Earlier this year Ulijona Odišarija sent us what was the first YouTube mix we’d come across from her then-base of Vilnius in Lithuania; a screen recording of a live performance of her ASMR-inspired ‘Browser Windows‘. A makeshift VDJ set of sorts, the artist-photographer mixed music played from YouTube, Soundcloud and her own iTunes to produce an unsettling mash-up of mainstream popular culture, tourist videos and self-made social media celebrities to create an unsettling though intriguing pastiche of a fragmented world view through the eyes of the voyeur.
Now based in London, Odišarija performed a new installment from within the walls of the Slade studio space, where she’s completing an MFA in Fine Art Media, for the fortnightly Album Launch event organised by her fellow graduate students’ ‘East Anglian Records’; a night put on to present EPs, albums and mixtapes made by their colleagues. The audiovisual demonstration of Odišarija’s set – aptly titled ‘Browser Windows 2’ – was projected on a wall of a window-less, bunker-like white room, to a handful of peers and invited guests, with the artist mixing between browser windows on her laptop. The outcome is the following documentation via two videos, one from the perspective of the artist’s screen, the other from fellow MFA graduate student and artist Sarah Boulton‘s smartphone.
Running through a track listing that confuses distinctions between sound and sight, via a video hosting server used as a resource for both, ‘Browser Windows 2’ features footage of home recorded a capella raps, hanclap skits and an unsettlingly militaristic Japanese synchronised walking performance called ‘Collective Action’ (‘Shuudan Koudou’). They’re combined with tracks by Teams, 18+ and E+E, as well as a brilliant sum tonal karaoke version of All Saints’ 1997 single ‘Never Ever’ and a song by Italian pop rock star Umberto Tozzi. That, along with pop-ups of in-built macbook tutorials on how to use a track pad and a video of a Lithuanian preteen’s bodiless head dancing to Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ generates the strangely alluring experience of watching type and cursor move across tastes, ideas and thought processes, from the perspective of the brain that holds them. Here, the artist and the audience goes beyond watching from the outside, to observing from within. **
TRACK LISTING
‘Hand clap skit’
Headlock – ‘Love Obscene’
Desmond Campbell – ‘The Phantom’
Teams feat. 18+ – ‘Paloma’
Vril – ‘Torus XXXII’
All Saints – ‘Never Ever (Karaoke)’
E+E – ‘Angel’ edit
Lentoliskot – ‘Martyr to Music
Rod Lee – ‘Dance my Pain Away’
Umberto Tozzi – ‘Ti Amo’
Ulijona Odišarija is a London-based artist. Album Launch runs fortnightly at London’s Slade School of Fine Arts.
