After an acclaimed opening year in 2013, Art Licks Weekend festival is returning to London for its second edition, running at venues across town from October 2 to October 5.
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.
Examining information dissemination and the archive on and offline, Tabularium exists as a physical exhibition and a website. Curated by Alana Kushnir and taking its name from the 78 BCE Roman building storing tablet legal documents, it builds on the ongoing project collating and preserving publications not available in a digital format yet drawing from, or reflecting on the internet. The original Roman Tabularium was closed to the public but the works on show at Melbourne’s Slopes gallery examine the modern archive as a public resource, actively created, modified and consumed on a daily basis.
Slopes is a space that exists in a transitional state – sitting in the back of a building currently being renovated into apartments, it will close once these renovations are complete. Right now though, it’s a white cube punctuated by a ceiling open to a rickety-looking wooden catwalk and its designated ‘slope’ (a remnant of its previous use as an underground carpark) jutting into the gallery. It’s a perfect place to present Tabularium, where the remnants of a utilitarian past and pre-ordained non-gallery future mean that the space itself is positioned within the fluctuating lifecycle of the archive.
Tabularium (2014) @ Slopes exhibition view. Photo by Christo Crocker. Image courtesy Alana Kushnir.
The destruction of tactile documents, from the legendary burning of the Library of Alexandria to the recent loss of museum artefacts in Syria to civil war, are examples of how physical objects of knowledge and information can be lost, but the intangible online one is just as prone. Both Ry David Bradley’s ‘Flowers for Ukraine’ (2014) and Jon Rafman’s ‘Annals of Time Lost’ (2013) examine said extinction. Bradley inserts an abstracted flower into the Ukraine Wikipedia page, printing a copy to record the incursion. Presented along with a large-scale reproduction of the plant, its documentation continues to offer an IRL version of the page that exists long after editors have figuratively ‘deflowered’ the online one. Rafman’s video work, meanwhile, draws from the London’s National Gallery collection to produce juxtapositions of anime characters and old master paintings, building a new archive informed by the personal narratives of its creator.
The archive as physical property is examined within Lawrence Lek’s ‘Memory Palace’ (2014) video, taking its audience on a virtual tour of an imagined Tabularium space in which server racks and monitor screens take the place of inscribed tablets. Katja Novitskova’s knife-like ‘Shapeshifter X’ and ‘Shapeshifter V’ (2013), are made from circuit board wafers and presented within acrylic cases. The circuit boards do not disclose their originally intended use and any information encoded within them is lost. Instead, the museum aesthetic of their presentation prompts the audience to consider them as historical objects used in the distant past.
Other works, also including Tom Penney, Heman Chong and Anthony Marcellini, continue this exploration of documentation and archive construction. Eloïse Bonneviot’s ‘My Forensic Steps 2’ (2014) print on silk presents written instructions on the process of crime-scene documentation within the gallery, then subverts the objective output of those rules through a first-person game hosted on the Slopes gallery website. This subversion continues within Rachel De Joode’s print, ‘Hanging Marble’ (2014), rough marble reduced to two dimensions and exuding an oppositional strength and suppleness, a perfect representation of the way knowledge flows and changes within the archive.
Surrounded by these works in the gallery sits Tabularium Archive, a library of books on a server rack that capture the internet in some way, yet exist only within a physical reality. They’re digital ‘ghosts’ of texts from Kushnir’s personal collection, which fade in and out of view from within the space, reflecting on their status as information not available through online archives. Both the books and the works within Tabularium examine the spaces between the original Tabularium’s static information collection and storage, and the data flows of our current realities. Kushnir and the artists involved have built a modern Tabularium – an evolving space which sets nothing in stone. **
That includes Lek’s site-specific and interactive performance of ‘Prosthetic Aesthetics’, a screening and new performance from Sagar’s Human Factors series and a performance from JocJonJosch’s Head to Head series.
Inspired by the Norman Foster-designed Palace of Peace and Reconciliation building in Kazakhstan, and already surfaced in Riga and New York, the nomadic project relies on collaboration while being subject to time and negotiation as it refuses a story’s end and thus its own answer.
Mediating one’s image is one thing but translating that into a portrait of your feelings is another. London-based artist Lawrence Lek tackles digital representation of emotion with this video ‘KI$$’, through “3d self-portraits, computer-controlled fabrication and rendered sculpture”.
With its ability to replicate live scenes and in the face of internet hegemony, you could argue that the 3-D printer threatens to “replicate, streamline and standardise” everything but Lek’s speculative sculpture is an attempt at showing that that doesn’t have to be the case.
Here’s blurb to explain how:
“KI$$ revolves around two lovers recording themselves at the moment of touch. Each holds their position, as the other moves around them, photographing them from all angles; when the capture is complete, they change roles. These images are recombined into a three-dimensional digital animation, which is then projected back onto full-size 3d-printed figures. As the film plays, the virtual male and female figures are projected onto their plastic doubles, revolving in an endless loop around the kiss.”
Mirroring the software release cycle of the corporate world, this new exhibition model explores their reach beyond a market economy and inside a gallery setting. Said distinction, though, is blurry to say the least, which is why the event, featuring live demonstrations and downloads of new technologies by “artists, coders, developers, composers, and writers”, should be an interesting one.
