Residency
The isthisit? residency allows artists the opportunity to have access and control of the isthisit? website for a 25 day period. They're provided with a dedicated page on the site to create a new piece of net art. In the past this has manifested in a number of ways, from the page functioning as a diary and a place to document the creative process to the debut and sole host of a new video work. Residents are either contacted in advance or selected from the ongoing open call. If you'd like to apply email us with your artist statement, an idea of what you'd want to do on the site as well as any links to social media accounts and artist websites.
Adonis Archontides
Postcards from Quarantine
01/06/20 - 25/06/20
As a result of the COVID-19 virus outbreak, countries all over the world have been implementing quarantine tactics in the form of lockdowns, entry bans and restrictions on travellers coming in or out. Combined with decreased willingness to travel, the pandemic has had severe negative impact on the tourism industry; the United Nations World Tourism Organisation reported a 57% decrease in travel in March 2020, leading to an estimated loss of US$80 billion₁.
Simultaneously, video games have experienced a spike in playtime as more people are spending time indoors. Campaigns such as #PlayApartTogether, initiated by the World Health Organisation in collaboration with several game publishers, have encouraged social engagement through video games to promote social distancing.₂
The gaming industry has been actively supporting epidemic relief efforts; Rockstar Games has promised to donate 5% of their revenue generated by in-game purchases in GTA Online and Red Dead Online in April and May 2020₃ , while Humble Bundle managed to raise over US$6.5 million through their “Conquer COVID-19 Bundle”, with all proceeds going to Direct Relief, International Rescue Committee, Doctors Without Borders and Partners in Health.₄
In June 2018, the World Health Organisation published the latest update to its International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), adding “gaming disorder” to its list of mental illnesses, defining it as the compulsive use of video games which continues or escalates despite negative consequences₅. WHO estimates that this affects around 1-3% of more than 2 billion regular gamers worldwide.₆ This implementation was made despite debates in the field on whether this disorder is a separate clinical entity or a product of underlying mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety and loneliness, which video games are being used to alleviate.₇
Postcards from Quarantine is a series of photographs taken in a number of video games that the artist played over the course of 72 days spent in social isolation, a diary of his virtual travels at a time when “real” travel was forbidden.
Adonis Archontides (b. 1991) is a multidisciplinary artist from Cyprus. His works are often satirical and introspective; they consist of investigations into the production of identity consciously or subconsciously, and the liminality between fiction, reality and simulation. Most recently, he has been collaborating with an avatar of himself created in the popular simulation game The Sims 4, juxtaposing Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey with an artist’s career trajectory through a series of episodes.
1. www.unwto.org/international-tourism-and-covid-19
2. venturebeat.com/2020/03/28/who-and-game-companies-launch-playaparttogether-to-promote-physical-distancing/
3. www.pcgamer.com/rockstar-to-donate-5-percent-of-in-game-purchases-to-covid-19-relief-efforts/
4. blog.humblebundle.com/2020/04/24/conquer-covid19-bundle-recap/
5. www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/gaming-disorder
6. www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/18/video-game-addiction-is-a-real-condition-who-says-heres-what-that-means/
7. Wood, R.T.A. Problems with the Concept of Video Game “Addiction”: Some Case Study Examples. Int J Ment Health Addiction 6, 169–178 (2008). link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00440-002-0236-0
Pierre Depaz and Pat Shiu
TTY2020
20/04/20 - 20/05/20
Technology frames our perception of time. For most, life under quarantine, has corralled even more of our public and private lives into digital spaces. Abruptly, we find ourselves sitting in our physical confines, looking upon the world almost exclusively through digital windows. As days pass, time itself seems to fall out of pace.
TTY2020 came out of a desire to log this period of collective displacement—a time in which time itself feels broken. Sitting by a bay window, a dot-matrix printer has put one character on the page every second, since its installation on April 12th 2020. Every minute, it completes a line, and moves on to the next.
