Auxiliary Progress…

Since arriving here in Stockton my time has been spent exploring not just the local landscape but also my current limits of my practice. I came here looking to examine how I install current workings of sonic works and how I can develop or bridge the gap that I find between what I am making and what I am trying to offer.

The first few weeks were spent contemplating speaker architecture and how installing speaker drivers within a form that dissolved or collapsed whilst it functioned worked.  Drawing on the inspiration of the local area and its regeneration hopes/plans.  I have been thinking heavily about addition and reduction as methods of creation both in sound and process works.  Glitch process that I have been known to use is a perfect example of how regeneration seems to operate, existing ideology is rehashed the result is urban planning that though clearly considered it is not until it is implemented you realise the functional errors of such planning.

The focus on heritage and community, the life and death of generations that have called a place home.  The time that passes by and the marks those leave on a place last longer than structures in many cases.  Replacing old is not something that should be done without consideration and awareness for those that live within it.  The Auxiliary residency is based within a community that is exposed to many different social factors.  It is an opportunity to live within a place that is struggling to come to terms with how it should function.  The oddity is that with all the trials and time that it takes to rejuvenate a place it somehow still continues, functions without much thought.  Time will change the nature of a community however daily this is not something that is really brought to your attention as each day was like the last.

Mid way through this residency my father has a stroke which alongside my research here at the Auxiliary has given me a new perspective.  Seeing a parent go through a life changing moment in their existence brings reality home.  I have recently been back and forth between the residency and my parents to see how my father has progressed with his recovery.  Even though I have not been making as much as I would of hoped it has provided much needed reflection, thinking more about the sound works that have been started yet not finished.  The last few weeks here in Stockton I hope to realise some new works with little or no focus on completion yet more or presenting something that is mobile/fluid and evolving.  

 

 

PNEM – SoundArt Festival Uden, Netherlands 14-15th November.

PNEM Sound Art Festival – Interactive Visual Art

On Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 November 2015, the platform new experimental music the fifth international Pnem Sound Art Festival 2015 with live, video and audio performances by artists from home and abroad. The Pnem Sound Art Festival offers a stage for musicians and artists that are located on the cutting edge of sound, music and new media. The organisers hope through the festival an international platform for the development and implementation of new experimental music and graphic art.

To the public is also an active and participatory role. How’s your food? Take a walk in the woods with as a guide by yourself a soundscape selected or listen to the music via the app. In the context of 10 years klankenbos (be) and 5 YEARS PNEM FESTIVAL (NL) created a soundartist Bart Van Dongen in cooperation with app-Developer Yvan van der sanden an interactive GPS composition for two locations, the looppiste in Lubbock and The old velodrome of Belgian refugees in uden. The listen app gets a permanent nature, in Belgium as part of the world war I and in the Netherlands klankroute a luisterwandeling by the maashorst.

PNEM Sound Art Festival
14.11.15 | 19:30 h till 23:00 H | € 15, buy tickets
15.11.15 | 12:00 h till 17.00 h | FREE
Theater to peak
Pnemstraat 1
5406 xa uden

http://www.besteburen.eu/…/interactieve-klankkunst-op-pnem-…

PNEM Program

Saturday 14 Nov. LIVE
20:00 Official opening of the PNEM Sound Art Festival
20:15 PushPull (DE) – Balgerei 
20:30 Ken Byers (UK) – Movement-Interactive
21:00 The Feedback Gents (DE) – Out Of The Wilds
21:30 Pause
22:00 Renzo Spiteri (MT) – Quintessence
22:30 PushPull (DE) – Balgerei
22:45 End

Sunday 15 Nov. LIVE
12:00 Official opening of PNEM Sound Art Maashorst
13:00 Stichting COM (NL) – Bezette Stad Revisited – theater
13:30 Bart van Dongen (NL) – Workshop – studio
14:00 PushPull (DE) – Balgerei – theater
14:30 Bart van Dongen (NL) – Live performance – studio
15:00 Renzo Spiteri (MT) – Quintessence – theater
15:30 Radio Approxim (NL) – Mother Flockers – studio
16:00 Studium:Stadt (DE) – To see with your ears and… – theater
16:30 End