With over sixty galleries and artist-run spaces participating, the Art Licks Weekend is one of the most consistently interesting features of London’s art calendar. By dint of its disparate nature and vast geographical stretch, though, it suffers from a problem of identity. With venues pock-marking the map of East and South London, it’s difficult to impose a unifying character on it- and there remains a question of just how far a festival that celebrates independence can go towards suppressing its constituent parts into a homogenous whole.
For sculptor LawrenceLek, the challenge was to find an imaginative solution to these dilemmas. Working in collaboration with Valentina Berardi, CliffordSage and AndiSchmied, his response was as thrillingly progressive as it was ambitious: if the galleries can’t be brought together geographically or thematically, why not unite them virtually? Working from his studio in Hackney Wick’s TheWhiteBuilding, Lek and his team sought to put the idea into practice.
Bonus Levels. Lawrence Lek & Andi Schmied.
Bonus Levels, a first-person computer game that brings twenty of the space’s participating in the Art Licks Weekend, is the stunning result of this brainwave. Three laptops rest on perches under a crosshatched wooden structure with images from the screens projected onto the walls of the space around it. On the screens themselves, the visitor finds themselves in a hilly landscape, rendered into the stylised visual argot of 90s Nintendo games. In the middle of a digitally undulating lake stands an enormous, angular tower, of which each floor painstakingly recreates the floor plans and layout of the galleries involved.
The tower’s appearance- accurate digital facsimiles of existing galleries piled high, one atop the other- is, as Lek explains, no accident. Its jagged, unwieldy lurch is reminiscent of some of London’s more blustering new skyscrapers- apt, given that the colossally expensive Olympic development towers are a hop and a skip to the east. Jumping from floor to floor, the player can take in a view of the idyllic virtual panorama, and, if they so wish, plummet twenty storeys to the ground. The point-of-view combined with large-scale projections make for a gloriously cinematic experience. If nothing else, it must be the only computer game ever to feature a blueprint for the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre.
Bonus Levels. Lawrence Lek & Andi Schmied.
The participatory aspect of the work is as refreshing as it is conceptually satisfying. Lek encourages the player to become a “digital sculptor”, pushing around gallery walls and rearranging materials. Inspired by the theories of the Metabolists, who combined architectural principles with ideas of organic biological structures, his vision is to keep the game running online in perpetuity, adding new floors and maintaining it as a ‘living’ project.
Bonus Levels’ romantic landscape- a violent contrast with the post-industrial drabness of Hackney Wick- is by no means incidental to the work either. While it may be overstating the case to call ita ‘political’ work, it functions as an intriguing comment on the plight of London’s independent galleries and artists; priced out of areas once synonymous with creative endeavour, they find themselves relegated ever further towards the city’s margins- might means one day relocate them from bricks and mortar to pixels and graphics? Brevity precludes an essay on late-stage Capitalism, but Lek articulates these worries with effortless dexterity.
So Public Assembly have inhabited pop-up space and installation Penthouse 4C at Hack the Barbican for nearly two weeks now and to celebrate, they’ll be hosting Sonic Architecture tomorrow, Friday, August 23.
Featuring two collaborations by Lawrence Lek and Chris King, as well as Patchfinder and Daniel Swan. Promising an “immersive live experience” the artists concerned all work with an audiovisual scope, particularly King, whom we interviewed not long ago.
Forever deconstructing notions of digital dualism, London art collective Public Assembly will be launching Bonus Levelsat this year’s Art Licks Weekend, running October 4 to 6 in London.A multiplayer video game celebrating the DIY spirit of artist-run projects spaces, the project hopes to bring together those independent artists existing on the margins through a digital sculpture, featuring participants of the Art Licks weekend on each floor.
Artist and avatar will be given the tools for building their own digital space in the shared tower space, in a collective artwork headed by Lawrence Lek, in collaboration with interaction designer Valentina Berardi, photographer Andi Schmied and artist Clifford Sage.
Artists LawrenceLek launched his half-sized installation ‘Penthouse 4C‘ of the most exclusive room in the Barbican on Friday for Hack the Barbican. It will host Public Assembly, a nomadic art collective founded by Lek, for the duration of festival, running August 5 to 31.
During that time the pop-up venue-within-a-venue will be hosting “a month-long series of interactive events, classes, installations, screenings, musical performances, hangouts, parties…” and the list goes on.
See the Penthouse 4C website for more details, including a timetable. **
![Alana Kushnir, 'Tabularium Archive' (2014 – ongoing) (updated list available [here] [https---docs.google.com-document-d-1C8hqwpkFZiecHtsWu4FIQsGLwSS7A2NxoZkRxMfzzTM-edit?usp=sharing]). Photo by Christo Crocker. Image courtesy Alana Kushnir.](https://d23pzp3qb0c2ie.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/640-Alana-Kushnir-Tabularium-Archive-2014-----ongoing-updated-list-available-here-https-docs.google.com-document-d-1C8hqwpkFZiecHtsWu4FIQsGLwSS7A2NxoZkRxMfzzTM-edituspsharing.-Photo-by-Christo-Crocker.-Image-courtesy-Alana-Kushnir..jpg)
