Cult of the Amateur
May 28, 2012 § Leave a Comment
CycLE CLUB event curated by James Harper
Tuesday 29th May 2012, 6-9pm 24 hour website takeover by bubblebyte.org Panel discussion with bubblebyte.org, Arcadia_Missa, Sunday Painter, Hotel Palenque, pyramidd.biz. Chaired by Sarah McCrory Performance by POLLYFIBRE
The sixth CYcLE CLUB event at Cell Project Space, ‘Cult of the Amateur?’ explores how artists and curators are using the Internet to create a new context and framework to produce and display art. Referencing Andrew Keen’s publication, ‘The Cult of the Amateur’, this event will contest Keen’s argument that the Internet is killing today’s culture and try to underpin the enormous potential of the Internet’s hybrid activity, which inspires and influences artists today. Acknowledging that the Internet has become a vital tool, source, and arena for a vast amount of contemporary art practice, James Harper has selected bubblebyte.org and POLLYFIBRE as part of this new development. Bubblebyte.org have invited Arcadia_Missa, pyramidd.biz, The Sunday Painter and Hotel Palenque to come together in discussion for a one-night event chaired by curator, Sarah Mc Crory. Turning Keen’s publication on its head, this event will aim to reveal emerging independent / artist-led activity in London that is using the internet to find new ways to display, make, and interact with their audience.
Live for 24 hours, and for the duration of the event, bubblebyte.org founders, Rhys Coren and Attilia Fattori Franchini, have invited artist Paul Flannery to create a compliant intervention of Cell’s existing and long standing website. Flannery will interrupt its conventional streamline order to interact with the basic framework of the site, creating a non-linear, auto-destructive viral action.
To complete the event POLLYFIBRE will present ‘SlideShow‘, a live work where digital and analogue media collide. The source for this work uses the Internet as a central point of departure in that the script is taken from the Wikipedia definition for the word ‘slideshow’. Information and words are randomly extracted from the Internet and transferred onto photographic 35mm slide to be projected with analogue carousel slide projectors taking the audience into a visual wordplay, from Google to PowerPoint presentation. The sound of projectors is manipulated gradually into a clashing, confrontational, digital/analogue crescendo. Slideshow aims to highlight how information is sourced, navigated and considered in a culture of accelerating mediation. It posits the notion of a post-digital era in which we are increasingly faced with challenging questions of authenticity and authority.
Sarah McCrory is curator of Frieze Projects, London. She recently formed ‘Arts & Jobs’ in Bethnal Green, London which opened in March 2012.
Arcadia_Missa, The Sunday Painter, pyramidd.biz, and Hotel Palenque are all active independent art organizations that have all developed web-based projects, which are either part or central to their activity.
bubblebyte.org is an online gallery showcasing artists that engage in a creative way with the digital space and stress the multiple possibilities of the media. bubblebyte.org is, in itself, container and content, artist and gallery.
POLLYFIBRE is a noise band that incorporate amplified analogue tools and machines in live performances that confront and engage digital culture. Founding member Christne Ellison is an artist and lecturer at the University of Reading. For Slideshow at ‘Cult Of The Amateur?’ she will perform with Lucyana Moore and Claire Moss.
CYcLE CLUB member, James Harper, is an artist and curator currently studying on the MA curating course at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Harper is a former studio member of ‘The Royal Standard, Liverpool’.
The work of Paul Flannery looks at the decoration of the Internet and its early aesthetics. Using ornamental elements, often produced by amateurs, as icons, background images and memes, Flannery’s work is a deep analysis about digital time and beauty.
Stray Topology
May 16, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Bild: ‘uniform standard with personal patterns’ Tonjaschja Adler, Studentin Studiengang Bildende Kunst
Stray Topology
Exhibition with F+F Kunststudierenden, Zurich
Tonjaschja Adler, Georgios Atzemakis, Lynn Egger, Debora Peter, Thomas Schlup, Erika Shaw, Liridon Sulejmani, Gianluca Trifilo, Franz Urben Dozentin: Mary Maclean
16. – 26. May 2012
Corner College, Kochstrasse 1, 8004 Zürich
Stray Topology is a group show of photographic works by students from the F+F Schule für Kunst und Mediendesign Zurich. The works have been produced in response to an open ended dialogue on the perception of place and its representations. The show includes a screening and discussion as part of Theory Tuesdays.