Interactive installation
12:00-16:00 Lex Raijmakers (NL) – Roots – near the studio
12:00-16:00 Alan Dormer (IE) – Thishearbeast – outdoor theater

VideoWall
• La Cosa Preziosa (IE) – The edge of the world 1’44
• Julian Scordato (IT) – Vision II 7’00
• Dickie Webb (UK) – U DYS HET 7’19
• Matthew Schoen (CA) – Vehicles CA 9″30
• Osvaldo Cibils (IT) – N°1-5 installation on monitor 2’31

PNEM Sound Art Maashorst – WoodWalk Experience 2.0
• Alan Dunn (UK) – The Black Forest 2’30
• Barry O’Halloran (IE) – Triptych 6’22
• Bart van Dongen (NL) – Gelukzoekers, zo noemen ze ons
• David Prescott-Steed (AU) – Miscommunication Solo 9’05
• David Rogers (UK) – Dungeness Tower 3’32
• Katherine Trimble (USA) – We’re Not Gonna Make It 9’03
• Osvaldo Cibils (IT) – Soundart 29 april 2015h 3’30
• Sam Marshall (UK) – Caught In Transmission 6’53
• Sandrine Deumier + Alx P.op (FR) – Mdr_test508 2’38
•Simón Pérez (AR) – Las Cifras y Las Palabras 8’00

Nog enkele kaartjes voor zaterdagavond beschikbaar: https://soundartfestival.wordpress.com/…/…/kaartjes-tickets/

Max for Live: Granulator

Robert Henke aka Monolake delves into granular synthesis with his Max for Live Granulator.

SOUNDS AS OBJECTS THAT HAVE TEXTURE AND SHAPE – Charlie McCanns’ Article ‘BEN FROST’S SONIC ARCHITECTURE’

BEN FROST’S SONIC ARCHITECTURE

~ Posted by Charlie McCann, November 6th 2014

Re-post from Intelligent Life- Original article click here

When the Australian composer and producer Ben Frost released his fifth album, “A U R O R A”, earlier this year the reviews were rapturous. Rolling Stone called it “unrelentingly menacing”, Drowned in Sound said it was a piece of “aural suffocation” (in a good way), and both picked it as “Best Album of the Year So Far”. Frost, though, is more low-key. His albums, he has said, are “over-glorified business cards”—adverts which get him well-paid commissions (he has written music for ballet, opera and film) and bring audiences to his live shows. He has been touring “A U R O R A” since April, and is playing six nights in Britain next week. It’s only live that you hear the album’s terrifying architecture. Listening to it on headphones is like reading a book about brutalism: it doesn’t do justice to its scale and weight.

An architect is certainly what Frost sounds like when you talk to him. When I spoke to him recently, he referred to sounds as “objects that have texture and shape”, and composing as “an arrangement of space”—which suggests his music is meant to be felt as much as heard. In August in a small south-London club, he played “A U R O R A” so loud and so deep that the audience couldn’t help but feel it. He has likened the pounding of the kick drum to “the externalisation of the human heart”. Shake your head all you like—as the drums thundered my heart hammered, and I began to wonder if it might leap out altogether. Some of the people pressed in close around me looked ecstatic, but plenty looked uneasy: the room cracked with the synthy snap of chain against metal; the air around us walloped with what felt like the weight of concrete slabs. On the small, dim stage, Frost was bent over his equipment, carefully adjusting knobs and dials—though he may as well have been operating a forklift.

