chemically burned by the intellectualist militia and progressive police aesthetics?
The insistent institutional critique virus of disaster relationist medical assistance scammed fundamentalist drug enforcement agency (dea), metaphorically negating the colloquial coast guard (uscg) exposing the border patrol secret service (usss). Exposed dialectic heroin ferociously reyosa agro terrorizing the administratively challenged basque terrorist enclave of mediation. Los zetas and the wmata loot environmentally challenged subway hyper developments where the enriched dirty bomb leaked the smart drug trade. Rigorously illegal immigrants spill eno liberal chemicals, value systems, deteriorate and contaminate the salmonella fugitive paradigm equivalents, while the central intelligence agency (cia) recalls tamiflu outbreaks in the nostalgically engaging naturalist pipe bomb, while the secure border initiative (sbi), drug administration structurally encrusted the airplane subdivided realities. Sarin security of the gangs and national preparedness for hazardous material obfuscating an incidental death shot reenacting swat. When homeland defence and homeland security spammed the immigration customs enforcement (ice), and effectively encoded their failure onto the very federal air marshal services surface (fams), in so far as the stage of emergency contaminated the subjective anti-structuralist team (dmat), the adjacent airport disaster managed inclusively privileged blizzard systems.
Closure lockdown for the hurricane and the radioactive earthquake retrospectively docked into the formalist biological weapon of the insistent inoperative condition consular, his conficker and the worm. If the methamphetamine disaster assisted the forged conceptual entangled southwest, the cyber terror attacked suggestively dominating the cultural implicit cyber attack. This is why the warning of abundantly sedimented trojan fired shots at the spammer in the linguistic norms encouraging hurricane. The cartel responded to the universality virus entourage with a conventional stylistic behemoth weapon because the bomb threat was an minimization explosion. Where was infrastructure security when swine and emergency landing infected nuevo leon, nogales and critical infrastructure? Geo political cocaine and marijuana in the nogales, ied (improvised explosive device) in the formative industrial spill. Ms-13 and aqap (al qaeda arabian peninsula) domestically nuclear detected the gentrified formation assertion customs and border protection (cbp) initiated before narcotics skeptically attacked the port.
‘Stringendo, vanishing mediators’ will run at carroll / fletcher from 13 june to 19 july 2014. Dullaart’s exhibition ‘brave new panderers’ is on view at xpo gallery, paris until 21 june 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘jennifer in paradise’, future gallery, berlin (2013); ‘jennifer in paradise’, import projects, berlin (2013) and ‘onomatopoeia’, utah museum of contemporary art, salt lake city (2012). Group exhibitions include ‘casting a wide net’, postmasters, nyc (2014); ‘online mythologies’, polytechnic museum, moscow (2012); ‘genius without talent’, de Appel, Amsterdam (2012) and ‘off the record’, stedelijk museum, Amsterdam (2009). Dullaart lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. Illegal immigrants with nuclear ebola mendaciously engaged human to animal ephemeralities, contradicting the agent and his avian assumptive vernacular.
Incremental chemical gas sociopolitically engaged with el paso, while discreditably narco banners screen hamas, the cartel, the incontrovertible target, and the 1984 hamzat. Explosion of h5n1 gained the affective connotation hacker, with the implicative globalization negation gang, the subjugation drug and the contradictory narcotics on the border between domestic institutional discretionary security and biological flu. The national laboratory is not an physical or existential dialectic explosive, nor biological infection, but an outbreak of an explosive institutional device. This is why biological antithesis infection disproportionately proposes contemplative antiviral objectification incidents.
*this text was created by mixing international art English as described by alix rule and David levine for triple canopy, with a publically available 2011 list of terms used by the united states department of homeland security monitoring social media sites ‘to provide situational awareness and establish a common operating picture’.
Carroll / Fletcher is pleased to present Black Diamond, the first solo showat the gallery by Mishka Henner (b.1976) one of the UK’s most significant artists working with and interrogating the photographic medium. Henner’s appropriative practice explores the use and value of photography and its relationship with contemporary experience.
