Furtherfield had a show opening titled ‘NEW WORLD ORDER’ which is part of an international programme of labs, debates with artists and writers testing alternative economies for arts in the network ages. Sounded right up our street and very interesting but unfortunately didn’t quite deliver for us. The concept of the Blockchain is very exciting and artists such as Simon Denny have explored this in great detail and with much success. Yet here it felt like people weren’t using the language that they were attempting to communicate with; they were trying to make it into ‘art’ as opposed to just using the material itself. For example, a metal flower that is in some way ‘powered’ by audience sending it Bitcoin doesn’t really seem very relevant to us.
This week was the CSM degree show. Always quite an exciting time but especially since these are people we were in the same year as us before we took a year out. As always, there’s so much work to look at that you end up wondering through a lot of it without a huge amount of consideration. If one was to give the same amount of time to every single piece, you would be there for days. A couple of thoughts that we felt came up a lot were if you’re making a film, have comfy seating and everything that looks like art just dissolves into the background. One film by Isabel Alsina-Reynolds (website >>>here<<<) was actually 50 minutes long and we stayed through the entire thing! This being due to the film being incredibly competent and us enjoying it but also because they have installed car seats you viewers to sit on while watching it. It was a film about a few people’s responses to a similar incident with an ambiguous creature. One thing that was noticeable was how good almost every actor was, something which we only realised once a less able one appeared on the screen. A repeated idea that they all spoke about was that whatever they saw had been a yellowy colour and it was only when we got quite far into the film that we noticed all the actors were wearing an item of colour clothing. Now, this wasn’t an obvious one, but more a supporting item like a sleeve of a cardigan peaking out from under a coat or a shirt folding over the collar of a jumper. This was then coupled with them speaking of a strange, artificial, lemony smell that they had experienced. A smell which we were also able to detect from our seats! Later we realised that it was a car air refreshener hidden near where we were sat. However, even though we lived playing detective with all these clue-like references, the most interesting thing about the work was the script and how the different characters were speaking about what had happened to them. It was as if we were piecing together a puzzle but using several different puzzles of a similar image.
We finished reading a pretty book about video games and their impact on the world. It’s called ‘Bit by Bit’ by Andrew Ervin and our favourite aspects were the realisations that we have video games because of warfare; in the same way that Paul Virilio connects it to cinema in his book ‘War and Cinema’. Ervin writes that the same people who invented the nuclear bomb also created the first iteration of the famous video game ‘Pong’ called tennis for two. Another fun aspect of the book was how he connected art and philosophy to video games, at one point using Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ to explain why he didn’t fully refurbish an old Donkey Kong arcade cabinet.