Via the website any visitor can view all previously printed text, and enter new text to be printed, Until the moment it is sent to print, all text is readable only by its author, so she drafts in private. To everyone else on the page, her input is displayed as grey blocks. Every second, as the print head moves forward, it sets in ink each character in its path, rendering it public to all.
Second by second, page by page, an open record is produced. Our timekeeper, an Okidata Microline 421 printer will tick on until we find our way back to the Normal, and its work becomes obsolete.
Pierre Depaz (France) and Pat Shiu (Hong Kong) create works about loneliness, humor and technological absurdity. An oft-revisited subject in their works is emotional connections as experienced through the constraints of the technologies that mediate them. Most of their works solicit interaction, and straddle digital and physical spaces. For years, they’ve lived in separate cities, and collaborate almost entirely remotely. Depaz is a lecturer of interactive media arts at NYU Berlin, and a visiting lecturer at Sciences PO; Shiu is Associate Director of Design at Rhizome at the New Museum.
Fragmentin
Obsology
01/03/20 - 25/03/20
Fragmentin is an art collective based in Lausanne, Switzerland, founded in 2014 and composed by three ECAL (Lausanne University of Art and Design) alumni: Laura Perrenoud (b. 1991, Lausanne), David Colombini (b. 1989, Lausanne) and Marc Dubois (b. 1985, Basel).
At the crossroads of art and engineering, Fragmentin’s work questions the impact of the digital on everyday life by investigating these technologies disposition towards control and opacity. Influenced by the likes of Alain Damasio, Eric Sadin and James Bridle, Fragmentin's works are designed as spaces for discussion on crucial contemporary topics and issues. Through installation, interaction, video and performance, the studio’s artworks demystify complex systems and reveal the tension between technology and climate change.
Fragmentin is currently showing burningcollection.tv a generative artwork created in collaboration with artist Lauren Huret and commissioned for the virtual space of the Jeu de Paume, Paris.
The Swiss art collective Fragmentin presents the research behind their upcoming artwork, entitled Obsology. The residency is an opportunity for the artist trio to create a series of digital images which will later be materialised in a printed format or become an inspiration for the production of sculptures for an upcoming exhibition.
Obsology - a neologism coming from a mix of the words obsolescence and archaeology - is an ongoing series of still and animated CGI images on the topic of Post-digital archaeology.
Today, every instant of life is recorded and therefore creates a massive amount of data. Paradoxically the survival of those data - and the knowledge they contain - has become uncertain: the electronic consumer devices we daily use which aggregate our data are made of rare and exhaustible metal while the servers designed to store them are over-consuming energy to cool down and are becoming rapidly obsolete over time.
Will our considerations on issues such as digitalization and climate crisis last ? What traces will be left over for future generations to remember ours ? And in which form? In that context, Obsology uses irony and absurdity to feature different scenarios borrowing their aesthetics from our web era. In landscapes where humans seem to have disappeared, objects or symbols - that have emerged from our digital imagery - are staged or sometimes physically anchored into sustainable and "archeological" materials such as glass, textile, stone, wood, shell, ice, rare metal or magma. This series also underlyingly questions the perennity of Digital Art itself.
The isthisit? Instagram account will be used to showcase images and videos of the series, while the website will present topic related research in the form of an infinite Tumblr-style collage: including sketches, found images, texts, pieces of code or video loops.
Michael Berto
The Geography
02/02/20 - 29/02/20
Michael Berto (b. 1989, Australia) is a writer, composer and artist exploring the concept of narrative and interaction, and how narratives are formed from simple interaction with novel spaces. Their recent work explored the lower-limits of interactivity in virtual worlds, in service of artful moments with virtual, interactive spaces. Attempts to translate a visual space into a seamless moment.
The Geography is a visual musical companion, featuring an endless and non-linear evolving musical score. Using geographic data from real-world location rendered into low-poly landscapes brought to life with soft shaders, The Geography is an electronic orchestration that plays forever, always re-organising itself, always changing and creating ambient sound baths. Musically, The Geography is not limited to any genre, but in it's current form uses many electronic instruments such as synthesisers to create it's various seeds.
