Jenna Sutela will be reading from her forthcoming publication Orgs: From Slime Mold to Silicon Valley at London’s The White Building (SPACE Art + Technology) on December 1.
“..But their circuits are self-growing and self-repairing, producing systems tolerant to interruptions or failure..”
The event is #11 in the OpenPROCESS series that provides a platform for process-led practices, and will take the form of a “performative, sonic transcription”. The reading will also feature Clara Jo, Emily Jones and Ming Lin.
The publication focuses on “decentralized organisms and organizations” and expands on Sutela’s interest in the simultaneous, multiple voices that related to a neo-biological future of technology. The Helsinki-based artist works across installation, sound performance and writing to “identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology.”
The four artists will present new work and works-in-progress developed during their three-month residency at SPACE Art + Technology. The residency investigated affective computing and emotional capital. The press release further explains, “the human body is commonly accepted as the primary site of subjectivity, empathy and affective processes” and “the breakdown between human and machine”.
Snowe will present a stage set, a series of texts and notes, sound for a new play called ‘Sticky’ and four texts that move in the same direction. Each text will be printed separately to form a series of four books.
As part of Art Licks Weekend 2016 and to coincide with the exhibition, SPACE Art + Technology’sOpenPROCESS #9 programme will take place on October 2. The event promises an afternoon of readings, presentations and custom cocktails. Snowe will read a series of short texts that surround and approach and her play. Yuile will make a short presentation relating to the research she has conducted throughout the residency. Special Tears will read together in an attempt to contact a character who can dream with us but cannot dream for us.
Megan Snowe is taking part in the next I Had This Feeling reading group at London’s Res. on September 22.
The programme is focused on emotion and affect theory, the emotional economy, and the sensual impacts of language. They will discuss ‘The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling’ by Arlie Russell Hochschild, who coined the term ’emotional labor’, on their next meeting.
New York-based artist Snowe is currently resident at London’s The White Building for SPACE Art + Technology’s OpenPROCESS #7 programme, where she is researching “emotion-as-substance with words, actions, drawings and substances (provided), co-creating enhanced issues, more thorough than before.”
Megan Snowe will discuss and annotate a new zine Sticky Business: Notes on Emotions’ Texture, Movement and Capital at London’s The White Building on August 24.
Presented as part of SPACE Art + Technology’s OpenPROCESS #7 programme, the artist will talk through a collection of notes on “emotion-as-substance with words, actions, drawings and substances (provided), co-creating enhanced issues, more thorough than before.” Snowe will present core questions within her research project, and is asking for audience members to bring their own thoughts on textures that can be associated with certain emotions.
The US-based artist works in a variety of media including installation, animation, text, sound and workshop. OpenPROCESS is a platform that responds to process-led practice.
Visit the FB event page for details.**
The This Time with FEELing #3 group exhibition is on at London’s The White Building, opening on June 29 and running July 1.
This short exhibition is the result of the #3rd cycle of ‘TTWF‘, a three month residency programme conducted at The White Building’s partner SPACE studios.
Artists Debora Delmar Corp., Sarah Abu Abdallah and Sophie Mallett present work and questions that they have developed over the past few months in relation to the residency’s continued themes on affect, the relationship human bodies have to technology and emotional capital.
No information is available as to how the above artists will deal with the issues raised during the investigation but it seems clear that questions will be a large part of the presented work.
The LiveArtAlmanac, Volume 4 is launching at London’s The White Building on June 28.
Featuring writing by the likes of Derica Shields, Coco Fusco, Morgan Quaintance and Vaginal Davis, the publication is a collection of ‘found’ writing about live art and radical performance-based practices, published by Live Art Development Agency (LADA) and Oberon Books. The event will feature two open discussions on “the state of writing” from current and former LADA members as well as Harriet Curtis of Kings College London, and a debate with UK-based writers, Diana Damian, Maddy Costa and Mary Paterson.
The pieces were “published, shared, sent, spread and read” between January 2012 and December 2014 and collated into several loosely themed sections including ‘Locating Performance’, ‘Performance Under Attack’. ‘Speaking Up/Speaking Out’, ‘Show Me the Money’, ‘High Art in Low Places’, ‘Reviews’ and ‘Dearly Departed’. These include writing on or by the likes of Mykki Blanco, Wu Tsang, Shia LaBeouf and boychild; Marina Galperina, Claire Bishop, Steph Kretowicz and Emily Roysdon, among others.