In contrast to his previous albums, “A U R O R A” is more militant and synthetic-sounding: there are no guitars, piano or stringed instruments. Instead, he uses heavy percussion, synths and lots of distortion, and he processes the sounds through his computer. The result is a portentous mass of noise undergirded by simple rhythms and melodies that emerge occasionally from the aural chaos. These primarily recall the rhythms and melodies of techno, trance and industrial music, although, with a recurring bell motif and occasional brass burps, there are some classical flourishes. But this kind of music—the kind that hits you in the solar plexus—isn’t produced by simply turning up the volume. It also involves playing sub-bass sounds: frequencies so low they’re not so much sounds as they are thrums, of the kind you’ll feel if you place your hand on a subwoofer.

As PA systems grow in sophistication, musicians and sound designers are exploiting a wider range of sonic frequencies—ones that steal ever further into the realm of the physical. A range of artists—from the Seattle drone-metal band Sunn O))) to the Portland noise artist Pete Swanson and the London DJ duo Raime—have, in the last few years, been experimenting with low-end music that gets at the gut. The music magazine the Wire has called it “a live performance trend”.

But Frost thinks technology will take us further still. As absorbed as he is by music’s effects on the senses, whether aural or tactile, he’s intrigued by how advances in medical technology might improve upon our limitations. “Twenty years from now, I think we’re very likely to be able to have our ears upgraded so that we can perceive a wider range of frequencies—or by-pass the ear entirely,” he says. “I’m personally really excited about that. Every time the fucking jack cable rips out of my headphones when I stand up too quickly and I have to put it back in, there’s always this little moment where I want to jam it straight into my skull.”

Frost might be looking to the future, but he should just look at what’s right in front of him: the people at his gigs, forced to listen with their whole bodies, already have their skulls full of his music.

Ben Frost The Haunt, Brighton, Nov 10th; Thekla, Bristol, Nov 11th; Capsule, Birmingham, Nov 12th; St John at Hackney Church, London, Nov 13th; Gorilla, Manchester, Nov 14th; Howard Assembly Room at Opera North, Leeds, Nov 15th 

Charlie McCann is editorial assistant at Intelligent Life

Passing Weeks..

These last few weeks have been spent exploring all parts of Yerevan some intentionally and others purely by accident.  One day this week even was comparably to my days on my snowboard.  Using the bus like a chairlift to take me to a point in the city with a line back to house which I walked capturing many elements that I had over the weeks hope to experience.

These random wanderings and planned excursions have allowed me to interact with architecture and accidental sculptural objects.  They have created conversations within my practice that I am now exploring and will continue post residency here.  I spend time photography and field recording the sounds I encounter not always for later work but to use the process of recording as a way to explore the moments that I have experienced.  Some of these elements naturally appear in the work but sometimes it is me focusing on something that i see a metaphor amongst or pausing just so the brain absorbs and allows the senses to filter completely.  Though the sounds and visual elements are important it is all senses that inform my thoughts.  If only to have a machine to record the smells both pleasant and not so.  The aromas here are strong and really striking.

Certain themes are constant within my travels such as looking through but seeing behind in reflective moments or the attraction to controlled and protected spaces.  Here especially where traffic cones are not so common the ways in which people mark space is intriguing.  One thought that is common with my travels here though is to do with vacancy as a positive.  The building of vacancy, i.e. in the sense of building glass and marble buildings that seems to be for something that only they know about.  With these buildings not necessarily fitting into the landscape rather standing alone amongst the tower blocks of Soviet era.  I see these new buildings a positive in one sense and nod to a new era or at least optimism.  This in comparison in other cities that I have lived recently where new construction has stopped.

As for work I am currently working on a new digital work, a step on from the Athens Arrival work I made in Greece last year and also some new photo and sculptural works.  These are all due to be exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art here in a couple of weeks.  So for now the walks and excursions are more precise and studio time has increased.  I will update from the studio in a few days prior to the show.