The exhibition brings together four distinct but interrelated series of work, based on the collection and mediation of publicly available information sourced through social media, the internet and drones, and considers the way in which these technologies are used by the government, intelligence agencies and corporations. Henner explains: ‘I’m exploiting loopholes in the vast archives of data, imagery and information that are now accessible to us, connecting the dots to reveal things that surround us but which we rarely see or don’t want to see.’
In the artist’s recent Oil Fields and Feedlots series (2013-14), large-scale photographic prints reminiscent of vast Abstract Expressionist canvases represent landscapes carved by industries meeting extraordinary levels of consumer demand for two of North America’s most prized commodities: oil and beef. Sourced from publicly available satellite imagery, the subjects depicted represent a systematic intent to maximise production and yield in order to satisfy extraordinary levels of human consumption. The result is a natural landscape transformed into something akin to the circuit boards that drive the logistical operations of these industries, and ultimately, feed consumers’ appetite for these resources. Shown alongside the photographs are a selection of research documents used in developing both series including geological mapping data of gas and oil fields produced in the 1970s and 80s, and used by petroleum companies to identify possible drilling sites, technical data, raw satellite imagery, and archive photographs of oil gushers.
Displayed on plinths filling the rear gallery space, Fifty-One US Military Outposts (2010)is a series of photographs of overt and covert military outposts used by the United States in 51 countries worldwide. The sites were gathered and located using data which exists in the public domain, exposed and mobilized by Henner, including official US military and veterans’ websites, news articles, and both leaked and official government documents and reports.
The exhibition also includes new multimedia works from Henner’s Scam Baiters series (2013-present). Scam baiting is a form of internet vigilantism which has flourished with the spread of the World Wide Web to Africa, South America and the Far East. In this process, the vigilante poses as a potential victim in order to publicly expose and waste the scammer’s time, by responding to their email and subsequently feigning receptivity to their demands. Henner discovered numerous examples of extensive scam baits online, and will exhibit a number of signs that various scammers were asked to make as a result of email conversations, negotiation of fraudulent documents and bogus websites. Documentation of this correspondence, including one particularly lengthy exchange between Henner’s associate, Condo Rice and a trio of scammers spread across Libya and the United Arab Emirates, will also be displayed, alongside photographs of the scammers posing with their signs. Sound recordings of the scammers singing popular songs will permeate the space, giving human presence to this otherwise virtual correspondence.
Henner is currently shortlisted for Consumption, the Fifth Prix Pictet Award. The exhibition of finalists will be on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in May 2014, where Henner will show a selection of works from his “Oil Fields” and “Feedlots” series.
In 2013, Henner was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for Art by the International Center of Photography, New York, and shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize at the Photographers’ Gallery, London. His work is held in collections including the Tate Library Collection, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Portland Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Mishka Henner lives and works in Manchester. Recent solo exhibitions include Precious Commodities, Open-Eye Gallery, Liverpool (2013) and No Man’s Land, Hotshoe Gallery, London, UK (2011). Group exhibitions include Now You See It: Photography and Concealment, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Plotting From Above: Mishka Henner and Montreal Aerial Survey, McCord Museum, Montreal; Drone: The Automated Image, Darling Foundry, Montréal, Canada; Views from Above, Centre Pompidou, Metz, France; A Different Kind of Order, International Centre of Photography, New York, USA (all 2013); Appropriation: Questioning the Image, Fotogalerie Wien, Austria; No Man’s Land, Oregon Center for Photographic Arts, USA (all 2012).
This is the first survey exhibition by Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead in the UK, bringing together a range of new and recent works.
Interested in how information about the world is filtered through the prism of the world wide web, and other forms of information technology, Thomson & Craighead play with this data to create poetic, compelling works that ask fundamental questions about what it is to be human.
