Claire Tolan

Berlin Community Radio @ Boat Rage #4, Jul 2

1 July 2016

Berlin Community Radio (BCR) is taking part in Boat Rage #4 at Berlin’s Blue-Star sightseeing boat at Märkisches Ufer 34 on July 2.

The event, happening as part of the 9th Berlin Biennale (BB9) programme, will feature artists from the Berlin-based broadcaster’s recent BCR Incubator programme, supporting Berlin-based “emerging electronic music talents with a special focus on underrepresentedd and marginalised voices”.

The artists selected from the open call include Bonaventure, who will present a live set in collaboration with artist Hannah Black, a DJ set by Rui Ho and performance by Hanne Lippard and Claire Tolan.

See the Berlin Biennale website for details.**

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‘At the Backend’: an AQNB x Video in Common screening rundown

16 May 2016

With new systems and infrastructures come new ways of organising information, new ways of thinking, of coming together. In light of this notion, AQNB editor Jean Kay, and Video in Common (ViC) founder Caroline Heron visited London’s Assembly Point, with an event called ‘At the Backend’, last Friday, May 6, to contemplate the theme of the Peckham gallery’s three-week Tableaux programme, in a very literal interpretation of its dictionary.com definition being, “a picture, as of a scene.”

‘At the Backend’ followed on from the ‘The Future Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed’ screening at Berlin’s Import Projects in March by considering AQNB‘s forthcoming website upgrade, and the questions and developments that emerge when reformulating the categories, formats and frameworks for presenting information to an international audience. We examined the work of some artists within our global network that somehow addressed or embodied these semiotic shifts that come with networked communication, and its influence on community-building and identity-formation.

These included AQNB/ViC editorial video commissions by two Berlin-based artists —’ASMR-tist’ Claire Tolan discussing her practice born from the YouTube community concerned with the Auto Sensory Meridian Response phenomenon, and Anna Zett talking about constructing and editing narratives around an initial claim into video. Helsinki-based artist Kimmo Modig contributed a  video—consisting of outtakes from sessions leading up to a work presented as part of curator Valentina Fois‘  The Utopia Internet Dystopia pavilion at last year’s The Wrong biennale —especially for AQNB, as a response to the affective labour and techniques of YouTube celebrities.

Encyclopedia Inc., ‘Yellowcake’ (2015). Courtesy the artists.
Encyclopedia Inc., ‘Yellowcake’ (2015). Installation detail. Courtesy the artists.

Los Angeles-based collective Encyclopedia Inc. shared two videos that illustrate a widely varied approach to their ongoing interest in uranium. The symbolic and physical properties of radiation becomes the sole anchor of a responsive, research-based practice that eschews any drive towards a single identifiable aesthetic or mode of working.

Ashley Angelus Ashley presented a live reading of her religious poetry via Skype from her base in Philadelphia. That was followed by a Q&A where she discussed her shapeshifting practice and still-evolving sense of self in an often oppressive digital regime that has negatively exposed her as an artist, writer and person too young. Ashley continues to actively evade identification while exploring the parallels between, and ritual practice of institutionalised religion and popular culture. Meanwhile, collectives like Johannesburg’s CUSS Group passively confuse and elude classification within global (see: western) internet convention, by promoting misinformation through inaction when it comes to readings and representations of their work outside of their own self-presentation. Taking footage appropriated from artist-musician Dean Blunt‘s 2014 ‘DEF Freestyle‘ single and re-presenting it in a pop-up exhibition from the back of a car as part of their Video Party series in Johannesburg, Geneva-based co-founder Ravi Govender discussed the groups disinterest in regulating the distribution of their work and identity outside of their own context, in opposition to the hyper-constructed artistic identity of an artist like Dean Blunt. Rather than try to be understood within a proscribed informational system, CUSS Group dismiss its authority entirely.

Below are the full videos, excerpts (and video stills) of the films and readings presented in their running order:

Claire Tolan: ‘Thinking Systems (ASMR)’ (2016) video. [6:55 min]

Berlin-based artist Claire Tolan discusses YouTube-born phenomenon ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) and how it informs her art practice. From mixing ASMR sounds on the radio to organising live ASMR Karaoke events, Tolan’s work and interests are centred on how strangers come together online and communities are formed alongside new technologies.

Anna Zett: ‘Theory of Everything’, p.1 (2016) video. [7:02 min]

Berlin-based artist Anna Zett talks about gathering empirical evidence of the attitudes and perspectives surrounding her chosen subjects, including dinosaurs, boxing and the brain. Prior to her most recent video work, ‘Circuit Training’ (2015), Zett’s impressive “modern research drama” ‘This Unwieldy Object’ (2014) saw her dealing in the construction of raw data into meaningful narratives along existing ideological lines.