The Bug “Function / Void” By Factory Fifteen (Music Video)

INCONSISTENCIES WITHIN THE KNOWN – Nicolás Lamas

The practice of Nicolás Lamas is full of playful process based works.  Using process, objects and a systematic use of language to explore the gaps within what others see as certainties.  The inquisitive nature of his various works explore past the obvious, simple techniques alongside conceptual installations allow your mind to wander.  Little gems of information are offered which allow your understanding to enquire as to what further levels of information Lamas is presenting.  It is good to see an artist who does this allowing a viewer to become engaged through entry points whilst also taking them on a tour of further concepts that could be over looked without this engagement.  Click here for his Website.

Nothing comes from nothing?

2013

Method

Todas las palabras que no entiendo de la versión alemana de la Teoría de la Relatividad de Albert Einstein, son lijadas y sus restos son acumulados al lado del libro. A través de este método intento simplificar y acceder de manera absurda al contenido de las ideas expuestas en el texto. Todas las palabras que quedan en el libro son perfectamente entendidas por mí, pero el sentido y la complejidad de las ideas planteadas originalmente en el libro han sido deformadas a través de este ejercicio.21,5 x 15 cm (libro).

My limited knowledge of a language (German) is taken as the starting point for this work, where I sand all the words and mathematical equations that I don’t understand in the book of the Theory of Relativity of A. Einstein. The result of this action is a disjointed text where I can understand each word of the book but not the meaning of the ideas in the original version. The sanded words and equations become a mound of remains next to the book.

20 x 16 cm (book).

Layers of meaning

2012

Proyección de collages digitales realizados a partir de la documentación fotográfica de diferentes exposiciones encontradas en internet. Dimensiones variables.

 

Projection of digital collages made ​​from photographic documentation of different art exhibitions found on the Internet. Dimensions variable.

 

FINDINGS FROM THE MOJAVE

An Excursion Into LA’s Mojave Hinterland at the CLUI Desert Research Station

Kim Stringfellow

Re-blogged from KCET

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) has always occupied a somewhat paradoxical space–one that is informatively neutral but at the same time also subtly provocative. This aspect allows its organizers to penetrate often, impenetrable places such as the Nevada Test Site. Indeed, the CLUI is as well known inside the art world as it is outside of it. It is in fact one of the more internationally well-known and respected interdisciplinary entities in contemporary art that often does not appear as an arts organization at all but instead as a highly creative interpretive center for some institutional-like agency.

Founded in 1994 by the Center’s director, Matthew Coolidge along with various CLUI associates as a research and educational organization whose mission is “dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.” The CLUI stipulate that “the manmade landscape is a cultural inscription, that can be read to better understand who we are, and what we are doing.” The Center is interested in multiple interpretations of landscape from a variety of perspectives and points of view.

The Center supports and presents a variety of exhibition programs at its main exhibition and office location in Culver City, CA adjacent to another SoCal gem of hard-to-classify arts practice–The Museum of Jurassic Technology. The Culver City location also features a bookstore where one may sign up for the Center’s newsletter, The Lay of the Land and purchase various Center produced publications. The CLUI also organizes highly popular bus tour trips. Its years of research have been organized into a publicly accessible online Land Use Database. On occasion, the Center hosts outside researchers though its Independent Interpreter Series.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation Desert Research Station. | Photo: Kim Stringfellow.

The Center’s American Land Museum is a group of associated satellite locations including the Wendover facility located deep within the Great Basin at the Nevada/Utah border adjacent to Utah’s Great Salt Lake–home of land speed records and Robert Smithson’sSpiral Jetty. Here resides the Center’s Wendover artist residency program at a former WWII training airbase whose claim to fame is its role supporting the first atomic bombing missions dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wendover visitors may casually visit the Enola Gay hanger that housed the B-29 bomber that forever sealed Hiroshima’s nuclear fate, later immortalized in early Richard Misrach photographs.