The idea of The Geography came from wanting to create a meditative, companion-like piece of software, a kind of self-care dada-ist installation; self-care art for self-care art's sake. The idea to create something soft, musical, and endless, something that can fill a room, or simply fill your ears with something calming, that is ever changing, but always familiar. A piece of tend-and-befriend software, for self care, as well as for communal peace. A portable geographic landscape, and an endlessly custom and soothing soundscape.
For the month of February The Geography will be presented as an endless stream, pre-designing the experience to a custom configuration to allow for an incredibly various month of ambient soundbath and soft geographic landscapes.
Although The Geography was conceived and intended as a mental health wellness and self-care personal installation, it's connection to the natural world is significant. Australia is currently in the midst of one of the worst bushfire seasons in history, and The Geography sourcing it's geographic data of the beautiful mountains and national parks that have fallen prey to the fires may both draw attention to the severity of climate change, as well as to the intrinsic beauty and majesty of the natural world that we should protect at all costs.
Dooyong Ro
LITMIS Project
01/12/19 - 25/12/19
Dooyong Ro (b. 1991, Seoul, South Korea) produces artwork based on the dismantling and reconstruction of symbols and objects that can be seen in the military, and this process is done through assigning them to his memories or worldviews formed by his military service.
Dooyong's recent work called 'LITMIS Project' is a story about his identity that is formed by experiences from diverse groups that he used to belong to. Especially, this project is an extension of his previous work that is about the Korean military service, and the symbols from the army or the factors which are derived from deformed specificity of the organisation are used. Thus, he suggests the k-pop idol group called LITMIS, which may have similarities with the army or may also be at the antipode of the military service, and dismantles those found factors through the features of the idol industries.
During the residency Dooyong will be releasing a k-pop music video called 'Shin-Gi-Ru' by a k-pop boy group called LITMIS. This release at isthisit? will be the first official release for the public. Also, through this platform, residency, he will post 'Behind The Scene', as well as some clips and clues of how this project has been made and others that existed during the process of producing the LITMIS project.
Gertrūda Gilytė
It Takes 21 Days to Form a Habit
01/11/19 - 25/11/19
Gertrūda Gilytė (b. 1992 in Vilnius, Lithuania) examines spiritual influencer culture, relationship between the #selfhelp and the self-optimization as well as bizarre, scary and beautiful ways in which spirituality, mysticism, and sexuality appear online and very thin gaps between public and private, facts and fiction, trust and risk, free and paid they create.
Currently studying Masters in Art in Context, at the University of Arts, Berlin. In 2016 she graduated from the Sculpture Department in Vilnius Academy of Arts, in 2015 Political Science at Vilnius University.
On the Instagram feed, next to the importance of forming self-help, self-love, and self-care habits, practicing mindfulness appears to be an inevitable step that could lead an individual towards the highest possible level of self-optimization. Besides more advanced and structuralized mindfulness learning methods online (for example apps as Calm, Headspace or guided meditations by Deepak Chopra), there is another part: meditation material created by individuals, that could be called spiritual influencers.
During my performance @successful_art_project , I am using mostly tools and methods which I found on Instagram and Youtube, this way experimenting with the self-constructed internet spirituality. While practicing positive thinking and gratitude felt rather easy and pleasant, I noticed that meditation was so far the tool that was hardest to use. That’s why I believe that the non-interruptive nature of Instagram live-stream would be a great medium to try to implement mindfulness practice. During the residency on Is this it?, for 21 days I will try to form a habit of practicing mindfulness while using guided meditations, created by my research subjects - spiritual influencers. This kind of daily practice will be streamed live on my Instagram and afterwards uploaded on the residency website.
Lee Bootee
Xenotopia
01/10/19 - 25/10/19
Lee Bootee (b. 1994) works though what she describes as ‘broken theater,’ directing multi-media performances and shape-shifting into a 4th dimensional-international spy, sharing her experiences as a trance DJ from Arcturus. Although, currently she is trapped in the USA due to travel restrictions.
