Category Archives: Art
MTV Visual Ident
I’m happy to finally share with the internet (and the TV) the visual ident I made for MTV
If you’re living anywhere except for the US or UK you can see it on your TV screens. For eveyrone else there’s the internet! A massive thanks goes to MTV for inviting me to make an ident – a process which I’ll hopefully write about soon.
Enjoy!
NARGIFSUS – No Fucks Given
NARGIFSUS, the closing eent for Carla Gannis’ second solo show, took plcae on 19th March at TRANSFER in New York. It featured works by 58 artists each responding to the them of selfies. As of 20th all of the gifs are now online 🙂 Below you can see my gif, No Fucks Given:
For NARGIFSUS artist Carla Gannis and curator Tina Sauerländer invited 50+ international artists to present animated GIF “Selfie-Self Portraits” that provide a broad range of artistic perspectives on contemporary selfie culture and self-display. This online exhibition (released March 20, 2016) follows the NARGIFSUS SCREENING at TRANSFER Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, on the occasion of the closing event of Carla Gannis’s solo show A Subject Self-Defined on March 19, 2016.
The Selfie Drawings by Carla Gannis, which are the prelude to the works in the show at TRANSFER, were part of the group show Porn to Pizza—Domestic ClichĂ©s curated by Tina Sauerländer at DAM Gallery in Berlin in 2015. The topic of the exhibition, the change of private and personal comfort zones in the Digital Age, complements Gannis’s The Selfie Drawings that deal with contemporary states of analog-virtual hybridity and identity performance.
Evasive Manoeuvres
During my 2016 Fellowship at Birmingham Open Media I will continue my collaboration with Lucy Hutchinson to further the work we have been producing in response to the growing surveillance culture. We will be devising creative interventions which aim to circumvent invasive surveillance technology.
These interventions will take a variety of approaches and will not be limited to purely hardware/software based response. In one such intervention we will be taking inspiration from the work of artists such as Adam Harvey and Zach Blas and develop a series of masks that can be worn to obscure faces from these cameras whilst making a political statement.
This project came about through several events. For me interest in this area started in 2015 when I curated the Stealth exhibition at Vivid Projects. This exhibition featured works by six artists that produced work in response to surveillance culture. This included a font by Sang Munn for circumventing text scanning software, a personal drone system by Joseph DeLappe and a film made entirely of CCTV footage by Manu Luksch.
For Hutchinson work in this area began with the This Is What A Feminist Looks like and Paying Artist artworks produced in 2015. These works used facial recognition software together with face-obscuring masks to make political statements. Since 2016, she has been undertaking a residency at Coventry University where she is using the “Media Eyes” at Birmingham New Street station as a focal point to explore the effect of surveillance on behaviour, particularly focusing on themes of participation and consumption.
During the fellowship we will bring together our skills in programming, photography and printmaking and collaboratively examine the increasing collection of audience metrics by surveillance technologies for advertising uses. We intend to further this research by considering resistance scenarios to these technologies and the application of this software into other areas such as threat recognition, art galleries and work spaces.
Self-portraits
Common Property opening
Common Property held its opening event at Jerwood Space on 14th.
Jerwood Encounters: Common Property seeks to demonstrate how artists engage with and relate to copyright through the work of six emerging and mid-career artists, including three new commissions. The exhibition and accompanying events programme seeks to generate new conversations about how copyright is currently impacting the way visual artists make and distribute their work, and demonstrates how artists are challenging the limitations of copyright through their practice.
The exhibition features new commissions by myself, Owen G Parry and Hannah Knox alongside existing works by Edwin Burdis, Rob Myers and SUPERFLEX.
I’m really impressed by curator Hannah Pierce‘s selection of artists and artworks that each deal with the broad topic of Copyright in very different ways.
For this exhibition I developed two new works, Transformative Use and a collection of four works, I Disappear, Blurred Lines, My Sweet Lord and Ice Ice Baby.
Photos in this post by Hydar Dewachi.
Transformative Use
This work builds upon the Dead Copyright piece made for the Permission Taken exhibition at Birmingham Open Media and targets one corporation.
I Disappear, Blurred Lines, My Sweet Lord, Ice Ice Baby
These four pieces use the sonification techniques developed in 2013 to create audiovisual data remixes of songs that are well known due to being involved in course cases about copyright.
Already there has been a writing and events surrounding the exhibition. a-n published an interview with myself, Owen G Parry and Hannah Pierce, and on 21st January a panel discussion took place at London Art Fair about Copyright and Intellectual Property. The panel consisted of myself, Hannah Pierce and Shane Burke and was chaired by Shonagh Manson. Future events include a fan club event by Owen G Parry on 29th January and a tour of the exhibition on February 15th that will conclude with a Sonification Studies performance by me.
Thanks
My thanks go out to Hannah Pierce for selecting me for inclusion in this exhibition and to the whole of the Jerwood Visual Arts team for their help installing the works. The exhibition continues at Jerwood Space until 21st February.
archiveremix.com
I’m happy to announce the launch of archiveremix.com. The site presents a small selection of artefacts from the archives from the University of Birmingham’s Research and Cultural Collections with the intention of them being starting points for new remixes.