Other field office locations and facilities include the Gulf States Field Office in Houston, TX; the Northeast Field Office in Troy, NY; the New Mexico Field Site outside of Albuquerque, NM; the Central States Exhibit Unit in Lebanon, KS and the Desert Research Station located in Hinkley, CA.

Opened in 2000 as part of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition Flight Patterns, the Desert Research Station (DRS) focuses on the California Desert region, specifically the Mojave Desert extending from Los Angeles outward fringes within the Antelope Valley eastward into Las Vegas, Death Valley, and the Mojave National Preserve–essentially “the desert beltway around the hinterlands of Los Angeles.” Exhibits are open year-round to the public and are accessible as self-guided gallery walk-throughs (visitors must access the facility through the combination keypad after phoning the CLUI during regular business hours for the access code; call-in information is located at the door). The DRS grounds include interpretive walking trails with signage exhibits. Additional facilities on site are available for researchers conducting operations with the CLUI.

Walking Trail. | Photo: Courtesy of CLUI.

Recent projects include several sound installations “related to spatial dynamics of the ground.” Steve Badgett and artist and interdisciplinary artist, Deborah Stratman produced the Desert Resonator, a 75-foot long aeolian harp which reacts and interprets the wind movement’s over the ground into sound, using a spherical acoustic resonator. This permanently installed sonic sculpture’s “six 75′ long strings pass over dual bridges and produce multi-harmonic drones contingent upon the force and consistency of the air currents”–effectively translating the wind.

Desert Resonator (Steve Badgett, Deborah Stratman). | Photo: Deborah Stratman.

CLUI associate, Steve Rowell explores the phenomenology of sonic booms linking sky, sound, and ground in unexpected ways. Due to the DRS’s proximity to Edwards Air Force Base and Naval Air Weapons China Lake Facility makes it a perfect location to research and collection of such sonic phenomena.

Wendover artist residency program participant William Lamson ended up staging his Line Describing the Sun project in the winter months of 2011 on nearby Harper Dry Lake when the originally intended site conditions at the Bonneville Salt Flats near Wendover proved inadequate. Using a Fresnel lens apparatus mounted onto a mobile unit Lamson inscribed a 366-foot burn arc other the course of one day onto the lakebed. The concentrated intensity of the 1,600-degree point of light melted the lakebed’s dry surface, “transforming it into a black glassy substance.” When the project was later exhibited in NYC the project prompted the NY Times to comment, “Mr. Lamson can’t go back in time, but he can still go to the desert.”

 

William Lawson executing ‘Line Describing the Sun.’ | Photo: Courtesy of CLUI.

Other current projects include a collaboration with University of Southern California art curatorial graduate students that is studying and documenting experimental aircraft crash sites found throughout the region.

Future research projects include those supported by independent/autonomous solar power systems, an underground bunker space, additional sound/space projects, and one concerning DIY low altitude aerial photography. The walking trail is scheduled for completion by January 2013 with a combination gate to allow public access.

For more information visit the Center’s website.

The street address for the DRS is 40083 Hinkley Road, Hinkley, CA 92347.
Directions to CLUI’s Desert Research Station: From downtown Los Angeles, take I-10 east, to I-15 north towards Las Vegas/Barstow. Just before Barstow, take Highway 58 west. Proceed approximately 9 miles to Hinkley Road, which is sometimes indicated with a “Hinkley 1 Mile” sign. Turn right on Hinkley Road and drive north 4 miles to the DRS, located on the east side of the road. Phone the CLUI at (310) 839-5722 for combination access code during normal business hours.