Exploring cultural collapse, synthetic evolution, and a blurry sense of origin; Bootee -a genetically modified, stateless being- will attempt to assimilate and understand new environments / circumstances out of their control. Image, video, text (hybrids), sound & mixes will accompany Bootee’s discoveries in each virtual representation of ‘home’ or ‘land’, through themes of travel and the idea of being physical while (dis)integrating at the base of atoms and pixels weaving reality.
Gretchen Andrew
TURNER PRIZE WINNERS (NOT NOT THE THE TURNER PRIZE)
01/09/19 - 25/09/19
Gretchen Andrew (born in California, 1988) is a Search Engine Artist and Internet Imperialist who programs her paintings to manipulate and dominate search results. In 2018 the V&A Museum released her book Search Engine Art, that was co-authored by Irini Papadimitriou, curator and former Digital Programmes Manager of the V&A Museum.
Andrew has completed projects or exhibitions with The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, The V&A Museum, The Photographer’s Gallery, The British Film Institute, Cambridge University, Arebyte, A4 Arts Foundation, The British Arts Council, The White Building, Ace Hotel, The London Film School, The Wikipedia Foundation, The Mozilla Foundation, and Whitcher Projects. Gretchen’s work has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Artnet News, Hyperallergic, Artillery and Financial Times.
Gretchen Andrew’s search engine take over of the Turner Prize Winners continues her practice of using internet manipulation to expose where technology failure, commonly talked about apocalyptically, can be positively and playfully used to reimagine the internet as a creative space.
By recasting the world’s most famous art prize in the mode of the highly popular Great British Bake Off Gretchen uses an inherent limitation of technology to confuse the internet into thinking that she is among the Turner Prize Winners.
Joining a long history of Turner Prize institutional critiques, Gretchen’s Turner Prize uses her unique process of internet imperialism to expose how false dilemmas (informal fallacies in which something is falsely claimed to be an “either/or” situation when in fact it could be both) dominate how both people and technology think about art, politics, nationalism, and age. Her isthisit? residency both exhibits the digital and online aspects of her practice while simultaneously hypnotizing Google more deeply. Turner Prize Winners!
Letta Shtohryn
Crypto H(e)aven
01/08/19 - 25/08/19
Letta Shtohryn (b.1986, Ternopil, Ukraine) lives and works in Valletta, Malta. Concerned by our relationship to the digital realm, Letta explores our intertwined coexistence with it. As a method, she employs speculative strategies, poetics and metaphysical investigations that respond to aspects of digital development using new media, sculpture, video games, commercial goods and imagery. Being ceaselessly inspired by deception, Letta looks for the origins of the real and the artifice, exploring the fine line between truth and myth-making. Her work can be placed at the intersection between the digital and the human coexisting in a world that is increasingly governed by algorithms.
On 9th December 2018, the CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Quadriga CX dies. Gerald Cotten personally held the passwords to customers' digital wallets, thereby rendering $190 million lost or missing. Speculation continues about the truth behind his sudden death in India. Leaving space for speculation on whether Cotten can be found in the cloud of afterlife or in a safe haven with a new identity, the project looks into the similarities between our vision of heaven and of self-proclaimed crypto havens playfully imagining a merged space that contains both – a Crypto H(e)aven. Crypto H(e)aven also looks into the religious aspects of cryptocurrency, exploring the consequences of death in the crypto world. When a corporeal occurrence clashes and supersedes the pseudo immateriality of the digital realm, it exposes how substantially the digital is anchored to the material and how vulnerable this link actually is.
Alif Ibrahim
Non-Descript Media Authoring
01/07/19 - 25/07/19
Alif Ibrahim (b. 1994, Rotterdam) is an Indonesian artist and researcher whose work focuses on ideology formation in technology, labour and computing, as well as the material (pre)conditions of the digital. In focusing on the enablement of the digital, he reconsiders the boundaries of software and networks, questioning where software begins and ends, as well as the material ways that digital labour is contextualised. He works through writing, experimental films, interactive installations, print, as well as participatory workshops. He received a BA from Brown University and is currently pursuing an MA in Digital Media from Goldsmiths University.
