This Frontier so Familiar so Strange

2016
Group Exhibition

Oscar Cass-Darweish, Bruno Grilo, James Irwin, Christopher Liam Oakes, Jack Marder, Laura O’Connor and Jennifer Wright

Curated by Mona Casey

Exhibition launch: Tuesday 8th March – 6 – 8PM
Exhibition continues: 9th March – 14th April 2016

ARTICLE gallery presents This Frontier so Familiar so Strange, a group exhibition of work, which engages with the internet, gaming and other digital technologies as content and as production method.

This exhibition occurs within the context of a moment, when the development of digital technologies has had a significant and recognised impact on art practices and we have shifted from use terminology such as ‘media’ to ‘new media’ and beyond. Post the turn of the 21st century we are embedded as a society in the consumption of the Internet and in the currency of the digital, such that we are already engaged with discussions by artist Marisa Olson and author Artie Vierkant on a Post-Internet age. The Curation of the digital right now is also a hot topic, despite exhibitions such as Bitstreams at the Whitney Museum in 2001 and 010101 – (Art in Technological Times) in 2001 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and arises in search engines, as frequently as digital adverts and cookies. Opening a couple of weeks ago at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, we encounter Iwona Blazwick’s reverse-chronological, historical journeying through the use of digital technologies in art, in the exhibition, aptly referencing Nam June Paik’s description of what he termed the Electronic Superhighway, 2016-1966.

Bruno Grilo, wall paper installation (left) and Jennifer Wright, digital print and perspecs (right)

Installation shots

Bruno Grilo, When I Should Fold I Wander, installation, Digital print on billboard paper

This Frontier so Familiar so Strange, Installation

Jennifer Wright, Crystal Totem (left) - Jack Marder, Yumyumyum (right)

In a history built upon the art of Roy Ascott and his adoption of telematics – communication systems, the internet works and gaming cheat malfunctions of Jodi.org, the online virtual and cyber space engagements in Second Life by eteam; Maurice Benayoun’s virtual-reality and interactive-art installations, the exquisite DNA and genetics works of Robert Kac and the acknowledgement of the performative space of technologies within Ryan Trecartin’ exaggerated character presentations that capture the lifestyle of reality and confessional TV and the explorer of digital spatial language, Hito Steyerl, especially in his Factory of the Sun, installation at the Venice Biennale, 2015, we are continually confronted by the epic possibilities of a space and distribution system, virtual, alien and second to none.

This Frontier so Familiar so Strange is the beginning of a series of exhibitions attempting to explore what is a widespread drive to interrogate the digital and cybernetic in art and life. Some of the artists included in this exhibition are of an age where they will not have experienced the dawn, the before of broad internet use, instead they have emerged with its development, this is the stuff of their everyday, whilst others will have seen the transformation of humanities life experience, as a result of the digital age.

The artists are based in England, America and Northern Ireland.

Oscar Cass-Darweish is a digital practitioner working across disciplines of web design, sound design, 3D modelling, video editing and compositing. His practice has developed out of an interest in virtual space and it’s relationship with actual space by means of data, software and display methods that can be used to present environments that we can engage with. Forms of immersion and telepresence are utilised for site-specific installations and online pieces. Considering the idea that screens and projections inherently present non physical depictions of spaces other than the one they exist in, he aims to create works that exist across physical and notional environments. Collaborative, curatorial and facilitative roles are explored, aiming to provide further platforms where artworks and spaces can interact and overlap.

Bruno Grilo’ work employs techniques of digital architectural design – placed within a philosophical, technological and art historical context – to find a new form of expression. This process of architectural design has its own set of rules and codes, in which the spaces (and the void) created are not limited to the actual, but become realities in themselves. As realities, they are not only objects within the physical world, but objects of and in consciousness. Grilo’s work explores this physiological and psychological phenomenon; the electronic, technological (digital) process, and the emotional and sensuous experience of a possible alternate reality.

James Irwin’ work investigates the relationship between physical and digital realities. Working across digital image and sound he makes concrete models and artefacts to explore the abstract, esoteric systems that enable digital communication. Other works manipulate and appropriate the tools and media that shape our experience of online reality. He is currently exploring how representations of physical and digital realities can overlap to produce ‘non-spaces’ – contexts within which things are no longer easily defined as representations of the physical world or as the product of digital aesthetics. These works manifest as veneered hardwood panels overlaid with the image of UV printed Instagram filters, as Facebook adverts filtered through custom built software, and within animations that generate narratives from hyperlinked imagery and passages of predictive text.