Top Image: Using the horns at the DRS, acoustic “binoculars” on the walking trail. | Photo: Courtesy of CLUI

La Vitesse Et La Pierre – Igor Zimmermann

La Vitesse Et La Pierre An epic 12-minute short film made of stills, shot in Western Sahara and Norway. Play a short extract here above.Stills:                                             DIRECTED AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY: Igor Zimmermann, Frode & Marcus SCRIPT & EDITING Igor Zimmermann MUSIC WRITTEN & PRODUCED BY: Yourhighness SOUND DESIGN: Mattias Eklund SET DESIGN Malin Gabriella Nordin       BACK

 

Science Fiction: New Death

Re post form: We Make Money Not Art

Science Fiction: New Death seeks to provoke the question – have the Sci Fi visions we once imagined of the future since become a reality? I guess we all know the answer to that one.

Dario Solman, Target Orbit

Jon Rafman, Hope Springs Eternal/Still Life (BetaMale)

Because i write mostly about art and science/technology, i’ve seen my fair share of exhibitions that reference scifi. However, FACT‘s latest show is the first one i’ve visited that is entirely dedicated to science-fiction and visual arts. And in this instance, science fiction isn’t explored as the ultimate future forecaster, it is rather the starting point of a reflection on our current condition, an invitation to explore how our relationship with technology has made our everyday lives increasingly look like it is set against the backdrop of a science fiction novel.

Inspired by the work of J.G. Ballard, our story looks to the bleak, man-made landscapes of the future and asks: What happens when virtual environments become indistinguishable from reality? Will our global culture allow us to choose where to live, and who will stop us? What will we do with knowledge that becomes freely available to all? With social platforms acting as camera, how will ‘selfies’ develop and what new forms of narcissism will thrive? What is it that we need to preserve, and what do we need to change? These questions are explored through intense visualisations of electronic communication, dystopian domestic interiors, and re-enactments of historical revolutionary moments.

New Death, a title which comes from a text that fantasy writer China Miéville wrote for the exhibition, is ominous but so are the glimpses that the participating artists give into the techno-mediated we’ve built ourselves: conditions of intensified surveillance and repression, border control, loss of citizenship, etc. Not everything is bleak and joyless in the show though. You can bounce off a trampoline and pretend you’re an astronaut, meet intelligent robots that attempt to avoid boredom at all costs, you can even participate to the exhibition by writing a story describing a dystopian near future. I don’t know what a sci-fi fan would make of the exhibition but i found it smart, provocative and thought-provoking.

Quick overview of the show:

Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Accomplice. Installation at FACT Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Accomplice. Installation at FACT-Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Accomplice. Installation at FACT-Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Accomplice. Installation at FACT-Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Accomplice is a small clique of social autonomous robots hidden behind one of FACT’s gallery walls. Because these machines are curious, they attempt to discover their environment and the first step to live new adventures is to break down the wall. Their mechanical arm relentlessly punches against the wall. In the process, they not only make holes, they are also acquiring knowledge: how the wall react to their poking, how to best expand their horizon and what it is like out there, on the other side of the wall.

As the wall disappears, the robots discover other creatures: the gallery visitors. The more they can see and hear, the more excited and active these robots are getting. Their behaviour, however, isn’t predictable and linear. As soon as the movements and noises made by the visitors or the colours and patterns they are wearing have become too familiar, the robots become bored. In a sense, the roles usually taken by the audience and the robots or the artefacts and the visitors are reversed: the robots are the spectators and the gallery goers perform for them.

I had a chance to talk with Rob Saunders at the press view. I scribbled our conversation on a bit of paper, lost it so i’m going to point you to this Robots Podcast: Curious & creative in which he talks about being inspired by Gordon Pask’sconversation theory, designing curious systems, the laws of novelty and the social structure that might evolve from them.

The Kazimier

The bits and pieces of walls laying unceremoniously on the floor and the unpredictable attitude of the Accomplice robots echo the exhibition experience that Venya Krutikov & Michael Lill of The Kazimier have designed for Science Fiction: New Death. They turned the FACT building into a disordered, stern and slightly disquieting space to navigate. Your movements inside the gallery might or might not be filmed. That poorly-lit corridor might be off limit. That door over there might open on another artworks or maybe it’s a dead end.