Non-Descript Media Authoring is a work of digital fiction in three chapters where an old, familiar assistant meets the User for a short update on its life throughout its dormant years. Set in a fictional location called "The Liminal Space", the User is taken through archives of discarded diagrams, unclear images and nonhuman photographs that the assistant calls "Non-Descript Media Objects" that the frail yet flippant assistant has created to fill its time.
Despite narratives of increasing adoption of and empowerment through technology, theorists such as Alexander Galloway, Phil Agre, Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold suggest the presence of constraints underscoring these technologies when used productively. The effects of this can be seen in the homogenising aesthetic and function of images, from food to amateur photography. Although generating new ways of seeing have always been part of an artist’s toolbox, this piece directly asks questions about how these ways of seeing have been imposed upon us while simultaneously creating an imaginary strict boundary of what defines an interface. "Non-Descript Media Authoring" will be updated thrice in the month of July.
Matthew Keff
Heyday
01/06/19 - 25/06/19
Matthew Keff (b.1985 USA) is a digital artist and designer creating visually driven works that take a variety of forms including interactive, motion and installation. The audiovisual ideas are drawn from emoticons, video game collectibles and other icons from popular digital culture. These items are squished together with weird simulation aesthetics of video game render engines as a quip on digital life and feelings.
Heyday is a multi-platform videogame(?) filled with digital fanfare and cute neon fluorescent color. Taking inspiration from mobile games and online advertisements, it emphasizes the fleeting pleasurable moments they aim to provoke. Heyday operates like a game, but (purposely?) misses the mark with the absence of a linear narrative or typical reward structures.
The results are caused by the overabundance of items and effects bandied about in simulated physics. Heyday is curious about the interplay between affect and new tech within popular digital culture. For instance, non-verbal communication using emoticons and collectibles or mimetic interfaces like touchscreens that create kooky interactions. During the residency at isthisit? Heyday will be employed throughout the month in a series of “Let’s Play” live streams, to be later archived on the site.
Paulo Arraiano
The Possibility of Forever
01/05/19 - 25/05/19
Paulo Arraiano (b. 1977, Portugal) is a visual artist based in Lisbon. He has participated in several exhibitions, both solo and collective including Hawaii-Lisbon [Lisbon]; Dimora Artica [Milan]; Pivô (S.Paulo); 55SP (S.Paulo); Art Rotterdam [Rotterdam]; Cidade das Artes Museum [Rio de Janeiro]; MAH Museum [Azores]; Quartier General, Centre d’art Contemporain [La Chaux-
de-Fonds]; Aeroplastics Contemporary [Brussels]; Petra Gut Contemporary [Zurich]; TAL Gallery [Rio de Janeiro]; ArtRio [Rio de Janeiro]; Pena Palace [Sintra]; Forty/Forty [Warsaw]; Galeria Graphos [Rio De Janeiro]; Museu do Côa [V. N. Foz Côa; Hifa, Harare International Festival Of Art [Zimbabwe]; Cãmara Municipal do Porto [Porto]; Museé d’Art Moderne [Luxembourg], Scope/
Miami Basel [Miami]; National Building Museum [Washington DC]; P28 [Lisbon] among others. Paulo Arraiano has also participated in several artist residency programmes, such as Walk&Talk [Azores]; Transforma [Torres Vedras]; LAC [Lagos] among others. He is represented in both public and private collections such as CAC Málaga Museum, [Spain]; Luciano Benton Collection [Italy]; Quartier-General Arts Center [Switzerland]; Museu de Angra do Heroismo [Azores]; Sztuki Zewnetrznej Foundation [Poland]; Pestana Group [Portugal]; Fundação D. Luís / Museum Quarter [Portugal]; MARCC Museum [Portugal]. Paulo Arraiano has a degree in Communication by ISCEM [Lisbon], and studied Visual Arts at Ar.Co - Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual [Lisbon]. He is also co-founder of re_act contemporary, art laboratory and residence program based in the Azores Islands and no.stereo, an independent Artis-run platform.