Ashley Angelus Ashley, ‘BITCH/BITCH’ (2016) poetry reading

Philadelphia-based artist Ashley Angelus Ashley seeks to reconcile her religious poetry with the social experience of exploitation and oppression. Taken from the position of what she calls a “sexually androgynous Catholic woman”, Ashley presents a live poetry reading via Skype, covering the stigmatization of gender nonconformity, ritualized humiliation, the sex industry, internalized misogyny, and biological control.

https://www.aqnb.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/fromBITCHBITCHAshleyAngelusAshley.pdf

Encyclopedia Inc.: ‘Yellowcake’ (2015) [1:25 min], ‘Fukushima, Mon Amour’ (2016) [3:34]

LA-based collective Encyclopedia Inc. –Carlye Packer, Googie Karrass and Nicholas Korody –is a research-based project that interrogates the inherited western idea of an object in isolation. In a continually evolving, process-driven practice that questions notions of art and information as self-evident, the group has produced publications, videos and installations reflecting a conceptual approach to the lived reality of ecological enmeshment, with uranium at its core.

Encyclopedia Inc., ‘Fukushima, Mon Amour’ (2016). Video still. Courtesy the artists.
Encyclopedia Inc., ‘Fukushima, Mon Amour’ (2016). Video still. Courtesy the artists.

Kimmo Modig: ‘KIMMOTALKS’ (2016) [9:26]

Helsinki-based artist Kimmo Modig deconstructs the languages and systems surrounding labour and production by both mimicking and destabilising an audience’s conception of capital flows in its various forms. Modig performs his own anxieties and sense of precarity in relation to the existing lexicons of communication media –like video, marketing and sound design –thus laying bare the oppression and authority implicit in the restrictive social paradigms they reinforce.

Cuss Group: ‘Video Party #4’ (2014) [8:22 min]

Johannesburg and Geneva-based collective Cuss Group –Ravi Govender, Jamal Nxedlana Zamani Xolo, Lex Trickett, Bogosi Sekhukhuni and Chris Mc Michael  –have been working as a dispersed group of artists and practitioners on the margins of not only a South African art market indifferent to video as a medium, but a globalised online network of artists still focussed on traditional Western economic centres. But instead of applying for impossible access to these systems and flows of information, Cuss Group passively evade legibility within existing colonial structures surrounding art and aesthetics.

AQNB x Video in Common’s ‘At the Backend’ event was on at London’s Assembly Point, May 6, 2016.

 

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Claire Tolan: ‘Thinking Systems (ASMR)’, p.2

2 February 2016

“I really expected it to kind of drown itself in a while”, says artist Claire Tolan about her ongoing research, interest and interaction with the YouTube-born practice and neologism ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response).

In the second of two videos exploring the Berlin-based artist’s work –as part of our ongoing video series made in collaboration with Video in Common aqnb joins Tolan in talking about developing her work, from mixing ASMR sounds live on air for a regular show at Berlin Community Radio called ‘You’re Worth It’ to applying a growing archive to her ringtone database Shush Systems and live ASMR Karaoke events. 

 Spending three-months in London last year on the Perlin Noise Residency, Tolan not only developed Shush Systems but teamed up with fellow SPACE residency artist Kei Kreutler to develop Second Foundation – a reading group and events series that explores practices of cybernetic pedagogy. It’s loosely based on a shared interest in veteran media artist Roy Ascott’s Groundcourse programme and precipitated in two major live performances –one by Tolan supporting Holly Herndon at Oval Space and another with Kreutler launching Second Foundation at Goethe-Institut.

The latter Tolan describes as a sort of “social evening” or “ice breaker” in a physical space that models itself on interactions on the internet. It explores how strangers come together and communities are formed alongside new technologies: “it’s powerful to think about how we can use the potential of different kinds of communication”.**

Watch the video embedded above and see here for Part One.

___

Produced in partnership with Video in Common. This project has been made possible through the generous support of Arts Council England.

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Holly Herndon, Claire Tolan + Jam City @ Oval Space, Nov 4

2 November 2015

Holly Herndon curates a night for Illuminations’ fall series with Claire Tolan and Jam City, taking place at Oval Space on November 4.

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Tolan, Kreutler + [ SPACE ] @ Goethe-Institut, Oct 27

26 October 2015

Claire Tolan is joined by artist Kei Kreutler and [ SPACE ] for a party marking the first in a series of Second Foundation events and interventions, taking place at the Goethe-Institut on October 27.

