Frustrated that we allowed the hand in for our dissertation draft to dictate so much, need to keep that in check next time. But moaning aside we’ve still been exposing ourselves to lots of new stuff and doing some new things but haven’t given the time to reflect on it so here goes.
We attended a great talk by Philipp Ekardt, a research fellow specialising in theories of image-circulation. He began his talk by discussing how fine art and fashion practice find themselves within digital ecology, showing us the film ‘Watermarked’ by the New York based collective DIS. They were hired by Kenzo to revamp the brand and this is what they produced. It was highly connected to their stock images; creating this aesthetic of emptiness/vacuity. Very similar in fact to how a catalogue is constructed. It’s slightly different to an advert, it’s highly generic because of the desire to be neutral.
He went on to discuss the unspecified nature of a stock image. They’re images which are created with a double quality; they respond to a need to fill a whole, be that in a film or a website but can’t distract too much attention so need not to be noticed. Invisibly filling a gap. The notion of the watermark is also something that was brought up (hardtop avoid when dealing with stock images). It’s a fairly new idea due to it being an attempt to hold onto something under digital conditions but when that is embraced and to a certain extent fetishised, it reverses the intention. This whole topic is something which obviously fascinates us due to our minor obsession with stock images (if you’re unaware of this visit our website www.sidandjim.com and you’ll find out what we mean).
There was then another highly interesting talk about blockchain technology with a great panel of including Hito Steyerl and Julian Oliver. They went over a huge number of topics like whether Art needs its own blockchain and can blockchain technologies help create and retain value for artists and arts organisations? They also discussed whether or not blockchains are transforming all other industries and supply chains, and if they are, how will it affect the arts? If you would like to watch the full talk the live stream is available below.
Last week also marked the end of this years ‘Into the Wild’ programme meaning there was an exhibition at Chisenhale studios. ‘Into the Wild’ is a free, year-long professional development programme for recent BA graduate artists, led by artists at Chisenhale Studios – a really great opportunity/thing to exist. Exhibition was fun, especially a work by Oliver Durcan titled ‘The Painter and Their Desktop’ which was exactly that; a painting depicting the classic Mac desktop background of a mountain range.
In other news our pavilion we curated for the wrong is open today!! Head over to the15cmdments.com to check out all the amazing artists, all the pavilions will be opening up today too so if you want to see those too then go to the wrong website. www.thewrong.org
We’re also producing a new work for a show in London titled Mutants which opens next Monday. It’s going to be a series of snowy footprints that wonder around the space, as if someone has walked in from the snow and taken a look round the exhibition. While deciding on the work we were thinking about the idea of horror films as ‘Mutants’ was the title of the show. We agreed that the scariest aspect of them is usually not being able to see the monster but merely witnessing its existence. As we’re noted previously in our last blog post, William K. Everson said it best – “Nothing that the camera can show can possibly be as horrible as what the mind can imagine”. This also has obvious nods to Yves Klien and Ignasi Aballí with regards to mark making and the body.
The rest of this week is just getting ready for the show in Manchester, An Exchange of Sorts. Hopefully we’ll be back in the next couple days with an update…