Produced by London-based videoclub and FLAMIN, the event will tour a collection of artists’ film and video throughout May and June at various locations across the UK. Having already premiered in Brighton’s Fabrica on May 4 and Glasgow’s CCA on May 16, future locations include Nottingham Contemporary on May 25, Plymouth Arts Centre on June 1 and Exeter Phoenix on June 14.
The screenings happen from 11am to 6pm in the Whitechapel’s Zilkha Auditorium, Tuesday to Sunday, and will feature the aforementioned US-based collective’s This is Presence and the Istanbul artist’s How to properly touch a girl so you don’t creep her out?.
The former video explores what the press release calls the “impact of technology in our mediated lives”, offering “a sophisticated array of lifestyle choices available online by borrowing from the language of corporate branding, health and beauty, and new age healing”. The latter is a collection of material posted online by pick-up ‘artists’ and coaches “revealing their deceitful methods”.
Artist and lecturer Zach Blas will give a talk called ‘Contra-Internet’ at London’s Whitechapel Galleryon April 21.
Taking its starting point from a screen shot of a Facebook status in which Blas outlines a transparent ‘user’s agreement’, foreswearing “any biopolitical position as a user of the internet” and points to the himself as “physical-data-body-nodes within the naturalised capitalised internet system”, this coming Thursday, Blas will talk about the “emerging militancies and subversions of ‘the Internet’”.
Also to be expected is a discussion of dildotectonics (a theory adopted against ideals of heteronormative sex), utopian plagiarism, and social media exodus, all in order to pose a challenge to the “control logic” with which we look upon our time and bodies spent online.
The talk by Blas, who has recently given similar lectures at Goldsmiths and RCA art schools, is a part of Whitechapel Gallery’s Electronic Superhighway season events programme.
Felix Melia‘s anticipated new film ‘Shoulder Blades’ (2016) will premier alongside a screening of his previous work ‘Lamassu Flats’ (2014) at London’s Hackney Picture House, hosted by Serpentine Cinema on March 24.
‘Shoulder Blades’, the press release tells us, manages and negotiates the process of developing intimacy whilst maintaining agency. While ‘Lamassu Flats’, made two years before deals with the relationship between the presentation of the self and the kinds of spaces that the self inhabits, which carry the “inherited and engendered narratives imposed” upon them.
London-based Melia, who is the Whitechapel Gallery current Writer in Residence, has continued to make in the gap between primary experience and how that is represented through second-hand narratives via films as well as more ephemeral video performances, and was involved in the Serpentine Gallery’s 89plus marathon.
In a bid to start 2016 with a big show, the Whitechapel gallery has put together a survey of over 100 artworks by more than 70 artists working with computer and internet technologies during the last 50 years. It’s called Electronic Superhighway (2016 – 1966), which sounds new and exciting, because it’s ‘about technology’. But the name also has a retro feel about it. Superhighway sounds a bit 70s. Indeed, the term was coined in 1974, by the artist Nam June Paik as a metaphor for the potentialities in a globalised world connected through technology. By choosing to name the show in such a way it allows the curators to situate today’s current state of affairs as one driven by technology, but also to situate the show historically, implying a previous state of affairs. This is made explicit in the exhibition layout, which splits the show into two distinct sections. Downstairs, where you enter the gallery, the work on show is from 2000 to 2016, and upstairs the work dates from 1966 to 1999.
This split between two states of affairs is one riven, simply, by the internet –not in relation to any specific point of origin, but in terms of the everyday colloquialism in which it is understood today. And herein lies the question that, for me, the exhibition poses. If this show is ‘about technology’ then are the technologies of the recent past homologous with today’s technologies? Or maybe even, what is technology?
The exhibition is arranged in reverse chronological order, but I thought that I’d reverse this reverse, as it were, and start with the earlier work. Upstairs is carpeted and peaceful. There’s lots of work up here – Ulla Wiggen’s paintings of electronic circuits (1967), Vera Molnar’s computer drawings (1974), E.A.T’s modified objects for performance (1966), to name just a fraction but to also illustrate the diversity of material. There is plenty of moving image –video and early computer generated works.
In Judith Barry’s film ‘Space Invaders’ (1981-1982) a voice muses over a night sky “we don’t know what’s really out there, just more stars, I guess”. The film continues into scenes of discos and video arcade games. A boy lies on his bed watching TV, dreaming, while the word ‘escapism’ intercuts. Dreaming toward the TV is echoed in Lynn Hershman Leeson’s interactive installation ‘Lorna’ (1979-1982). The work is styled like a 1970s apartment. A TV on a dresser plays an interactive film of the agoraphobic Lorna trapped in her apartment with her own TV, the only channel to the world outside. Nam June Paik’s ‘Internet Dream’ (1994), is a large video wall sculpture consisting of 52 screens displaying snippets of broadcast and electronically processed images. Is this heavy machine dreaming of the internet; that maybe more screens can break the single channel-induced stupor?