The party—soirée, as it is called—comes as the first in the new Second Foundation series exploring “new structures of alternative pedagogy within the context of networked culture”. The evening is designed as a series of group activities like ASMR Karaoke, delegated drinking (??), chocolate fountains, and Groundcourse-inspired social experimentation.

The whole night is led by Tolan, Kreutler and [ SPACE ] acting as the “group leaders” and pays homage to Roy Ascott’s Groundcourse programme.

See the event page for details. **

Claire Tolan, 'You're Worth It' @ Berlin Community Radio.
Claire Tolan, ‘You’re Worth It’ @ Berlin Community Radio.
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Claire Tolan + Jeremy Hutchison @ [space] AT, Oct 1

30 September 2015

Claire Tolan and Jeremy Hutchison will be discussing their work and ideas at London’s [space] AT (The White Building) in a pilot version of a “new distributed curatorial framework” by Space called AGORA_IN_RETE_01 on October 1.

Described, as a “public arena for the pattern recognition and critical discussion of creative process and process-led practice”, the event will present a platform for exchange between the aforementioned Berlin- and London-based artists.

Tolan will be expanding on her work with ASMR as part of her Space Perlin Noise Residency, and Hutchison will be exploring the operation of capitalism in the production of subjectivity as a FEELing resident artist.

See the Space website for details.**

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Inger Wold Lund, ‘Riding so slowly it hurts’ (2015) audio tour

26 August 2015

“What is your favourite fantasy?” asks one of the nameless characters of Berlin-based Norwegian artist Inger Wold Lund‘s ‘Riding so slowly it hurts’ audio tour, downloadable online at s41.berlin (embedded below) with the password ‘Yes’ or ‘Ja’ from August 26. A woman’s voice, Lund’s, whispers erotic stories intended for an inner ear on a public train, Berlin’s S41 of the Ringbahn specifically. It’s a looping route in the shape of dog’s head that takes an hour and circles the A-zone “drawing a line around the city, you being placed on the outer edge”, according to the artist recording. “If you live in the city, it is likely that sitting on this train you are circling the people you know”.

‘Riding so slowly it hurts’ concerns those people you don’t know. Those faceless, nameless, sometimes genderless bodies that Lund and her listener encounter in a series of spoken vignettes observing and recounting not only sex with strangers but those small obsessions with hands, clothes, gestures, a dog, we might harbour alone and in private. Accompanied by sounds mixed and created by Claire Tolan as part of her Space Perlin Noise Residency in London, Lund’s breathy voice hovers over the flick of a lamp switch or the crunch of dead flowers. Tolan is an ASMR artist who explores the possibilities of said autonomous sensory meridian response phenomena on her ‘You’re Worth It‘ show on Berlin Community Radio and contributed a track to Holly Herndon‘s recent Platform album.

The ‘Riding so slowly it hurts’ soundtrack is a journey into the particularities of pleasure derived from things, a sort of object fetish that triggers the brain through what you can hear. “I like it when I discover needles from pine trees on my skin while in the city. What do you like the most?” **

Inger Wold Lund’s ‘Riding so slowly it hurts’ audio tour, with sounds by Claire Tolan, was published online on August 26, 2015.

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Holly Herndon @ Berghain, Jun 11

10 June 2015

Holly Herndon takes over Berlin’s Berghain with a night of live performances curated by the San Francisco artist this Thursday, June 11.

Presenting her second full-length album, Platform, through Rvng Intl. and 4AD record labels, CMT Festival and transmediale – festival for art and digital culture berlin have invited Herndon who, in turn, has invited a few of artists that have either contributed to Platform or explore similar themes of surveillance states, neo-feudalism and big data. 

Joining Herndon (also be performing live) is Berlin-based artist Claire Tolan with an Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) session, followed by Amnesia Scanner performing a special live version of their audioplay, ‘AS ANGELS RIG HOOK’, and “poem-producer” AGF performing “(if (is_true) 1 plus 2 = you”.

See the event page for details. **

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An interview with Holly Herndon

19 May 2015

“Are you doing anything internet-intensive right now?” Holly Herndon asks through Skype as she struggles with a new internet connection from her latest base in Los Angeles. The US-born but fairly peripatetic producer can’t hear, typing words into the chat window saying she’s only getting every second syllable. She heaves and grunts to give an impression of how it sounds, and it’s not unlike the hyperventilating whoops and howls of a song like ‘Chorus’. It’s the track that follows the first, ‘Interference’, on her second album Platform – out on RVNG Intl and 4AD on May 19 – and it’s one that explores the intimate relationship between a person and their laptop. Made up of sounds recorded from Herndon’s own computer’s processor – its inner life – ‘Chorus’ combines the clicks and currents of said device with her own voice that’s sampled, cut and filtered in a way that one could almost imagine how this electrically powered entity would actually hear.