Jack Marder’ works address contemporary behaviours such as indulgent Internet use, voracious consumption and capitalist driven excess. He is currently interested in screen time, how we devote ourselves to the consumption of electronic media and transfix on the virtual. The idea of looking at our consumption of the Internet, its relation to food and the amplified excessiveness involved is also something he is interested in. ‘YUMYUMYUM’ is a video based work visualising consumption’s vicious cycle, gastronomic voyeurism and food eroticism through a gross, sugarcoated theatricality. The visuals of oozing milky pink, overfilled orifices and a regurgitation of GIF based imagery flow over the backdrop of an altered insect’s metamorphosis. The constant state of feeding and consuming within the caterpillar acts as a representation of western societies unfulfilled state – always desperately seeking their complete metamorphosis.

Laura O’Connor’ work focuses on feminist art strategies of subversion within the context of social media. Researching trends in online self-presentation and exploring post-feminist ‘femininities’ the work aims to unsettle assumptions as to what a woman is or what it means to be ‘feminine’ within social media culture. O’Connor achieves these subversions employing formal strategies such as; live performance, live web-camming, green screen technology and social media, and performance strategies, such as; parody, masquerade, masochism, humour and irony.

Christopher Liam Oakes works across a range of disciplines exploring the links between the virtual and the physical. Using a variety of tools – including 3D software, virtual spaces, installation and projection, Oakes creates film work that de-constructs and reconstructs media, exploring how the virtual influences and defines us in contemporary culture. Damsel in Distress was created in response to the recent influx of gender and sex-related discussions within the gaming community. In the style of a Machinima production, the short film brings to light the regressive and patronising representations of women in the games industry and subverts a tired and clichéd trope. Be it the acceptance or destruction of the trope, the damsel takes on an active role in the situation, claiming herself and turning the trope in on itself in a moment of both empowerment and defeat. The disturbing cry for help turns in to a protest and control balance in the midst of a male dominated world, resulting in the destruction of the virtual world she embodies.

Jennifer Wright’s, Escape from Oplontis is made from many sources digital processes and presents an excavation of portals and parallel worlds found in various domestic spaces, manifested through different means: murals, paintings, TV monitors and mobile screens. In this, the notion of a media archeology is followed; that is, Escape from Oplontis explores the idea that today’s media are not new modes replacing older, redundant forms. Rather, desires and instantiations of thought realized through various means throughout history. Specifically, Escape from Oplontis explores the Roman villa Oplontis, with its murals, mosaics and architectural vistas and also contemporary environments with their screens, pads and phones. The artist visited a number of Roman villas to experience the ways in which images of gardens, sacred landscape, mythical beasts and fantastic and strange buildings (the exterior) are placed inside the domestic space, in designs that direct the viewers movements and gaze, and as vistas organizing space and time (both imaginary and real). The villas are an early form of technology that connects an inside to an outside. If the sacred aspects of the frescos are no longer present in contemporary domestic spaces, today there are many portals in which individuals can connect to a parallel space. And if the villas can be said to offer theatrical spaces for inhabitants to perform the rituals of everyday life, we might think about the way contemporary portals offer platforms for performance or theatre in domestic space. In this media archeology, differences become apparent. Today, our portals are often digital and mobile and connection to other spaces is made through small hand-held screens, the theatre of gaming being a common example. An extension of this logic is to think about how the mobile device, when used outside, allows connection to parallel spaces (whether real or virtual) at private (domestic) scale.

Escape from Oplotus, being made of perspex cut by a laser following digital vector files, hand-made embroidery produced by following digital patterns and a print merging photographs and pattern through photoshop, is information made material. This idea of different materialisations of information being translatable into other forms can be found in earlier works, and relates to the idea of a media archeology that identifies various strata of media in the present. In this, how pattern is transformed by a particular medium or media and circulates, infuses or dominates domestic environment – as the fabric of such spaces – is important.

James Irwin, installation

Jack Marder

James Irwin, Double screen Installation