Banner Repeater will be hosting the launch of the 2nd edition of Living in the Future at their London space on July 23, 7-9pm.
The new magazine, edited by Rebecca Bligh and James Hedges and focussed on speculative fiction and future-writing, celebrated its official launch in February.
When artist and curator Mat Jenner describes the distribution and viewing of art online as a “loss of the body, in some ways,” his choice of words has a particular resonance in the space of Stoke Newington’s Project/Number. In the presence of his Foam exhibition, after all, the body (both yours and the body of work that makes up the dubplate archive at the room’s centre) is crucial. It’s dependent on participants entering the space, picking out a record and playing it; it’s entirely grounded in physicality.
The records in the archive include contributions from artists as varied as Hannah Black, Yuri Pattison and Christopher Kulendran Thomas& Amnesia Scanner, and range from experimental soundscapes and heavy metal, to spoken word poetry and a Drake cover. In practice, this endows the recordings with an unpredictability and tension that makes them the volatile epicentre of the otherwise sparse room. Jenner talks of them as “colouring” the space; each person who walks into the gallery and plucks out a record has the potential to drastically alter their surroundings.
This Friday, July 4, Foam opens at Hackney’s AND/OR gallery, where you can see (and hear) it until August 2. Watch our interview with Mat Jenner for more on the unpredictability of the Foam experience, the process behind the artists selected to contribute, the use of records (and of the space itself) as form and the re-gaining of art’s lost body. **
Artist Mat Jenner’s roaming art project, Foam, opens this week at London’s Project/Number gallery. Unlike many art programmes, this one features no canvases, no video installations, no performances. What we traditionally allow to be named as art is conspicuously absent, and instead Jenner presents an archive of one-off 12-inch dubplates commissioned from over 100 participating artists – including Yuri Pattison, Benedict Drew, GandT, Cecile B Evans, Jaakko Pallasvuo – along a wall of stainless steel pieces that stand like backdrops. The archives, he seems to say, are the art.
In our email correspondence previous to the show, Jenner is obliging and affable, responding promptly even in the bedlam days prior to opening. The only prickle I feel from him is when I ask for private digital copies of the records for the preview that are sure to exist because, well, we live in the digital age. “No to copies,” he answers bluntly, “you have to be with them to listen to them”.
In this way, Jenner’s Foam functions as a response to this modern religion of ours in which everything exists in its digital form – first, after, alongside, but certainly. The name of the project speaks to its expansiveness, its malleability, and that of the archives – Space and time are reborn to us today – to its design. The line, lifted from Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner’s The Realistic Manifesto, harks back to the religiosity of this sentiment: we are reborn only because a rebirth is necessary.
The revival to which Jenner alludes is that of physicality, of the reverence we have for those things which we still can hold. The archive, in its components and its entirety, echoes the sentimentality of all those who still cherish the physical copies of the things they love – the frayed edges of the book, the splattered paint of the frame, the smooth finish of the LP. “The insistence on a restricted physical relationship with these records is an attempt to explore the problematised condition of these records as artworks,” Jenner writes in an email. “It is a romantic and futile attempt to negate their dissemination. By doing this I’m hoping to slow down an audience, to make more explicit their spatial and temporal relationship to the work.”
It is an ode to a time past, as Jenner knows, necessarily nostalgic and futile, but it is just as much a nod to a future that Jenner knows is his to create. In positioning the records as art, he revives the act of listening to that of performance, or rather to that of participation in a performative act. Listen to them as though for the last time, Foam seems to say, echoing the sensibility of Gabo and Pevsner in their manifesto. Listen as though your life depends on it.
The conceptual framework of the project functions alongside its more pragmatic, sociable one, through which Foam functions as a catalyst for creativity. The range of archival material is expansive, including spoken word, field recordings, electronic noise, and soundscapes, among others. From the minimal glitch soundtrack of Brian Moran gleaned from the digital data of Snapchat, to the Gregorian church chant style of Mark Dean’s Nico cover, to Paul Purgas’ dark electro sounds derived from 3D stimulations of architectural interiors, it is apparent that the conceptual mentalities of the participating artists have created a breed of sounds all of its own. “It is one of the best compliments I could have had about the project,” says Jenner, “that the artists involved want to run with it”.
And run with it they did. Participating artist Charlie Woolley took his faux metal band idea and made it real with the formation of Lead Pipe, and Jesse Darling took her audio cover of Drake’s ‘Marvin’s Room’ and produced a whole video for it. In that regard, Foam functioned as a creative jumping point for works that continue to live and expand outside the contours of the exhibition. The visual artists participating do not go gently into the good night of their visuals, leaving the making of LPs to established musicians. Instead, they remain all of it: artists, musicians, creators, living out the last lines of Gabo and Pevsner’s text:
“Art is called upon to accompany man everywhere where his tireless life takes place and acts…so that the flame of life does not go out in man.” **
Migrating Origins, an online project by Temporary Art Project and curated by Warren Harper & James Ravinet in association with SoSLUG, will run from April 7 to June 14.
