a h o m e f o r o l d i d e a s

We’ve really broken the back of the fictional artists this week! We’ve done all their bios, nearly all their artworks, and two press releases. Fingers crossed by next week it’ll all be done and we can start designing the leaflets! With the artworks, we decided to use ideas we’ve had in our ideas list but for whatever reason, time or money or both, we’ve been unable to complete them. It’s rewarding to be able to include them in a work of their own and it’ll be fun if they ever get made into works of their own right. In term of the physical information stand, we’ve cut all the pieces and even started putting parts of it together, after that we’ve only got the leaflets that we just mentioned, the film and the frontage left! 

The heads for mascots are coming along pretty well too, just one more head to build and then we can start figuring out if it’s at all wearable…We’ve also rethought the mascots being just off duty and instead we’ve going to have some present for a photo opportunity at the front of the building. This will hopefully create a more effective difference between the mascots within the exhibition (off duty) and those on the outside (on duty). 

We went to see a performance night at Tate, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, which was a little hit and miss. It was off to a bad start because their seating for over 200 people was 3 benches so we had to sit on the floor and the sight lines were also awful; two giant concrete pillars meant that a lot of our view was obscured. We then felt it had kind of missed the point of performance art – everything just happened in front of us as if it was narrative theatre and it felt inappropriate for the content. Imagine if Tate put on a retrospective and then put all the work in one room or one wall, it felt very unconsidered and under-curated. Everyone was also taking it so seriously and to us it felt much more funny than serious. A lot of our issues are to do with the situation as opposed to the work which is maybe not the best way the review art but it definitely impacted upon our experience. However, there were some redeeming factors in the work – there was a string based work were the performers were intertwining themselves with string and another one with giant green hands. These were both ruined by the sterile environment they were displayed in. 

For the forth issue of the isthisit? book there was an exhibition at the new Arbyte gallery space on the London Islands. A really exciting an engaging exhibition and book all about the internet of things, AI, and dystopic futures. A great feature of the space is the uniform removable floor panels which mean that the TVs for the show are able to be sunk into the ground. Quite a novel method of showing the moving image works in the show, our favourite of which has to be Stine Deja’s video Foreigner, featuring an android singing “I wanna know what love is” to itself in a vanity mirror. Immersed in a clinical environment, the android appears as a new born learning to experience emotion through a widely distributed and culturally ubiquitous musical touchstone. The video satirises the ways in which machine learning recognises patterns and repeats them regardless of what those patterns are while being a world away from actually identifying or knowing ‘what love is’; a very clever idea and bizarre outcome. 

In film world, we’ve had the amazing new Marvel film, Black Panther. A truly excellent film in all respects, first we don’t think we’ve ever seen such black centric film with this many characters before and it was so refreshing. The villain was one of those most fleshed out ones we’ve ever seen in a marvel film; usually just driven by mindless, incomprehensible world domination, this was a ‘baddy’ you could relate to and sympathise with. We really hope Marvel continue with this type of film as they really nailed it with this one. 

A change of tone for Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. The true story of the Hollywood actress Gloria Grahame finding romance and happiness with a younger man, but everything goes to shit when she is diagnosed with breast cancer. The film was so moving that it brought us to tears towards the end. Highly emotional and so tragic; the characters you feel opposed to during the beginning, are understood towards the end and the empathy flood gates just break wide open. A beautiful story of romance and untimely death. 

Into science-fiction land, we saw the new Netflix film release everyone’s been talking about, Annihilation. Even though it began with some ham-handed writing at the beginning, the film totally won us over with its auditory and visual punch. Not to mention the philosophical readings which had us discussing it with others for lengthy periods of time. Our main reading was a Hegelian one based on his ideas about the dialectic; this is defined as having a thesis (e.g. white) and an antithesis (e.g. black) and then come to get and make a synthesis (e.g. grey) and then that’s the new thesis and the whole thing starts again. So here we have people and aliens and then we see the effect of the aliens on the people and vice versa. A very ambitious films which definitely won us over with some superb world building. 

Only the Brave was next, the very moving story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots becoming one of the most elite firefighting teams in the country. Unfortunately, they’ve taken an amazing story and turned it into a very mediocre film; most of the characters are one dimensional even with the few who are given backstories. A classic case of bad storytelling undermining a compelling event. 