Allan Kaprow’s ‘Hello’ (1969), documents experiments with closed circuit video systems, in which participants would communicate via the artist’s instructions when they see each other on the screen, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s ‘Surface Tension’ (1992), where a huge eye tracks your movement around the room, both anticipate communication through the screen and surveillance systems.
With so many works on display it seems pointless, impossible even, to find particular threads or analogies to bind this work together, even though they have been grouped under the banner of technology. And also in a kind of ‘history zone’, which we may as well call ‘pre-internet’, because this is what the show suggests.
So in historicising these works into a group, I start to wonder. To think about technology as a category by which to group something seems to chime with present-day thinking. After a while it becomes difficult to understand what these works have in common. Perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Here, technology is understood as electric, computerised, modern and medium-oriented. The show itself starts to define the boundaries and parameters of technology.
Going back downstairs, back to where you enter the exhibition, you are in the present. It is bright and full of work. “What is it that makes the present so different?” asksJayson Musson in ‘ART THOUGHTZ’ (2010-12), originally a show on YouTube, in which he endearingly greets his audience as ‘Internet’. “Well,” he continues, “it’s the internet”. Musson’s film, a compilation of all his previous shows, is full of humour and satire, but it strikes with resonance a needed simplicity with which we can regard the internet. Maybe the internet is better understood as a process and not something that can be represented. It’s more like a practice. “This is the best time for the Layman to get into performance art”, says Musson, half joking, “the performative nature of the ritual of the everyday.”
But what kinds of performance might we get into? Musson jokes about the mundane, but maybe it’s also something else, like taking the neoliberal subject of excessive self-governance, faux autonomy and pseudo flexibility, and warping them into something more heightened, intensified, performed, pleasured, ephemeral –something like a technology of the person. Something like the characters in Ryan Trecartin’s film ‘A Family Finds Entertainment’ (2004). Trecartin hasstated about his films that he sees personality traits, behaviours, genders and identities as tools or applications rather than ways of existing: Tools that allow for a state of inventiveness and do not depend on labels.
So maybe this Superhighway is no longer electric but performative, with that category also being variable. Zach Blas’ ‘Queer Technologies’ (2007-2012), is a mixed-media installation that displays an array of consumer products –computer components, coding manuals and software operating systems –‘Queer tech’. On a screen a film speaks of ‘anti language’ and ‘Transborder immigrant tools’ – “walking equals true if you are born in the wrong place”, says the narrator. Here the highway need not be electric. This highway is about keeping moving, perhaps until you disappear out of sight completely, and escape.
Another kind of escape is echoed in Thomas Ruff’s ‘Substrat 34 1’ (2007), a chromogenic print that through technical process applied to found images abstracts the picture into a spectral play of colours that ripple into each other. The work has a fluid motion, edges that dissolve and also the feeling of detachment inherent in that there is only a notional connection to its founding body, the index image.
The ‘Net Art’ room shows works selected in collaboration with online organization Rhizome. Here, biographies are incorporated. In Ann Hirsch’s ‘Twelve’ (2013) as the artists chat room dialogues, and in Martine Syms’ ‘Reading Trayvon Martin’ (2013), an ongoing work that tracks Syms’ archiving and bookmarking of web pages relating to the case.
These notions of performativity, escape, modification and ephemerality suggest another way of thinking about technology, as any kind of tool or process between two states of affairs. So the technologies that are actually not electric –languages and orders of signification–seem to be the ones under scrutiny by the artists in the 2000-2016 part of this exhibition. The internet may be electric but the things now trying to be crashed and failed are not electrical systems but systems of information, representation and control.
I get the sense that the composition of this exhibition comes from viewing the previous state of affairs through the lens of today’s state of affairs –that in a time of digitally networked global computer systems, which are possibly beyond representation themselves, there is the overwhelming urge to call all electrical systems ‘technology’, but not apply the term to other systems and applications.
Maybe artists now don’t even see the internet as a technology, but just a commonplace. Artists have been working on the internet since its inception and continue to do so. How can the gallery represent what is actually happening online? It can’t. And that’s fine. The show was good, in the sense that if you didn’t know any of the artists before then you can go away and look them up –or do it in the gallery on your smartphone. **
The so-called contemporary zeitgeist artist joins Whitechapel Gallery curator Omar Kholeif for conversation about language, cultural identity and living in the thick of constant media and technology.