Through the course of the month+, TAP will feature the works of two dynamic artists, showcasing the work of Yuri Pattisonfrom April 7 to June 7 and that of Harry Sanderson from April 14 to June 14. Exploring the ubiquitous engagement with digital media in the developed world and its problematic consequences, ranging from that of its broad effects on human cognition to more specific problems such as authorship, Migrating Origins investigates how the moving image is embedded into “the fabric of our everyday lives” and how it, in turn, relates to the power structures of its reception and production.
To find out more about Yuri Pattison, you read his interview with aqnb, and likewise for Harry Sanderson.
Visit the official TAP event page here or get details on he event on our aqnb event listing.**
If you consider the fate of Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden, the physical consequences of your virtual actions are extremely real. Jailed and exiled for what can be reductively referred to as “file sharing”, the two US dissidents –respectively charged with “aiding the enemy” and accused of treason –had their lives and freedom irrevocably altered. For London and Berlin-based artist Yuri Pattison the parallels between said contemporary resistance and the August Putsch of 1991 are endless.
Most importantly, the faction of Communist hardliners plotting to overthrow Soviet President Gorbachev (along with his liberalising move towards decentralising government in an effort to prevent the collapse of the USSR) suppressed local and international broadcasting of the event, only to be undermined by Russia’s first computer and information network, RELCOM (РЕЛКОМ). The coup failed, the new union treatynever signed and the Soviet Union dissolved four months later.
These days and this side of the Iron Curtain there’s Swedish “free-speech” ISP Bahnhof to thank for WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay, the same server to host Pattison’s RELiable COMmunications website –a commission by LEGION TV and jumping-off point for what’s to be realised as a physical book, published by Arcadia Missa in March. Here, the virtual and its real-world ramifications interweave, interact and fold over on to each other in the form of the Chelyabinsk meteor and its fragments, dropped from space, into Russia, on to eBay and back through the digital network to Pattison’s 3D printer and the exhibition floor. There are some CGI models of said cosmic bodies floating across the browser of RELiable COMmunications, where layer upon layer of ftp archival content, First Gulf war chat logs, a server, a diagram of the meteor route, are thrust into chaos.
All linearity and narrative, ‘sense’ as we know it, collapses into a glut of information that demands user engagement in order to make a connection. There’s no streamlining here, no Google algorithms to shape our identities and reinforce our pre-existing ideas. Instead, it’s The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto that hovers in the background. Dating back to 1992 and posted by writer and engineer Timothy C. May, said proclamation of cyber-spatial autonomy makes some eerily accurate predictions of the future. That is, our present.
“The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns… and fears of societal disintegration,” May warns, while, suggesting that, just as printing diminished the existing power structures of the Middle Ages, “cryptologic methods” will do the same for the here now. It will “alter the nature of corporations and of government interference” by creating “a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures”.
In RELiable COMmunications, the August Putsch, PRISM, Chelyabinsk meteor and May’s early 90s Manifesto are experienced all at once. In the same way that proponent of the Singularity Ray Kurzweil’s experiments in nanotechnology evoke an eerie sense of Sci-Fi déjà vu, so too does RELCOM-become-Relcom Business Network Ltd echo the modern corporatised Internet. History doesn’t just repeat itself, it exists all at once and its up to the user break the cycle.
Why the allusion to RELCOM?
Yuri Pattison: I really enjoyed how transparent all these communications were. You didn’t really have the same sort of internet etiquette, so you had a lot of personal correspondence. It’s very personal in terms of history and, in that sense, it encapsulated the aspirations of what the internet could do; how it could serve a greater good within society.
Now you have the inverse of those communications. Of being very much manipulated and used by governments and by companies in a very controlling and imperialistic way. I found it really interesting that RELCOM came out of something as restrictive as the Soviet Union; even when it was being opened up, it was a government scheme. It came out of that environment but then it offered incredible potential in terms of movement and freedom of information. It had different aspirations to the previously restrictive Soviet regime.
It’s interesting that that sort of free network, that would later become what we know as the internet, came from such a restrictive regime, while now, within a globalised and supposedly ‘free’ world, the internet is having the opposite effect.
YP: That’s the thing. In the early days, it wasn’t taken seriously. It wasn’t restricted and it was a completely free zone. Now we’re in a position where the internet has had such an influential and dominant effect on society; where it does control many things that we do in our day-to-day lives. It’s actually had an inverse effect and it really has real-world consequences. If you’re doing things that are political online, that goes pretty deep. It’s come from something that was so unrestricted and become something that has really deep implications.