Taking the position that place is both exactly where it is and a digression from itself, the project examines the encounter with place through perspectives on urbanism, architecture and literature.
These vantage points animate our relationship to place, suggesting a meshing of subjective experience with the processes of recollection. The project considers the politics of place in relation to the selection, construction and mediation of the photographic image.
Theory Tuesdays
As part of F+F Schule fur Kunst und Mediendesign show Stray Topology, Theory Tuesdays will screen excerpts from Robinson in Ruins directed by Patrick Keiller followed by a discussion on the role of ruin aesthetics in relation to the sites and non-places of urban modernity. Mary Maclean (University of Reading) and participants in the project will hold a critical discussion of the work in the exhibition.
John Russell at MOT International, Brussels
May 16, 2012 § Leave a Comment
John Russell
JEXUS
18th May – 22nd June
MOTInternational, Brussels
Rue Vandenbrandenstraat 1, 1000
Brussels, Belgium
MOTINTERNATIONAL Brussels is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by artist John Russell.
This is the representation of a crucifixion on an alien planet. Of a deep-space pilot who wakes to find herself nailed to a cross. The details of how this happened are unclear. She remembers she was lying on her bunk considering the nature of surplus value … now her ship is long gone … light years away. Two other people are crucified here but there is no audience. No witnesses of this enactment of a cliché … neither a sacrifice nor a prophesy.
It may seem ridiculous to claim that the ecstatic scream of the Madonna, or saints on the cross is connected to the ecstacy of shit and meat rather than the divine but that is exactly what will be claimed here. Not shit specifically or anality, but “O” as the opening (out) of a throat or tunnel. The shit and anus are still key however, in the way they are used in Bataille’s analyses of the ‘dazzling brilliance’ of apes’ anuses “…the enormous anal fruit of radial and shit-smeared raw pink meat” which he contrasts with the ‘blossoming of the human face’. The animalistic, primitivity of the anus compared to the organizing civilized functions of the face (faciality). As an o-pening up as a hole, or extruded as O-O-O-O-O into a tube or tunnel. Or “O” as an opening out onto infinity as ZERO; or as a mouth splitting open the face, opening it backwards to ‘mammal meat’ and noise. A journey into “O” – either the “o” of PORN or some other word like “freedom” or “revolution” – or as the connection to other “O”s – and through these to still further examples.’
Excerpt of the essay written by John Russell to accompany the exhibition JEXUS and available online at:
http://www.john-russell.org/Spring.html
Degree Show 2012: Preview
May 14, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Simon Morgan
Table VII
2012
Balaclava, rope, tool wallet, crowbar with taped handle, 1968 Volkswagen manual
Pollyfibre
May 8, 2012 § Leave a Comment
On 4 May 2012 Breathe live art will launch with an event at Hotel Elephant, featuring performance art, sonic art, live music, installations, films and DJs. The event will showcase local artists and bands plus graduate and student work from London College of Communication alongside more established artists including Andrew Beedle (performance); Black Mass Rising (film by Shazzula); Chris Shen (installation); Electric Puffs (band);Joe Stevens (performance); Lo-budget mayhem from London Short Film Festival 2012; POLLYFIBRE (performance); Tiger Walking Downhill (sonic art / noise act)
Turner Prize 2012
May 1, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Department of Art postgraduate researcher Andy Hunt is one of the four judges for this year’s prestigious Turner Prize. The panel of judges drawn from art museums and institutions from UK and Europe – including Migros Museum, Zurich and Modern Art Oxford – announced their shortlist which includes Spartacus Chetwynd, Luke Fowler, Paul Noble and Elizabeth Price.
The Turner Prize 2012 exhibition will be at Tate Britain, 2 October 2012 – 6 January 2013. The winner will be announced live on Channel 4 on 3 December 2012.
For further information on this year’s Turner Prize see here.