Finally, we watched Hidden Figures which was superb from beginning to end. Seeing the black women who worked for NASA to get the spaceship into orbit was exciting to say the least. We’ve never been exposed to this story and it’s a real shame that these amazing women haven’t had their achievements more celebrated. Their boss was a very familiar case of someone who was set in their ways but when called out on it, realised that it was completely backwards. An example that springs to mind is the ‘coloured bathroom’ scene where he asks Taraji P. Henson’s character where she goes every day for 40 minutes and she explains to him that the only coloured bathrooms are over half a mile away. He then proceeds the remove the signs and tell everyone that there are “No more coloured restrooms. No more white restrooms. Just plain old toilets. Go wherever you damn well please. Preferably closer to your desk. Here at NASA, we all pee the same colour.”

w h a t h a p p e n e d t o f l o p p y d i s k s ?

There’s a new work in the pipeline this week! It’s based around the book we spoke about last week, House of Leaves. The basic plot of the book is that a character is in search of a new apartment and in the new apartment finds an academic study of a documentary film called The Navidson Record but can’t find any other evidence of the film existing. Just to recap, within the fictional world of the book there is a report about a documentary – several layers of fiction. The only way we (the reader) are able to access the book is through the narrators interpretation of the report – we’re not even presented with the actual document, only through the lens of the book and its characters. The work which has been inspired by this is making a DVD menu for the documentary spoken about in the book, The Navidson Record. For those of you born in the 21st century, a DVD menu is the bit when you put the DVD into the TV and you have a few options such as scene selection, play movie or special features. DVD menus strike us as interesting because they’re kind of like a blurb for a book or a lobby area of office building. They’re not as informative as a trailer because you’ve already bought the DVD so they don’t need to sell it to you anymore. This goes along with the idea that the film is inaccessible other than through the narrators’ interpretation, just as here it’s only accessible through the imagery we’ve chosen for the menu. In addition to this, the imagery for the film will all be taken from YouTube clips of people attempting to make trailers for The Navidson Record, creating another layer of interpretation. 

The work will be shown on a TV screen at average eye height and below it will be a rack of DVDs which share the same imagery at the film above. The DVD’s will be able to be taken by the public and on them will every fan-made film we could find on YouTube of a Navidson Record’s trailer, some of which we have used in the menu film itself. They will all retain their own titles meaning that they could be found on YouTube if people wished. This in intended to reference the idea of physical distribution as well as the distribution of ideas and access to content; physical being DVDs are old, inefficient tech, most laptops don’t even have CD drives anymore, and ideas being about how the film from the book is presented to a new audience. DVDs are they’re their own “thing” now, they’re becoming a snap shot of tech and time and could eventually be ironic/nostalgic in the same way records are. 

The font in the book changes throughout; the changes serve as a way for the reader to quickly determine which of its multiple narrators’ work they are currently following. In the book, there are four fonts utilized by the four narrators. These are: Times New Roman (Zampanò), Courier (Johnny), Bookman (The Editors), and Dante (Johnny's mother). Therefore, we’ve chosen to use Times New Roman for the font in the film since Zampanò is the author of The Navidson Record.

w h a t ' s i n a n a m e ?

The mascot production has begun! We’ve started attempting to paper mashe the heads by using a yoga ball as a kind of template. There will be two halves with a connecting part which will elongate the head to make it look more like the original drawings. They’re going to take a fairly long time but hopefully it’ll all pay off!

We’ve also started creating the fictional people for the information stand; their respective bios and artworks are coming along. We’ve decided to have a pop-up exhibition on the forth floor for each day the degree show is open, a permanent exhibition in the sculpture garden which will have performances going in throughout the show and then events such as panel discussions and film screenings in the basement. The panel discussions and other talks will be given by art-world professionals and also some exhibiting artists. Each of the pop-up exhibitions will be based on one of the four themes we were looking into when creating our final works for the degree show, gallery archetypes, sponsorship, event and institutional bubble. For each exhibition, there will be a separate pamphlet within the information stand itself. There will be 3 leaflet sections, one for each space, basement, sculpture garden, and forth floor. The basement and sculpture garden will contain the same information throughout since the sculpture garden is permanent and then basement is only having a couple events per day. The names of the fictional artists and all from a variety of fictional sources; artists and other fictional characters from films or books e.g. Maude Lebowski from The Big Lebowski; invented characters within an invented world e.g. Homily Clock one of the main ‘Borrowers’; characters from myths e.g. Nessie Lock, the nickname for the lockness monster; and characters from our previous work involving a fictional gallery only seen through twitter. Inventing 37 characters is a pretty big task but it’s also a fun one!

We final managed to do our foley artist performance lecture! It went brilliantly; the actor we hired made it even better than we could have possibly imagined. It’s definitely such a liberating and exciting aspect of working with actors or people with proper skills; they take it to a whole ‘other’ place which as artists we didn’t even thing about. The microphones worked a treat and Jamie really played up to the roll. He even did a question and answer bit at the end, answering as if he was the artist! It felt an appropriate length as much longer would have been overly frustrating to experience. 