Kimmo Modig is presenting Listen to Yourself: Sound Design Tutorial with Pappa Modig at London’s The White Building on April 29.
The Helsinki-based artist opened his SPACE residency with a “show-and-tell shop talk performance anxiety q&q event”, Living with Moneyin December of last year. It began with a “group therapy session”-cum-live sound design demo that culminated in a collaborative sound piece being produced in collaboration with his audience —specifically in response to The White Building’s location in the Hackney Wick art hub —called ‘RADIO PLAY CREATIVE INDUSTRY’ (2015), embedded below.
For this closing event, ‘Pappa Modig‘ will look at what the press release calls “key questions concerning the use of sound effects with moving objects & subjects”, such as “Does a lot of reverb always equal wealth?”, accompanied by video cameras peopled by Video in Common and an open letter exploring notions of affective labour and art production.
Current markets have adopted new flows, through which they never stop evolving, adapting and changing. The content driving those markets shifts every second and is generated by its actual users. The analytics and data extraction from profiles and behaviours is what shapes formats and shifts the direction of big corporate platforms, like Amazon, Lush, or even the ‘mindfulness’ boom.
Dissent as an iPhone App is a multi-layered project curated by Àngels Miralda,running at London’s Arebyte gallery from March 19 to April 16, 2016, as a part of its 2016 Legal Aesthetics programme. The physical exhibition is just a fragment of the greater project, which aims to extend its influence into the interactive realm in an app, also called Dissent as an iPhone App. It can be downloaded from the internet and contains information on projects, artists and art pieces in the exhibition, in addition to an open forum for discussion and instruction to take part in the evolution of some of the work. To an extent, the Dissent app serves as a virtual spread of the show, also as an alternative to the traditional paper press release, which, in the absence of a viewer’s personal iPhone, is also available in tablets on two stands at the gallery wall.
Dissent as an iPhone App, which takes its title from New York-based curator and writer Joshua Decter’s Art is a Problem, explores the potential of critique from within: how can one be critical towards the (art) system while remaining part of it? How can art reflect the reality of markets and user’s behaviour, not only in its themes, in its outputs and formats?
A crossed-out 3D logo appears half way up the stairs of the industrial building where Arebyte is located. It welcomes the visitor with the corporate aesthetics and tactics that not only lead the show but already subsume so many existing art practices.
In the middle of the main room, a rectangular podium holds a set of domestic objects collected by Débora Delmar Corp. The collection called ‘Most Wished For’ (2016) includes products, such as a vacuum cleaner categorised as ‘Business, Industry and Science’, a baby haircut set as ‘Baby’, clothes as ‘Clothing’, an adult colouring in book called Animal Kingdom in ‘Books’, a set of hairbrushes as ‘Beauty’ and a Black & Decker dustbuster categorised as ‘Cars and Motorcycles’. Their only special feature is that they represent the ‘most wished for’ objects of Amazon customers, which becomes obvious through the labels accompanying them, depicting their name, category, and the date they were most wished for. The readymade works and their arrangement changes every week, depending on Amazon’s data, which keeps fluctuating and affecting the movement of the installation.
On a side of the podium, a white and worn suitcase emits the sound of some contemporary mantras recited by a recorded voice. ‘Untitled (Venom)’ (2016) is a collaboration between Daniel Keller and Ella Plevin, where enhancing sentences which aim to sustain a harmonious mental equilibrium, instead become exhausting and meaningless background noise through its incessant repetition.
Saemundur Thor Helgason’s‘Commissioned by Lush Cosmetics’ (2016) is visible, glowing behind the window glass, from the Arebyte building yard. Wooden mannequin hands partly painted in green, magical spinning zoetropes and a set of fake cardboard TVs depicting vintage-looking footage of product promotions are neatly placed on a large metallic shelf. The installation was once exhibited by cosmetics brand LUSH at their shop in Oxford Circus and through this conscious dislocation Helgason gives visibility to the generally hidden process of making a living as an artist. Money tends to be a taboo and the way many artists survive economically remains shrouded in mystery. In response, this sort of ‘unreadymade’ has a very precise and pragmatic purpose: to minimise the labour and maximise the profit of an artist, blurring the two realms of the ‘survival side job’ and ‘artistic career’.