Sascha Pohflepp, Camera Futura

Sascha Pohflepp, Camera Futura

Sascha Pohflepp, Camera Futura

Before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon in 1969, the NASA elaborated various exercises to understand how man would move in microgravity. The experiments were not just simulations but “pre-enactments” of a new set of rules that we were about to enter, providing a window into the future through which NASA researchers collected not only data but also visual impressions. One suchexperiment was conducted at Stanford University in the mid-1960s by Thomas R. Kane. The applied mechanics professor had studied the ability of cats to spin their body mid-air so that they could securely land on their four paws. Kane would film a cat bouncing on a trampoline, study its movements, and then a gymnast in a spacesuit would try to reproduce the cat’s movements on the trampoline.

Sascha Pohflepp’s Camera Futura enables visitors to replicate the experiment. You are invited to wear a light space suit and jump on the trampoline while a camera captures your moves.

The energy stored in the trampoline’s springs amplifies the power of our muscles, so that we can briefly launch ourselves and experience an instant of relative weightlessness when falling back to Earth. Camera Futura captures images from that very instant. These photos allow for a glimpse of our brief moment in a post-gravity world. In a sense, they are impressions of ourselves from one of many futures.

Jae Rhim Lee, Infinity Burial Project Installation at FACT Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Jae Rhim Lee, Mushroom Death Suit #2

The Infinity Burial Project is an art project with an aim to help us accept the reality of our own death. It is also a very bold and practical alternative to current burial system. Once buried or cremated, our bodies do not just decompose and vanish, they also contribute to the deterioration of the environment by releasing the toxic pollutants that our bodies have accumulated over the course of the years: pesticides, preservatives and heavy metals such as lead and mercury.

Mushrooms, on the other hand, can detoxify soils.

Jae Rhim Lee has thus developed the Mushroom Death Suit, a burial suit infused with mushroom spores to assist the decomposition of human corpses. The outfit comes with capsules that contain infinity mushroom spores and other elements that speed decomposition and toxin remediation. Besides, an open source burial container, and a membership society devoted to the promotion of death awareness and acceptance and the practice of decompiculture (the cultivation of decomposing organisms).

Zach Blas, Facial Weaponization Suite

 

Facial Weaponization Suite is a playful but also dark critique of the silent and gradual rise of the use of biometric facial recognition software by governments to monitor citizens.
During a series of workshops, Zach Blas worked with members of specific minority communities (queers, black people, etc.) to create masks that are modeled from the aggregated facial data of participants. The amorphous and slightly sinister masks are then worn in public performances.

Masks remain an effective tool to prevent identification technologies from capturing, analyzing, archiving and identifying our face. The use of mask also refers to social movements that use masks as a sign of protests. From the Zapatista rebels, to Pussy Riot, Anonymous, etc.

Brad Butler and Karen Mirza, Deep State Installation at FACT Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Brad Butler and Karen Mirza, Deep State. Installation at FACT Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Brad Butler and Karen Mirza, Deep State. Installation at FACT Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death (photo FACT)

Brad Butler and Karen Mirza are presenting Deep State, a film scripted by science fiction author China Miéville. The film takes its title from the Turkish term “Derin Devlet,” meaning “state within the state,” and tells a story about the representation of political struggle, moments of crisis, solidarity, schisms and oppression.

The whole film, which overlays archive protest footage and performed interludes, is online:

At first, i wasn’t sure what to make of it but, as the images rolled on, i started connecting them to what was going on in Ukraine at the time of the press view of the show and i realized that at this very moment, maybe we still have a choice: we can be the people who raise their heads, protest and attempt to take some control back or we can be the people who are blindly herded into a society of control.

James Bridle, Homo Sacer, 2014. Installation at FACT-Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death

Close and Remote, Zone

Laurence Payot, 1 in a Million You

Mark Leckey, Pearl Vision. Installation at FACT-Liverpool as part of Science Fiction: New Death