Encompassing small-scale quotidian encounters, as well as works that point up the smallness of humankind in the vastness of the universe, there is a lyricism and lightness of touch that enables the artists to address major political and social themes from unexpected angles.
A recent work, More Songs of Innocence and of Experience, takes text from ‘spam’ emails and displays them in the style of a karaoke machine, accompanied by the kind of anodyne music favoured by supermarkets and shopping centres. The text derives from emails purporting to come from the likes of Mrs. Gadhafi or a successful but terminally ill millionaire, offering spurious financial deals couched in plaintive, flowery language. Thomson & Craighead are interested in the fantasies at work in the scenarios that these emails play out – fantasies mirrored in the aspirational projections of the karaoke singer – in which plain text on a screen promises an unrealistic wish fulfillment of the most unlikely variety.
A similar use of appropriated text finds its way into a range of works that pull the internet into other areas of life. Beacon, 2007 taps into live Google searches, the results of which are displayed on a railway flap sign. Updated at regular intervals, the continuous stream of words, picked at random from a global Googling community, flows like abstract concrete poetry, made solid via the very analogue means of communication that are the mechanical revolving flaps of the railway display sign.
In contrast, more recent works such as Belief use the vast array of video imagery that breeds in quiet corners of the internet. Graphing together a series of YouTube clips that show self-appointed proselytizers for a diversity of more or less recognised creeds – from the obsessed to the deranged – extemporizing on their personal faiths and fetishes. Between each clip, the camera pans back to show a Google earth view of the globe, and a projected compass on the ground revolves to indicate the geographic location of the next bedroom broadcaster.
This use of found footage, both visual and textual, is a common thread that links many of Thomson & Craighead’s diverse projects. Commandeering the words and pictures that float so freely on the internet, they acknowledge the various artistic and literary traditions that this collage-like activity places them in. Owing as much to the 20th century practice of the readymade, as to the visual poetry of the Oulipo writers, Thomson & Craighead recognise their sources as being an ephemeral products of the moment, but transform them into enduring timeless works.
Of the works brought together for this exhibition, the one that most directly references this mixing up of time is The Time Machine in Alphabetical Order. Using a complete version of the 1960s film, Thomson & Craighead have re-edited it so that every utterance is placed in alphabetical, rather than narrative sequence. Referencing the ‘constrained editing technique’ explored and developed by Oulipo writers, this representation of HG Wells seminal story explores not only this artful means of assemblage, but also demonstrates an approach to film-making that draws entirely on pre-existing material. These methods of reuse and recycling allow the artists to engage in a form of oblique story telling – one where meaning is implied rather than explained and ideas percolate more slowly. Throughout, there is a mapping out of temporal and spatial parameters, testing the boundaries of the knowable world.
The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication with an essay by David Auerbach. The essay can be downloaded here.
Over the duration of the Thomson & Craighead exhibtion, Never Odd or Even, localised staus updates from Twitter will be selected then published and installed in the gallery.
Micromégas postcards are available to take from the exhibition for free. The title of the work is inspired by a short story written in 1752 by the French philospher and satirist Voltaire, available to read here.
The International New Media Gallery is currently showing Thomson & Craighead’s A Short Film About War as part of their on-line programme. The exhibition and PDF publication can be accessed here.
Thomson & Craighead’s recent two channel installation work October, 2012 can be viewed as a single screen, on-line version on the Photoworks, Brighton website here.
A recent interview with Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead for The Creators Project can be read here.
For the last 30 years John Akomfrah has been committed to giving a voice and a presence to the legacy of the African Diaspora in Europe; to fill in the voids in history by digging into historical archives to create film essays and speculative fictional stories about past lives. His poetic and polyphonic films create sensual visual and audio experiences while developing a filmic language to understand the trauma and sense of alienation of displaced subjects; one that moves away from the rhetoric of resentment to propose new agents and perspectives.