Commercial strategies and psychologies are often applied to both art and commercial economics, and Dissent as an iPhone App aims to unravel them and make them visible, while creating a physical and virtual space for doubt and discord in reaction to the fallacy of certainty and stability that art, economics and its mediation often implies.**
The second in a series of London’s The White Buildingresidency programme, This Time With FEELing is culminating in a show by the artists who participated in the cycle, opening March 11 and running March 20.
Featuring Adham Faramawy, Fleur Melbourn, Holly Whiteand Sophie Hoyle, the artists have been thinking about and putting on events that look at shifting dynamics between affect and its site of production or receivership. They take a critical approach to these boundaries, questioning “the commercial drive towards the naturalizing and subsumption of technologies that enable the trading in and simulating of algorithmic emotional capital”.
The Finnish artist will be presenting the hour-long “show-and-tell shop talk performance anxiety q&q event” as part of a greater solo performance, a work-in-progress to culminate on April 2016 for his residency at SPACE.
The press release comes accompanied by a script-like written text (“K stands straight. takes time, scratches nose etc”) and an invitation that reveals the artist has “worked” as an advisor at the Finnish National Theatre, and “made” a solo contribution to the Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival “because they asked, not because theatre rules. Money does.”
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.
“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 Tolanas part of her Space Perlin Noise Residencyin 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 Radioand 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?” **
The selected artists and “creative technologists”, as the press release calls them, have been on-site for three months, working on their conceptions of infrastructures (physical, political and social), and Thursday’s opening brings the somewhat disparate artists together for three unique points of view.
Altmann’s survival fantasy-focused practice, RealFlow, will be presented on the top floor through a collaborative reading followed by live text sets from Emily Jones and Flexia, and live music sets from Nkisi, and Hitashya. Below Altmann is Kirton’s justjustgirlythingsthings, a performance of “repentance, reconciliation and restoration” following her year of critically examining the Justgirlythings community. Last in the lineup is Lemmey, whose use of technology attempts to “read the city as a space formed by political and sexual desire”.
The first event in [ space ]‘s new sound art programme, Perlin Noise, kicks off with performances by WE and The Rebel at The White Building on November 20.
Perlin Noise welcomes the two acts as performative challenges to assumptions of what contemporary music and sound art are meant to sound like, and the project explores the “permeable boundaries between sound art, experimental music and networked performance”.
Described as “four bodies barely obscured by identical black boxes”, WE pushes the limits of pop, combining guitar, synth, and “cartoon drumrolls” and turning them inside out, converting the individual I into the collective We of an abolished and pluralized identity. The Rebel, in turn, brings Ben Wallers and his mix of lo-fi country, garage punk and “the political malaises of liberal democracy”.
With Sky Line as with the larger project, Lek uses video-made virtual worlds to interrogate the notion and construction of a utopian fiction, and with each chapter – Sky Line being the sixth – he attempts to reconcile a new conflict.
Wavering “between systems of control and forces of change, between reality and its representation, between the individual and collective”, these conflicts are rendered visible to the viewer as video tours and playable games, and Sky Line takes on the scanty infrastructure for London’s independent art spaces, modelling a floating version of the Circle Line with a vision of the city as not just made of financial skyscrapers but of “infinite access”.
The installation’s opening night kicks off with a live audio-visual performance by Patchfinder at 8:30pm, and will feature a critical discussion with Lek and White Building curator Rachel Falconer on Saturday at 3pm.
Established by four Goldsmiths Fine Art students in March 2012, each issue of the London-based contemporary feminist magazine –some of which are titled ‘Anti-Work’, ‘Salirophilia’ and ‘The Transparency Issue’ – acts as a mini manifesto in an ongoing research project.
For their sixth issue, SALT puts into circulation “performative gestures of disobedience and nonquiescent articulation” as models of experimental protest, questioning traditional modes of articulation and the power of language in the process with contributors such as Jala Wahid, Molly Davy, Freya Field-Donovan, and the Villa Design Group, among others.