We’ve also started our podcast artists and friends again which is going pretty well! Feels good to get back into it and talking to new people and finding connections – all positive.

A fairly light viewing of films this week, the first being the new Jumanji film. We’ve been entertained by both the original Jumanji and Zathura (both written by Chris Van Allsburg but the former about the jungle and the later about space) and it’s safe to say we were definitely worried about the idea of a second Jumanji as this tends to be where it all goes to shit. History has shown us it rarely works; Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, prequel to the Star Wars original trilogy; Hannibal, sequel to Silence of the Lambs; Speed 2: Cruise Control, sequel to Speed; Staying Alive, sequel to Saturday Night Fever; Son of the Mask, sequel to The Mask; Alien 3, sequel to Aliens and Alien; Jaws: The Revenge, sequel to Jaws; The Matrix Reloaded, sequel to The Matrix; Blues Brothers 2000, sequel to The Blues Brothers…need we go on? However, despite our reservations this was a genuinely funny and good take on the original. The problem we have with the sequel is that it rarely adds to the original storyline and characters in favour of merely reproducing the first film in a slightly different way (see the ‘Meet the Parents/Fockers/Little Fockers’ even the name tells us it’s the same film! Back to Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, it has new things to say and a new story to tell and it deals with the change of tech (from board game to video game) without fetishising old computer games or (too much) explaining how a video game works. All in all a fun ride with some enjoyable characters, Jack Black is especially great as a teenage girl. 

Next up we had The Florida Project, a truly stunning film where the theme of childhood is present in everything from the camera angels to the use of colour. Every adult in the film is shot from below, as the children in the film would see them. All the buildings are bright colours such as purple and yellow, almost as if drawn from the kids’ imagination. It also made us think of so many other films whilst watching; a scene in which the kids venture into derelict buildings (yellow, green and pink) reminded us of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, another Florida-set film that found kaleidoscopic poetry amid streets blighted by poverty. There’s a touch of Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher or Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant in the way Baker and co-writer/producer Chris Bergoch embrace Moonee’s defiant perspective, making us feel her joy and pain with all the raw urgency of youth. American Honey is there too; a kindred spirit in the portrayal of Halley, whom Baker discovered on Instagram. This authenticity is also present in The Florida Project through open auditions and street casting. It all adds up to a superbly sympathetic portrait of marginalised experience from a film-maker whose great triumph is that he never feels like a tourist. This is Moonee’s world, and for a couple of hours at least, we are privileged to live in it.

Marjorie Prime is a slightly more subtle reflection on the progress into AI and how we can live forever. A much more interesting take than the new Netflix series Altered Carbon where minds are uploaded and transferred between bodies. Here we see people and their subsequent AI replacements, remembering and re-remembering experiences and events through each other’s memories, creating an almost Chinese whisper-like effect on their final forms. Their unintentionally creepy phrase of ‘I’ll remember that’ suggests a long life memory but this is not reflected in the outcome.

On a slightly light note, Everything, Everything is a film about a girl with a terribly weak immune system, so weak that she is unable to breath the toxin filled air. She is therefore confined to her home and has never left. That is until an attractive guy moves in next door…she then braves getting ill and begs her nurse to allow him inside and then even goes outside when she sees he’s in trouble. They eventually run away together and she finds out that her mother has actually been lying to her for her entire life; she is not and has never been allergic to the air and it was just a way of her mum controlling her as her husband and first child died in a freak accident. A lukewarm sentiment and a different take on a teenage love story but all in all pretty trashy and inconsequential.

That’s it for films but we’ve been doing some reading recently too. Robert Webb’s new book (and kind of autobiography) is called How Not to Be a Boy, and after watching multiple interviews with him and listening to him on the radio we were presented with the book as a Christmas present. As emotionally repressed young men it ring dangerously true; we see ourselves mirrored in this so badly that it made us want to call people (mostly women) we feel as if we’ve been unkind to and apologise. We never actually did that but we’ve definitely been attempting to make changes to our behaviour, in order to be responsible for our emotions so other people don’t have to pick up the pieces. 

We’ve also picked up a copy of House of Leaves. It’s a pretty crazy book with an even crazier/unconventional format/structure. The page layout and style is pretty unusual and we’ve seen that it’s a prime example of ergodic literature. It contains copious footnotes, many of which contain footnotes themselves, including references to fictional books, films or articles. Some pages contain only a few words or lines of text, arranged in strange ways to mirror the events in the story, often creating both an agoraphobic and a claustrophobic effect. The novel is also distinctive for its multiple narrators, who interact with each other in elaborate and disorienting ways. We don’t tend to read fiction but recently it’s been highly influential in our art-making and general thought process.