“I’m kind of already spying on myself in that one”, she says about the early implications of the single and accompanying video by Akihiko Taniguchi released in January last year. It features browser windows, files and images, as well as webcam video and floating 3D renderings of searches for washing powder, pigeons and clothes pegs. “[It’s] spying on people in their very personal workspaces, and the very personal private spaces where they’re also spying online.” That was followed by the other side of stalking and being stalked beyond individuals to government surveillance and mass control via the networks we’re connected to in ‘Home’, released as another video in September. It’s one of two, produced with graphic designers Metahaven, along with Herndon’s long-time partner Mat Dryhurst, and a part of many other interdisciplinary collaborations on Platform including those with Colin Self (also of Chez Deep), Claire Tolan, Spencer Longo and Amnesia Scanner.

Metahaven x Holly Herndon, 'call.hollyherndon.com' (2014). Screen capture courtesy Metahaven.
Metahaven x Holly Herndon, ‘call.hollyherndon.com‘ (2014). Screen capture courtesy Metahaven.

“It gets really lonely in the studio, you know?” Herndon says matter-of-factly about a part of the reason she’s embraced the collective route to production. But it also gets like that in a world where the noose of social alienation and political oppression seems to tighten with every high-tech advancement. “I feel like people try to imbue technology with a specific agency,” Herndon, and by extension Platform, says, rebuking the suggestion that we have anyone (or more specifically, anything) to blame but ourselves when it comes to this current climate of what the album press release calls “systemic inequality, surveillance states, and neo-feudalism”. That’s why, in summoning the involvement of other artists, writers and thinkers, with a similarly active interest in the basic notion of human liberty, Platform becomes a musical manifesto of political resistance.

Literally having just flown in from a show in Chicago late that evening for her first night in her new home (“no need to use a camera, I’m still in my pyjamas”), Herndon is understandably exhausted. She switches Skype apps, between laptop and phone, struggles with her tangled earphones and own exhaustion to offer insight into our changing relationships with technology, agency and oppression, and how we as a community can adapt.

You’re working with all these people who are really dispersed geographically, would you say that there is some kind of shared intent, or aesthetic, or ideology between you and the artists that you’re working with in this particularly movement generally, or is there even a movement to speak of?

Holly Herndon: I don’t know if I necessarily want to call it a movement but I think that there’s definitely a shared proactivity. There’s criticality, but joined with optimism and proactivity.

Do you think that optimism is shared by many people or a specific set?

HH: That’s hard to say, I feel like I experience a lot of cynicism today and I feel like often when you show optimism, people can be very glib, and I don’t know, I find that really exhausting.

In being completely open about who you’re working with and also referencing, I’ve also been a little bit confused about how digital culture seems to work, or how it’s criticised for the fact that people just like lift stuff, take it out of context and don’t credit anyone…

HH: [laughing] That pretty much happens all the time.

But that always happened in literature, where people would reference something, probably not with the intention of claiming an idea, but it comes with the presumption that a reader would get it.

HH: I see that as a little bit different. Whenever I see those references in literature, it’s more like, ‘oh, ha, ha, I know you know and this is like a fun little witty thing’ and ‘oh i get where this reference is from’. It’s more like an intellectual game or something and I think that’s different from just like lifting someone’s idea [laughs].

Holly Herndon, Platform (2015) album cover by Metahaven.
Holly Herndon, Platform (2015) album cover by Metahaven.

There are artists out there who do that as their entire practice; appropriating work, reformulating and representing it as their own, without adding much, if anything, as some kind of pseudo-commentary, but not really critiquing it and just benefiting from it.

HH: I think our culture is rampant with people ‘pseudo’-criticising things and simply benefitting from them [laughs]. That like sums up the last… I often think that a lot of people do it under the guise of criticism without really criticising anything. I also think it’s a very ripe time for us to not necessarily just say, ‘oh, that’s bad and we all know. I know that you know’. It’s more interesting right now when people are like, ‘this thing is bad and so why not try this thing?’ I find that way more inspiring, when someone has an alternative idea instead of just poking fun at, or showing that they know something should be criticised. I feel like that’s what’s problematic about art, ‘creating this great problem’. Why can’t it be creating these great answers?

I remember you speaking at Unsound 2012 and saying that with technological development come new problems and new ways to solve them.