The discussion hints on some themes explored in Coupland’s earlier writing – including the books Generation X, Microserf, and Life After God – and seems echoed in most of his visual work, from the pixelated ‘Welcome to the 21st Century‘ to the dripping computer colour-heads in ‘Pop-Heads‘.
Whitechapel Gallery is hosting Where is My Territory?, an afternoon screening of short films exploring the transformation of landscapes, at their London space on September 6, 3-6pm.
In Where is My Territory?, GCC member Monira Al Qadiri explores the modern-day apocalypse with the Werner-Herzog inspired Behind the Sun (2013),Ali Cherri zeroes in on Lebanon and Syria with The Disquiet (2013) and Pipe Dreams (2012), Köken Ergun considers the martyrdom of Hussein in Ashura (2012), and Basim Magdy takes a look a cynicism and the “persistent search for a seemingly essential unknown” in My Father Looks For An Honest City (2010).
The afternoon event is followed by a Q&A with participating artist Ali Cherri.
London’s Whitechapel Gallery is presenting the Artists’ Film International showcase, running in the venue’s Zilkah Auditorium July 8 to October 12.
The event features the works of five international filmmakers and artists, including Yuri Ancarani‘s Italian film Il Capo (2010) describing the dialogue between a man and a machine, Mattias Härenstam‘s Norwegian film Reconstruction (2010), Afghanistan (2014) by Masooda Noora, Uudam Tran Nguyen’s Vietnamese film Waltz of the Machine Equestrians (2012), and Amir Yatziv‘s German film by the name of DETROIT (2009).
Chris Marker (aka Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve) was best known as an experimental filmmaker, but he was also a graphic designer, photographer, activist, magazine editor and a pioneer on Second Life. He’s had an indelible influence on other contemporary artists and video essayists like Andrew Norman Wilson and Renzo Martens, preceding and inspiring these journalistic and political approaches to contemporary art practice.
For the UK’s first retrospective of Marker’s work at the Whitechapel Gallery, the series of disconnected multi-media elements is a sporadic but exploratory journey. In engaging with the diversity of his output –including his essay-films and experimental use of digital media –the exhibition attests to the diverse platforms across which he operated. It’s fragmentary approach to an exhibition, split into sections devoted to the themes of ‘Museums’, ‘Travel’, ‘Image’ & Text’, and ‘War & Revolution’, that leaves little room for contemplation.
Chris Marker, ‘Ouvroir: the movie’ (2010).
Opening with a set of installations thematically organized around ‘the Museum’, the Chris Marker exhibition points to the animated work ‘Ouvroir: the movie’ (2010). Playing out in Second Life, the film replicates the online virtual world where users interact through avatars. Marker’s avatar ‘Monsieur Guillame’ is a CGI orange cat guiding visitors on a virtual tour of his works. That stands in stark contrast to ‘Statues Also Die’(1953) a 30-minute essay film focussed on the French colonial perspective of African art history, nearby and looking more than fifty years back. While you can draw your own conclusions on the link between these works, the transition between watching a digital feline frolic through a brightly animated virtual archipelago, to a call for recognition of African contributions to the arts in a time of intense racial conflict is harshly anachronistic.
But perhaps what unites the discordant selection of film art throughout the exhibition is the notion of travel. Many of Marker’s films appear as travelogues bridging documentary with fragments of memory and notions of science fiction. The ‘Travel’ section to follow deals with Marker’s ‘Petite Planète’ series (1954-1958), made up of illustrated guidebooks to various countries known for their lavish imagery and inventive layouts. With covers featuring an anonymous inhabitant from a given country, the books’ pages present photo montages that create a cumulative meaning through closely cropped stills, much like his films. Stylistic parallels could be drawn to Marker’s most well-known video work, ‘La Jetée’(1962), later remade by Terry Gilliam into Hollywood sci-fi classic 12 Monkeys. ‘La Jetée’ is composed entirely of stills, these static portraits of its characters meshing into a cinematic experience. Like his travel guides, the film is imbued with a sense of journalistic initiative, giving the impression that Marker is developing a personal relationship with both his viewers and his protagonists.
Ultimately, the importance of creating opportunities for reflection on these themes and ideas in favour of breadth is abandoned at Chris Marker, leading to a segmentation that disrupts the potential for a more fluid chronological or thematic trajectory. Yet, its this very fragmentation that parallels the extraordinary versatility of Marker’s practice, as well as the mercurial nature of his art. **
Irish artist Gerard Byrne‘s first major UK survey at theWhitechapel Gallery, A state of
neutral pleasure, invites discussion of media and sexuality. On entering the lens-based practitioner’s show, one finds themselves in a large darkened room lit by five hanging projectors – each beaming onto a slightly tilted, rectangular white block. Across the floor plan each of these screens is angled against each other in what creates diverging plains of sight.
