Started today with some good news that we are showing our film ‘The Best 4 x 4 x Far’ is going to be shown as a part of 'God's Own Country' at the Western Park Museum in Sheffield. The works are going to be projected onto the outside of the museum (as shown below) so it’s exciting to be able to see our work on such a huge scale.
We were also discussing The Wet Paints and perhaps their first release could be Brian Eno’s ‘Ambient 1: Music for Airports’, but instead it would be called ‘Ambient 1: Music for Stealing’. Originally, the music was designed to be continuously looped as a sound installation, with the intent of defusing the tense, anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal. To achieve this, Eno sought to create music that is as ignorable as it is interesting. This reflects our thinking around ideas based on the stigma around the notions of ‘theft’ and also the fact that Eno is one of popular music’s most influential, innovative figures, means that his content has been stolen a multitude of different ways.
Eva and Franco Mattes’ show at Carroll Fletcher Gallery titled ‘Abuse Standards Violations’ was this evening and it was a great opportunity to see their work in situ, since mostly the only way we can see them is through documentation. The ‘Dark Content’ series confronts us as we walk in – the first showing of the next episodes. They were displayed using topsy-turvy office desks and a cubicle wall – reflecting the corporate nature of the companies, which employ the content moderators and the facelessness of both parties. Heading into the backroom is ‘By Everyone For No One Every Day’ (BEFNOED) which also calls attention to a new form of labor in the digital age. For this series, the artists used a range of crowdsourcing websites to give instructions to anonymous workers to realise a variety of absurd performances for webcam. The artists laid out instructions for them to follow and interpret. Once received, the videos are dispersed on obscure, peripheral or forgotten social networks around the world. Seeing both works in the same space made us think about how in ‘Dark Content’ the artists act as a sort of confidante, but in ‘BEFNOED’ their position is more complex, as their unusual demands appear to both entertain and exploit their performers. The placement of the monitors is something we’re very fond of; in the space is such that, in order to watch the work, viewers are forced into a series of physically awkward and bizarre positions, in a sense taking on the role of performers themselves.
Remai Modern has awarded Ryan Gander with its first web commission, ‘My validation through my association’. A publicly available Twitter feed from the perspective of Picasso’s chair, donated to Remai Modern in 2014, written by a ghostwriter employed to give the inanimate object a life. A continuation of Gander’s ‘What if?’ style practice which we always attempt to strive towards. It started with just its own tweets but now it has began to act more like ‘real’ twitter account such as retweeting others etc. building up a persona.