For the opening of Ian Cheng’s exhibition at serpentine, there was a great in conversation with writer Nora N. Khan, and digital curator Ben Vickers. They discussed the history of human consciousness, emergent forms of intelligence, as well as non-human entities, our capacity as a species to relate to change, the nature of mutation and the capacity of humans to relate to change. The talk was much more exciting than the show, which is sometimes just the way it works when an exhibition is fairly minimal. This isn’t a criticism but merely something to consider. Ian Cheng was very erudite and had this American drawl which was hard not to associate with arrogance but he’s a successful artist so bragging seems to be ok. The exciting aspect of the show was that instead of it being an animation or video, Ian Cheng creates a simulation and therefore it’s almost like going to a digital zoo as opposed to a gallery.

The Sondra Perry show in the Serpentine Sackler Gallery is very special. As well as the expected, single person film experiences, the full interior walls of the gallery have been turned into this undulating purple waves. In order to view the films on show, you sit on a exercise bike and then a rowing machine. The show’s title is taken from Turner’s painting of the British slave ship Zong, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On. En route from Accra to Jamaica, 133 enslaved Africans were thrown from the vessel so the crew could claim insurance on the ‘goods’ they were transporting. Sharing the title of the exhibition, a digitally modified 2018 video of Turner’s oleaginous sea is projected onto the outer walls of the gallery interior. Up close the paint look less like water, more like roiling skin. The video switches periodically to the purple waves we mentioned before, rebooting the Zong massacre for the present day.

a l l a b o a r d t h e l o n d o n e x h i b i t i o n t r a i n

A few exhibition thoughts to catch up on! First of all we have Rachal Bradley at Gasworks. A minimal show with small adjustments to an all but empty space which is always something we always warm to. The majority of the space is empty, the floor coated with natural resin, infused with a bespoke herbal tonic, dispensed by the artist’s sister, medical herbalist Lucie Bradley. The mixture was made following short interviews with all Gasworks’ permanent members of staff, in which they were asked questions about how the institution works and their roles within it, it is intended to remedy the organisation’s ailments. A slightly bizarre/hippie set of tools and thought processes but it’s used in a much different and more logical/slight way than we’re used to seeing these sorts of processes in e.g. a place with lots of windchimes and dreamcatchers. 

Jerwood Space was showing some works by 3 different photographers, the most interesting for us was Lua Ribeira. All the works are built on a fear of dying. Motivated by escape from reality and the longing for mythological significance in contemporary life, the work is an allegorical exploration of the inevitable decay of the human body, in relation to classical mythology and religious symbols of mortality. 

Then we had Copperfield, a show curated by artist and curator Doug Bowen. The title is Mantel and we found it an excellently curated exhibition. It was structured by commissioning a number of mantels and then arranging the artist’s work on and around them as if they were a collection in a household, telling the story of all their independent travels and adventures. In addition, all the work took on the role of this style of object, highlighting their trinket style qualities. Very intelligent curating, always exciting to see such a well thought out lens to view the work through. 

Marguerite Humeau is the current ‘Art Now’ at Tate Britain and since it’s free and current it always seems appropriate to check it out. Unfortunately, it felt a little tacky and forced. It’s intended on being part temple, part laboratory for the industrial production of an elixir for eternal life but it just feels fake. 

The newly re-opened Hayward Gallery has its first show in over 3 years. It’s a solo show by the photographer Andreas Gursky so it’s basically what it says on the tin but it was still very fun to see them on such an incredible scale. The photoshopped ones were our favourites, mostly because of their twisting of reality; they appear like real images but only as you look on do you see that they can’t possibly be. Not bad but we expect more from Hayward… 

Then we had Mark Dion at Whitechapel. It was fun to see the giant birdcage library, a super tight set-up and a couple of the other prop-style creations evoked characters that observe, conserve or exploit the natural world. 

We also attended Ryan Gander’s opening at Lisson Gallery. A very ambitious show where he’s turned the gallery into a giant sand-timer, having sculptures which are initially submerged on the top floor and then revealed, where sculptures on the lower floor become concealed in black sand. The show is also monochrome, only colours are black and white; walls, floor, artworks etc. A very succinct show. 

Finally, we had Eloise Hawser at Somerset House. It’s titled, By the deep, by the mark and it’s all about hidden networks of liquid flow within our bodies and below the city of London. She’s collected a miscellany of medical imaging devices, engineering diagrams and other representations and tools of calibration and prediction, drawing parallels between extraordinary feats of civil engineering and the intricate inner workings of the human body. Both highly researched and well executed, would recommend.