You could even say that’s reflected in your own evolution as an artist. Where you’ve started in fine arts, without a computing background, and wound up concentrating on digital culture five years later.
YP: I think most artists of our generation are using the internet. It’s become such a day-to-day tool, for general communication but also for research, and I think it’s really important to acknowledge that, in some way, within the work. I found it’s important to be much more honest about what is the right sphere to show the work within. I think the physical works do acknowledge the internet and the online works fold that information back on to the physical. I don’t feel I can avoid that. It would be a much more obtuse to try to ignore that the internet exists. Digital culture has had such a huge impact on society and it is very much a major part of society now.
Yuri Pattison, ‘kxol.com.au sums it up for me’ (2013). Image courtesy the artist.
I guess another parallel between RELCOM and the internet now is in the physical ramifications of online behaviours. Obviously, there’s Snowden and Manning now, while although the Putsch itself failed, it arguably marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union.
YP: That’s the thing, the coup was conceived by hardliners and they wanted to actually re-retrict the Soviet Union, bring it back to the darkest Cold War days, and it kind of ended up really speeding up the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I mean, in some ways we’re still in a very weird Post-Soviet vacuum and you have the ghosts of the Cold War very much within the Snowden and Manning revelations.
The internet is a political space and there’s no way to avoid that but I think the political within the work also very much has this metaphorical element to it all. It illustrates how important this space is; of being very much an extension of reality and the real-world implications things happening in that space have.
You mentioned Science Fiction and how what was written about in the 60s and 70s has come to be. In terms of how memory is experienced in a very horizontal, non-linear way in this new space, that has some interesting implications about how we experience time.
YP: Yeah, you end up with this weird feeling of déjà vu. There are many things in the present that were these fantasies for us growing up and it’s particularly strange for earlier generations. A really good example that summed all of this up for me is this very creative hoax, which is John Titor.
There are postings on various chat forums where he claimed to be someone from the future who had come back to the present, his past, to solve the problems that were facing us. He was talking about imminent events that were going to happen in the mid-to-early 2000s but it very much read in a way that it was Science Fiction in action. It was about the present and our near future that was very much rooted in the internet. I just saw parallels between a lot of the structures of Science Fiction and how those have collapsed entirely due to the rate of change that we’ve been experiencing.
Yuri Pattison, RELiablCOMmunications.net (2013).
Thinking about this ‘collapse’ in terms of the Singularity, and how Chelyabinsk meteorites were being sold on eBay. It’s almost like the ultimate realisation of consumer capitalism; it’s even claiming that final frontier of outer space. Meanwhile, Kurzweil is literally talking nanotechnology and artificial intelligence with Google. It all seems to be rapidly converging towards this predicted explosion of superintelligence.
YP: Yeah, he’s very much thinking about conquering time. I think time is much more the last frontier for him. That’s been a human obsession forever: ‘how do you conquer time? How do you jump past your flesh existence?’ I think there are elements in all of this where the internet has very much collapsed that.
Oral history exists, in a written way, on the internet. You just have to find those layers and expose them. I was trying to conceive that in a world that has this longer timeline, that sort of exists going forward forever and knowing that you’ll have a sort of network that will negotiate these spaces in many ways and how our perceptions of time will change.
RELiable COMmunications is quite visually layered and hard to navigate, in a way. Is that a sort of reflection the sort of garbled reconstruction and retelling of narratives within oral culture?
YP: Yeah. When I was reading these chat logs, they’re kind of written oral histories and they become slightly impenetrable because of their formatting and now they just exist as raw text files. In a way, the site is my representation of it. That is my experience of it but it’s also a way of trying to reformulate them in a different way. In taking the elements of the current internet –which is much more dynamic, flashy and generally orientated to selling you something –then taking fragments of the previous internet –which was very much a non-commercial space –and putting those two things together. I wanted it to be a space that you would discover things and make new connections.
I was basically trying to reformat how that space on the internet worked, into a productive space, because I’m finding it increasingly difficult with the way Google and search engines streamline your access to data, you’re only being fed information based on your previous searches. You don’t have these moments of revelation, something new and relevant that you haven’t discovered yet, or haven’t searched yet, that is outside your bubble. I was trying to burst that bubble a bit with this piece because a lot of the information I had acquired was too much for me to find those connections with in a meaningful way.
In your mention of the frustrations of streamlining searches, there are so many implications. Firstly, the internet in some ways has been paved over with a particular narrative history, but it’s also really reifying and reinforcing certain cultural, racial, gendered, assumptions and misconceptions by limiting users to a particular stream and thus perspective.