Google is our memory
Google is our memory
A place where we shall decide what is machine and whats human...
Supercomputers... used as external Prosthesis that guide us and control our daily existence... leading us into a techno-dematerialisation lifestyle... in future they will integrate our physical body, minds, thoughts...
Swiping reality... scrolling trough daily life... we are experiencing an age of a technologic and biological exponential change... a new sensorial revolution...
An artificial way of connecting / disconnecting with the natural world...
Interacting through analogic and electronic signals, guided by information that travels throughout satellites, orbit bodies, created by man that, directly via mobile protheses, act as new divinities controlling via GPS data our daily life performance....n
AI awakening...
This body as well as landscape as a playground for atoms and molecules will transform into a new physical and even spiritual paradigm...
Possibility of an existence of new hybrid species or biological based machines... recording... sending memories... sensations using every day cognitive augmented intelligence.
Transforming society and reality as we know it in the present moment, we are spectators of a precise moment where fiction... magic are becoming science facts. The arrival of internet of things...
As technology grows more dominant, the universal ambition of humanity remains... greater intelligence.... No other attribute is so desirable... No other so useful... Here... and on any world we can imagine.... Soon the only thing holding us back will be ourselves....
Our bodies, our brains, and the machines around us may all one day merge, into a single massive communal intelligence.
DNA Revolution, Artificial intelligence; Augmented intelligence; biotech; nanotech... cyborgism, trashumanism...
Connecting... mapping... digitalizing the Human Brain... building a network map for our thoughts... images... ideas creating a Library of Souls towards the possibility of Digital Immortality...
Rosie Abbey
Authentic Design
01/04/19 - 25/04/19
Rosie Abbey (b.1996, Birmingham) experiments with the parameters of communication, seeking to demonstrate the ways in which language is determined by particular circumstances. She aims to test and challenge methods of translation between different formats, including text, gesture and sound, investigating that which is lost or may be gained during the process. Her work is contingent on established guidelines; each piece is generated by a set of rules which become disguised but remain implicit through its materialisation.
Across the course of the residency, Rosie will present a series of ‘advertisements’, which play on our understanding of the word itself. Working with a single item, and a selection of participants, the work created is intended as a direct reflection of individuals involved. The object is used as a vehicle to locate and trigger memory, with repetition and anomaly being crucial indicators of individual and collective experience. The process of ‘selling’ the item is one of description and recollection: persuasion through personal interpretation and bias.
Conall McAteer
Every Minute Counts
01/03/19 - 29/03/19
Conall McAteer (b. 1988, London) is a visual artist whose practice explores the intersection between the digital and the tangible. Considering technology’s increasing application, he investigates the potential, limitations and complications of the virtual in relation to the politics and conventions of the real.
What if instead of the current electoral system - voting for 4 year terms and having little to no say over policies enacted - the public were able to impact political decisions in real-time.
To coincide with his isthisit? online residency, Conall McAteer presents a new and timely web-based project, Every Minute Counts. With Britain scheduled to leave the European Union on 29th March 2019, the work will utilise the social media platform Twitter to gauge the swing of public opinion on Brexit to leave or remain. Scraping the platform for keywords, collating the results and re-presenting them as a proportional colour gradient between those who desire to leave (red) and those who would vote to remain (blue). Every Minute Counts will run for the 41,760 minutes of March leading up to Britain’s exit from the EU, illustrating the British public’s shifting decision in real-time.
Allan Gardner
Expanding and Contracting Barriers
01/02/19 - 25/02/19
Allan Gardner (b. 1992, Glasgow, Scotland) is an artist working in medium specific series' based in London. The underlying concern of Gardner’s work is viewership; looking as a search for understanding, or as a method of interrogation, looking as an act of criticality and implication. Art is made to be seen in some capacity, to be understood or interpreted, and to take a position within a given context. His work functions as a consensus between the looking of the artist, the audience and the work within space.
