Goethe Institut

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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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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Life, language and London’s last Lunch Bytes

1 December 2014

“I’m going for a deeply oceanic look today”, Holly Childs is reading from her upcoming book Danklands, to be published via Arcadia Missa on December 9. It’s an excerpt of what she calls, “a make-up tutorial that is also subliminally a climate change awareness campaign, or a self-defence for women pep talk”. It features a persona called Augustine’ pointing at ephemeral hyperlinks from inside a computer screen, while recommending “slut shame” eye shadow or “urban decay & deathzone 4 Eva” liner to suit any lifestyle: “maybe you’re a scientist who’s just started dating again after a massive break up, or doing some whaling”. From here come the ideas of “dredging and resurfacing” that Childs actively explores in her work, a subject that is revisited in various forms across ideas and artistic practices expressed in conversation with several other writers and artists. They include Cally Spooner and David Jablonowski, as well as art historian Florian Cramer and panel moderator Elvia Wilk at Lunch Bytes exploring Life: Language. The film that should follow the ICA programme is being delayed as the last in the London editions of the Goethe-Institut‘s European series applies some interesting ideas to the computer generated future of communication via the internet.

Holly Childs, Danklands presentation image. Courtesy the artist.
Holly Childs, Danklands presentation image. Courtesy the artist.

“’Always scared amateur porn is going to turn out to be a snuff film”, Childs is quoting Australian artist Aurelia Guo in exploring the “rerouting of form” where a format meant to present one agenda exposes itself for harbouring another. Hence the post-presentation question time concerning Emoji and their relationship with the corporate interests of the companies that produce them – say, the myth of “John Appleseed” embedded in Apple’s tiny pictographs. It’s a technologised type of social interaction that started in emoticons and has since been colonised by corporate entities; Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!  encoding them with their own ideologies. Spooner goes further with these “shared behaviours between labour and speech, and therefore politics” citing Hannah Arendt’s derailing of a political form of life through speech and actions in the “big musical collapse” of her ‘And You Were Wonderful, On Stage’ (2014) performance. It was inspired by the artist’s experiences working with an advertising agency in a campaign that would refill its employees’ real-life stories with a company’s brand and values, only to resell it to its staff.

“I was thinking about how people use Emoji when they’re sexting, like an eggplant is supposed to be a dick”, Childs deadpans about the subversive potential of recalibrating said characters’ intended corporate meaning via context. This is something Cramer also illustrates via the encoded language of early 4Chan image boards, where he draws parallels between the highly referential “visual linguistics” of 17th century allegorical art and something like ‘Y U NO?’ or the Anonymous meme-cum-hacktivist group-cum-global symbol of dissent. The latter’s famous Guy Fawkes mask signifier is, of course, an iconic image that draws from Alan Moore’s cult graphic novel, V for Vendetta – which in turn was inspired by the 16th century activist – resurfacing via a Japanese anime-inspired culture transfered to Western image boards and manifesting physically via the #occupy movement.

Cally Spooner, Performance of 'Damning Evidence Illicit Behaviour Seemingly Insurmountable Great Sadness Terminated In Any Manner' (2014). Courtesy the artist.
Cally Spooner, Performance of ‘Damning Evidence Illicit Behaviour Seemingly Insurmountable Great Sadness Terminated In Any Manner’ (2014). Courtesy the artist.

In his ‘Powerslave, Revolution Main (Signature Series)’ (2014), recently shown at BRANDS – CONCEPT/AFFECT/MODULARITY, David Jablonowski draws a link between political revolutions via his found object sculptural arrangement of Iron Maiden tour merchandise from 1984. The band are regarded as the first rock act to cross into the Eastern Bloc at the time, while the limited edition Vans shoes were discovered by the Netherlands-based artist during a visit to New York when the 2012 Arab Spring in Egypt had erupted.

That sort of layering of symbolic objects not only expresses a sort of density of information but also an emptying out of a self-contained object’s self-contained meaning, especially when presented in pairings as disparate as the plexiglass and lacquered bamboo boxes in Jablonowski’s ‘Alibaba (dot cn dot sa dot com)’ (2014) sculpture at To Satisfy Algorithms/ Still Life with Asparagus. It’s inspired by a Chinese-founded trade website (alibaba.com) with an Arabic reference that has no connection to the region’s history except for its global potential for brand recognition.

Illustrating language as highly coded and malleable to its context – whether corporate, political or personal (often all three) – it’s in a clash of cultures and concerns that makes contemporary communication and the Lunch Bytes Life: Language discussion such a dynamic one. Cramer references Heath Bunting’s 1998 “social sculpture” ‘_readme.html (Own, Be Owned or Remain Invisible)’, where an article written by the net artist for Wired magazine is entirely linked by words to a corresponding .com domain. Starting out with mostly dead links, in the almost two decades since, they’ve been almost entirely populated and commercialised – even the conjunctions like ‘at’, ‘and’ and ‘to’.

Courtesy Holly Childs.
Courtesy Holly Childs.

Meanwhile, Spooner’s ‘Damning Evidence Illicit Behaviour Seemingly Insurmountable Great Sadness Terminated In Any Manner’ (2014) opera takes its title from a public statement made by Nike after Lance Armstrong’s revelations of doping. The opera itself outsources its scores to comment threads reacting to public controversy like Beyonce’s lip-synced Obama inauguration performance (“if you can’t trust her, who can you trust?”). All this, while Cramer suggests, “a new kind of writing needs to be invented”. But when Childs shares her “cute and nice conversation” with a Microsoft Word spell check function via an error-box gesturing, “it didn’t have the exact language to convey what it was thinking or feeling”,  I rather think it already has. **

Lunch Bytes is a discussion series examining the increasing ubiquity of digital technologies in the art world.

Header image: Cally Spooner, ‘Damning Evidence Illicit Behaviour Seemingly Insurmountable Great Sadness Terminated In Any Manner’ (2014). Courtesy the artist.

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