YP: For sure. I’ve tried to find ways around it but it is having quite a ghettoising effect on information, particularly from a contemporary art point of view. If you’re searching things in an art context then if you search other things and they have an art context you will get fed that information. Rather than maybe the more relevant information that stimulates new thoughts and new experiences. I think a lot about the ‘filter bubble’ and it’s interesting that Google continues to reinforce their thoughts on what’s useful. There are lot of people working for Google, including Ray Kurzweil, who don’t believe in those things. They believe in new experience and the endless possibility the network has, rather than the very personal, local possibility of tailored searches. **
An exhibition and shop, in an art gallery and shopfront, French Riviera draws its title from its own Gallic origins to convey the ‘department store’ concept of Grand Magasin. It playfully examines, not just the links between art and commerce but the shaky tenets on which these apparent distinctions exist. Exploring and ultimately deconstructing these divisions, or ‘departments’, across “artists” and “non-artists”, artworks and objects, curator Nat Breitenstein presents work by 50-plus contributors in the tiny Bethnal Green space. It’s one you could hardly fit in to at its opening, being packed with people and objects; a mass of ‘things’ bundled on tables, shelves and walls. Artists and gallery owners Samuel Levack & Jennifer Lewandowski’s light blue ‘One Minute Disco’ caps are occasionally knocked off their hooks, while Harry Burden’s glazed ceramic pun of ‘Potential Accidents’ (Banana Skins 2013) arescattered around the floor and as precarious as the notion of permanence at an event described by its own press release as a “fluid process that develops, changes and grows as it goes along”.
Commodified and re-contextualised, with no information beyond a price tag, you might then miss concepts drawing from Virilio’s “integral accident” in Burden’s practice, or Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto in Leslie Kulesh‘s framed print, ‘As long as you love me’. Red-nailed fingers suspend a tablet featuring a hyper-realised Dakota Rose and remediating the “multiplicities of being defined” originally illustrated in the 2012 video ‘As Long As You Love Me: A love letter from Dakota to Donna’:“if you want to see me. Leslie. Just go online”.
Perspective and its reproduction is explored in Yuri Pattison’s reformatting of a reformatted format (about formats), in ‘Ways of Seeing PDF’. Here he reproduces his online PDF ‘ways of seeing WAYS OF SEEING’ in physical book form. Online, photocopies and scans, zoom in and re-present the original 1972 publication across windows and scroll bars, while sections of pages are outlined and underlined, drawing attention to passages like, “men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”. It’s a self-perpetuating loop of focus on established cultural norms that the John Berger-presented BBC series the book is based on, purports to challenge (“a large part of seeing is based on habit and convention”). But, in drawing attention to the ways in which technologies mediate these established habits, they only propagate them further. As technologies evolve, whether through photography or .pdf, these old formats and ideas persist, not only as the digital or a broadcast medium reapplied to the book form but in the question of what it is you’re paying for when you buy it: is it the information or the card it’s printed on?
Framing, perspective and the lexical shifts that come with it emerge on the silk surface of Fabienne Hess’s Unknown Face Fragments prints series. Here, artworks and familiar popular cultural portraits are fractured almost but not quite beyond recognition. Because archetypes persist and that’s mirrored by the protruding eyes of Levack and Lewandowski’s totemic Jesmonite and plaster ‘Pilgrim Shells’. The mystical connotations of their titles echo the primal impulse that Kulesh identifies as being behind the “cyborg stand in” of a social media avatar in the ‘As Long As You Love Me’ print, hung among them. Will Cruickshank’s‘Logs for Sale’ wood-cut print not only identifies the advertisement as the actual point of value in goods exchange, but mirrors the model of ‘artificial scarcity’ by making it available as one of only 14 editions –a sales model shared by art galleries and the Disney Vault alike.
‘Grand Magasin’ @ French Riviera. Image courtesy of the gallery.
The consumables at Grand Magasin aren’t limited to products though. There are edibles from Kitty Travers’ ‘Candied Citrus Fruit’ and services from Daniel Kelly’s DKUKpop up salon, coming on Saturday December 7. Another Kelly work, ‘Tunisia riots see 3, set to fly home’ reflects the distance, degradation and disconnection with the realities of a country from the voyeur’s perspective, virtual or otherwise. It’s an account of tourists being evacuated during civil unrest in the country through a browser view of a Daily Mirror headlinepartly obscured by a Google image of a burning resort, courtesy of Getty Images.
While the Grand Magasin pressrelease speaks not of the “difference but rather of divergence” of its unquantifiable conceptual and material elements, what’s more interesting is where they converge. Didactic panels give way to sales tags, the information limited to the name of its creator and a price arbitrarily applied by any number of nebulous considerations. Here, the distinction between artist and artwork, person and product collapses; context vanishes, and all that’s left is some things you can pay for. **
Grand Magasin is running at French Riviera from November 30 to December 15, 2013.