Working in tandem with an arts council funded residency at the Art House in Wakefield, the digital residency will function as a project space, to test and critique the non-physical aspects of the works produced. This is the first stage in a series of sculptural works concerning the societal presence of barriers, both physical and non-physical.
The partnership with the Art House residency is an important one to explore, providing Gardner with accommodation, cost of living allowance and a materials budget. These are some of the most immediate barriers facing emerging artists around the world. More importantly however, these same barriers are present across society, encouraged and enforced by bureaucracy. It's Gardner’s intention to use this position of privilege as the first step to producing a body of work that addresses the conceptual and aesthetic presence of barriers; as something to be altered, broken down or maintained.
Izabela Koczanowska
A rendered life
01/12/18 - 25/12/18
Izabela Koczanowska (b.1988, Poland) is an interdisciplinary artist & spatial designer living and working in Warsaw.
Koczanowska has a BA in Interior Design and an MA in Intermedia from The Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow.
In her work she combines visual standpoints with observations of sociological processes where digital and traditional methods lead to physical manifestations of dysfunctions.
Focusing on emerging sociological model of human relations, behaviour and values in the age of the Internet, she looks for ways to express interpretation of existential and emotional impact that digital revolution has brought into our lives.
During the residency, Koczanowska will use herself as a link or as a spiritual medium between the internet and reality, gradually filling an empty room with objects drawn from the ‘pop internet‘ aesthetics to create a temple-like installation.
This process will be recorded live and shown online.
Simultaneously, the same process will be carried out in virtual reality, developing an evolving 3D creation mirroring her room, allowing spectators to see and interact with the works in first person, achieving a simulation of her reality.
Koczanowska's interactive sketchbook, embedded in a html website. She intends to combine video, photography, painting, programming and 3D graphics to create a loop between the digital and the physical world.
Christina Smiros
The Nest’s Revenge
01/01/19 - 25/01/19
Christina Smiros (b. 1993, New York) is a video and systems artist based in New York. Smiros’ work explores interpersonal relationships in technophilic societies through storytelling. She holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art, and a MS in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University.
Smiros has shown nationally in New York, NY, Miami, Fl, Boston, MA, Austin, TX and Portland, OR, internationally in Mexico and Italy, with an upcoming shows in Cyprus and South Korea, and online at Welcome to My Homepage Residency and the Wrong Biennale 2017.
The Nest’s Revenge is an on-going project that is accumulating into a series of five short videos.
The Nest loves the profile and the Owl loves privacy. Diverging desires and ideas of property has caused conflict between the co-dependent pair. Archetypal characters from old stories of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, The Owl takes the shape of highly private figures like Mark Zuckerberg and others, who govern the social ecosystem profiting off of more and more people relinquishing their privacy for the cultural capital of a public profile. The Nest is many personas and characters all at once. It is the proletariat, and the aspiring social media influencer. It wants a public life but it also wants its data to be free.
Pulling from her academic work in narrative, Smiros will develop the dialogue between the Owl and the Nest, pushing the limits of both archetypal characters.
Everest Pipkin
Ellinger, TX
01/11/18 - 25/11/18
Everest Pipkin is a drawing and software artist from Bee Caves, Texas, who produces intimate work with large data sets, particularly around landscape as complicated by digital space. They produce printed material as books and zines, as well as digital work in software, bots, and games. They also make drawings on paper. Pipkin holds a BFA from University of Texas at Austin, a MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and has shown nationally and internationally at The Design Museum of London, The Texas Biennial, XXI Triennale of Milan, The Victoria & Albert Museum, and others.
Ellinger, TX is a durational generative video artwork, to be broadcast live online, 24 hours a day, for duration of the residency.
This project of Ellinger, TX is based on a real small town of the same name that is situated on the intersection of two major interstate highways between Austin and Houston, TX. Although once a farming community, Ellinger now makes the majority of its income in the town’s two gas stations when travelers stop to refuel.