HH: Yeah, I mean, I don’t remember the context of that talk, it’s been so long but that sounds like it’s still very much in alignment with what I’m working with now. People sometimes like to think of technology as the problem, which is so bizarre.

There’s that quote where you say technology is and isn’t the problem…

HH: Well, I feel like people try to imbue technology with a specific agency, like ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and I don’t see it like that at all. I see it as more of a neutral, or just like an extension of human thought. It has everything that’s good and bad in human interaction because it’s a part of human intellectual thought.

Holly Herndon.
Holly Herndon.

So then does the existence of technology imbue a person with greater potential for destruction? Like the human that wields the gun is the problem, but the gun makes it easier to kill people.

HH: So you’re thinking about the gun metaphorically in terms of technology?

Yes.

HH: Oh my god [sighs heavily].

Sorry am I doing what you didn’t want me to do?

HH: [laughs] No. Yes, a gun is a technology, but this gets really specific into how certain technologies are regulated [laughs]. Yeah, the gun does make it easier to kill someone but I’m from the South and a hunting family, so I grew up with guns being used to make dinner.

That’s true.

HH: I also don’t believe in the NRA thing of everyone needs to be able to own a machine gun in the United States to really have personal liberty but, I guess, philosophically speaking, the gun doesn’t necessarily have agency. Of course, certain technology can be developed in a way that has been designed in a specific way, but if you look at the technology of the gun, it’s like the steel and the mechanics, that can be designed in a way that’s both positive and negative [laughs]. 

So if you’re looking at technology or the design of certain tools, you’re looking at something as basic as C++. It’s just a language, and that can be used in both a positive and negative way. That can be designed in a way to spy on you, or to protect your privacy.

You’ve lived in a few major cities already, and you’ve just relocated to LA from San Francisco, why do you move around so much?

HH: I’m so not tied to any one particular place. My partner grew up in Kuwait and he has been moving around since he was old enough to do so. I grew up in Tennessee and I knew from the age of two that I didn’t want to live there when I grew up [laughs], even though I love visiting my family there. So we’re both just so not tied to any specific place, if we can’t afford one place, or if it’s not working anymore, or we can’t handle the dynamic in one place, it’s very easy for us to get up and leave because we’re not so emotionally tied to any one specific location.

And I guess it makes it easier because you can still maintain relationships online?

HH: Yeah, relationships have changed as well. I mean, some of my best friends I don’t see every day. I see them in my email account and then we spend time together when we’re in the same place. People are much less, kind of, what’s the word, like needy or something. Is that a bad word? Does that make it sound like I’m a bad friend? [laughs]

Do you think it’s a cultural thing or an age thing?

HH: I think it’s probably both but I think people are way more transient these days. People move around way more and it’s totally normal to live in a city for three months, hang out with someone there for those three months pretty regularly and then go to another city. It’s not like that friendship ends but you don’t have to see each other quite as often. I actually do think the nature of relationships has changed.

And this isn’t for everyone, this is an incredibly privileged position to be coming from. To be like, ‘oh yeah, I can move here if want to, when I want to, because my work is mobile’. I think most people are probably still tied to wherever their income source is, physically. So I think I’m speaking for musicians and artists on the large part. And rich people [laughing], they can do whatever they want!

Also people of certain nationalities that can’t move around as freely as others.

HH: That is absolutely the case.

When thinking about the song New Ways To Love, does this relate to the way relationships are changing?

HH: Yeah, I never really thought about it that way. I think with that, I was trying to think more like, ‘with new problems come new answers and new ways to connect and trying to solve them together, and to come together, and to help each other’. Also it comes from, that with these new conditions come new modes of emotion. So we don’t’ necessarily need to rely on the same emotive tropes that we have.

Music is pretty guilty of that, where very specific vocal inflections mean one very specific emotional thing and it’s like that will be the same for 50 years, even though the world is dramatically changing. So I really like the idea of us being open to finding new ways to be emotional and not always to rely on a kind of emotional nostalgia.

I was thinking more in terms of polyamory being a thing.

HH: Oh god! [laughs] Gosh, I’m reading this book right now, Perdido Street Fiction, have you ever read that?

No…

HH: It’s by China Melville and it’s the beginning of a trilogy. Anyway, I’m only like 10 short chapters in but it’s this new world with all these different species and then you have these interspecies sex scenes, where it’s like, ‘he gently caresses her quivering wing’ or something. It’s so interesting, but that’s not what that track is about [laughs]. **

Holly Herndon’s second album Platform is out via RVNG Intl and 4AD on May 18 in the UK and May 19 in the US. 

Header image: Metahaven x Holly Herndon, ‘Home’ (2014). Screenshot. Courtesy Metahaven.

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