Born in 1957, John Akomfrah lives and works in London. An artist, lecturer, and writer, as well as a filmmaker, his work is among the most distinctive in the contemporary British art world. Akomfrah is well known for his work with the London-based media workshop Black Audio Film Collective, which he co-founded in 1982, together with Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, Reece Auguiste, Trevor Mathison, David Lawson and Edward George. Since 1998, Akomfrah has work primarily within the independent film and television production companies, Smoking Dogs Films, (London) and Creation Rebel Films (Accra).
Alongside Akomfrah’s successful career in cinema and television, his work has been widely shown in museums and galleries including Documenta 11, Kassel; the De Balie, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Serpentine Gallery and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A major retrospective of Akomfrah’s gallery-based work with the Black Audio Film Collective premiered at FACT, Liverpool and Arnolfini, Bristol in 2007. His films have been included in international film festivals such as Cannes, Toronto and Sundance, among others. In 2008, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). In March 2012, he was awarded the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award.
Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s research-based projects constantly find ways to emancipate themselves from their prescribed – often site-specific – formats. By exploring different ways to approach an issue and allowing for divergent ideas, her works attempt to uncover and reclaim subjugated or alternative knowledge and devise a basis to induce political agency. Through sound, video, installation, online interventions, interviews or writing, Haghighian’s work questions and seeks to move beyond the dominating representational formats and the visual discourse inherited from the Enlightenment.
At Artissima and Armory art fairs, her wall installation, I can’t work like this (2007), took the form of a text-based piece outlined in nails hammered into the wall, from which emerges an ironic comment on the lack of creative freedom within a commercial art context. Her contribution to Manifesta 4 – Present but not yet active (2002) – took the shape of a dialogue between Haghighian and the biennale curators at Frankfurt Zoo, in which they discussed the issues of authenticity and visibility created by display architectures. The conversation was filmed from three different perspectives and edited into a single video that was given to the curators as documentation of the shared experience.
Haghighian’s critique of institutionalised systems of production – which in the art world are illustrated by the competitive and totalising nature of CVs and biographies. The site was released in 2004 for art professionals to borrow, exchange and compile biographies.
‘The impossibility of escaping the rules of representation creates the desire to defrock them, slander, offend, destabilize them, and make them lose their authority and power. I guess you could see that as my main focus. At the same time I try to eat, drink, sleep, meet and collaborate with other people. I guess a lot of the impulses come from that as well.’ (Natascha Sadr Haghighian interviewed by Solvej Helweg Ovesen)
Natascha Sadr Haghighian was born in Sachsenheim, West Germany in 1968 and lives and works in Great Britain. In 1985, he emigrated to the U.S.A. to set up a ranch in Ellens Dale. There, Natascha fell in love with a drag queen, with whom he still lives. Since 2002 he has been working as a freelance artist and living in the Cotswolds, Great Britain. Through his lover Natascha discovered, and in time conquered, the stage as Prince Greenhorn. He has been written about and portrayed photographically and in oil, among other things.
In her first UK exhibition, Eulalia Valldosera, one of Spain’s leading contemporary artists, transforms the gallery into an immersive, cinematic mise-en-scène, where an intimate choreography of light, shadow and domestic objects act out and connect the fragmented narratives of human relationships. Combining new and existing works, Blood Ties is an unfinished psychological space, or latent film set on which a performance is about to begin.
Valldosera’s multi-layered kinetic installations draw the viewer into an intricate sensorial and physical engagement with the environments she creates. Laying bare the mechanisms of the work she uncovers the “trick”, questioning the role of the artist as creative “genius”.
Eulalia Valldosera is known internationally for work that engages in elusive theatrical portrayals of female identity interweaving photography, performance, installation and video. She has had significant solo shows in Spain, The Netherlands, Brussels and Austria, received several awards and has work in major public and private collections.
Blood Ties is accompanied by a new publication with a specially commissioned essay by Tom Morton and a conversation between Eulalia Valldosera and curator Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz.