There has been much movement towards encouraging galleries, libraries, archives and museums to open up their archives for use by the public. Quite often this is hampered by a variety of factors including cost, copryright and just having the resources to manage such a task. One approach to this, which served as a big inspiration for this project, came from Oliver Laric. In 2012 he started a project to make 3D scans of sculptural works from the Usher Gallery and The Collection in Lincoln. The resulting remix works that were made from these scans came in various forms including 3D models, videos, gifs.
Taking inspiration from this I set about making use of the archives from University of Birmingham in a creative way. Over the last year I have been releasing remix works on the Archive Remix tumblr site and at the Permission Taken exhibition at Birmingham Open Media. Although they, in some cases, lack narrative, in making these remixes I wanted to show the opportunities to be had from allowing artists to remix works. Of course, this is not a new practice at all with artists doing this in collages, in music and every other creative practice.
The selection made available obviously only represents a small amount of what is available. This was a conscious decision as I did not want to overwhelm artists with too much of a collection.
A number of remixes have already been made by artists that I invited to participate in the Remix Party on 20th January.
Remix of Portrait of Lord Hannay by Victor Arce
Remix of Janiform zoomorphic helmet mask by Morehshin Allahyari
Remix of Cathode Ray Oscilloscope by Carla Gannis
The party featured remixes by Dan Hett, Lorna Mills, Ashley James Brown, ShawnĂ© Michaelain Holloway, MichaĂ«l Borras A.K.A. Systaime, Benjamin Berg, Michael Lightborne, Morehshin Allahyari, Daniel Salisbury, Carla Gannis, Faith Holland, Nick Briz, Daniel Temkin, Adam Ferriss, VĂctor Arce, Chema Padilla, Kate Spence, Jessica Evans, Emily Haasch. The approaches to working with this archive were very varied indeed. It featured still images, animated gifs, remixes based on compression, videos, and in the case of Nick Briz, an interactive website!
It is my hope that the archiveremix.com site, my exhibition(s) and the work made by the artists joins the case being put forth by websites such as OpenGLAM and encourages more institutions to free their archives.
Remix this
If you feel inspired by any of the works please download them and make a remix of your own! These can then be uploaded back onto the website.
This project couldn’t have been made possible without the support of the University of Birmingham’s Research and Cultural Collections and the amazing web design skills of Sebastian Lenton (you should hire him).
Over time new works from the archives of Research and Cultural Collections will be added, so check back often!
GLEEETCH, 12th December
GLEEETCH, an awesome 8 Bit/chiptune event, is coming back on 12th December at Power Lunches and I made this rather dizzying video to promote it (with audio by Oliotronix).
The night features music and performances from HarleyLikesMusic, Galaxy Wolf, Lazenbleep, J3wel, Fanny Davis and more.
I sadly can’t be there (though I’ll be London-bound for an Algorave the following weekend on 18th) but y’all should go!
Archive Remix prints
The Archive Remix print pieces are a continuation of the remix pictures that I have been making as part of my residency at the University of Birmingham’s Research and Cultural Collections. The content that I have been making for that has focused on what can be lost when restrictive copyright is enforced. In keeping more with the themes of this exhibition the Archive Remix print pieces focus on the effect of corporate branding on imagery.
The most central imagery consists of 3D scans of artefacts from the archives of Research and Cultural Collections. These then become obscured amongst the visual barrage of slightly distorted corporate branding, something which might not seem so visible at first.
Copy Bomb
The Copy Bombs are my way of contributing to the free culture movemnt by encouraging the public to share images, audio, text and video in an unhindered way.
The Copy Bombs are, at their heart, PirateBox installations.
PirateBox creates offline wireless networks designed for anonymous file sharing, chatting, message boarding, and media streaming. You can think of it as your very own portable offline Internet in a box!
When users join the PirateBox wireless network and open a web browser, they are automatically redirected to the PirateBox welcome page. Users can anonymously chat, post images or comments on the bulletin board, watch or listen to streaming media, or upload and download files inside their web browser.
By building these sculptures (well, I employed Matthew James Moore to make them) I aim to give more of a physical presence to the wifi network. It serves as an object to signal that media can be shared freely within the vicinity. Due to being powered by battery (which can last nearly three days) these can be located anywhere.
In practical terms to use the Copy Bomb only a browser is needed, which can be on a mobile or desktop OS. A user needs to join the CopyBomb Alpha/Beta/Gamma network and then point their browser to http://copybomb.lan. They will be redirected to the sharing site, which is a PirateBox with the theme/CSS changed.
Once there they can browse the current contents or upload their own. I have hand picked content from the following online open archives:
In addition to this there is content from the University of Birmingham’s Research and Cultural Collections and my own archive of previous artworks.
The content from the public archives was chosen based on how easy it could be to remix and modify it. So, many of the items can easily be isolated from their backgrounds and used in other projects.