This version of Ellinger has been cut off from its highway routes, as well as the rest of the world- the characters that live in this town are in a micro-landscape, bordered in much the same way that many games-spaces are surrounded by invisible walls. Narratively non-explicit, it is unclear whether Ellinger has been cut from the world via a catastrophic event, or if it simply exists in a singular system of its own logic where there is no more outside.
The simulation questions what happens when a place that has survived because of a network of capital is cut off from that network, what happens when the transit network that carries individuals away from a place is removed, what survival looks like in places where ecology must be managed on a micro-scale, and how artists can use found digital material with responsibility and care for original makers.
Owen Gwynne Vince
SAD TROPIC
01/10/18 - 25/10/18
Owen Gv (1988) is a media artist and writer living and working in London, UK. His interests explore the anthropology of the malign and often impossible spaces created under late capitalism, around archaeologies of the ‘online,’ and a teasing-out of the paper-thin barrier between the digital and the ‘real.’ His work has been exhibited at Edicola Radetzsky, Milan, and as part of the Wrong Biennale.
During this residency, Gv will be conducting a digital seance with the now iconic 1913 performance of the Russian Futurist Opera, pobeda nad solntsem (Victory over the Sun), to reach out - spectrally, ghoulishly - to the intensities of confidence and hope that the original work represented: where the sun itself was pulled from the sky, and defeated. During the residency, he will attempt to invoke a (failed) revolutionary future where humankind was spared the agonies of late capitalism, and freed from the body that would suffer within it. Taking up Mark Fisher’s argument that the digital present is comprised of ‘all the lost futures,’ what might we learn from walking around inside these hopeless futures that never came to be? Might they help us to act with hope, or do they plunge us into loss? The residency will draw on sound, film, website UX, and video game design.
Marcel Darienzo
THESE… THIS IS… IS THIS IT?
01/08/18 - 25/08/18
These things here… these things there… these things altogether… these things apart… these things coming closer… these things moving away… these things clustered… these things spaced out… these things crossing borders… these things fighting… these things not settled… these things unsettled… these things hanging over… these things shot dead… these things in you… these things…
This is here… this is there… this is altogether… this is apart… this is coming closer… this is moving away… this is clustered… this is spaced out… this is crossing borders… this is fighting… this is not settled… this is unsettled… this is hanging over… this is shot dead… this is in you… this is…
Is this here? Is this there? Is it altogether? Is this apart? Is this spaced out? Is this crossing borders? Is this fighting? Is this not settled? Is this unsettled? Is this hanging over? Is this shot dead? Is this in you? Is this it?
Alex Tobin
Itter
01/06/18 - 25/06/18
Alex is an interdisciplinary artist working most frequently with integrating software and internet art with performance and physical objects. His practice incorporates elements of experimental animation, programming, performance and music. He studied in Edinburgh and Kyoto, and has exhibited and performed at venues across Scotland including CCA, DCA, Tramway and Summerhall. He is currently a committee member of Dundee-based arts collective Yuck ’n Yum.
In 2013, BuzzFeed codified “Weird Twitter” as an emerging online microgenre, presciently ending with the question “IS WEIRD TWITTER DEAD?” Since that interview, Weird Twitter has almost certainly died, which is to say it has been absorbed into the solvent of Normal Twitter and denatured there. We’re all fluent in its grammar and vocabulary, we can recall famous Dril quotes for all occasions, “COLOSSAL PILLAR OF WASP EGGS” seems quaintly tame in comparison to what the average teen tweets in their hypnogogic hours.
“Itter” is a small programming experiment to make a small, self-contained Twitter-style sandbox for computer programmes to write Tweets for. Alex will be developing Itter this month, and then the Itter platform will be left to its own devices to see if it comes up with anything truly Weird.
Natalia Skobeeva
UnNational Monument
01/09/18 - 25/09/18
Being of transnational background (born in Russia, based in the UK/Belgium and earlier in Luxembourg, USA and Bulgaria), Natalia Skobeeva explores how the issues of the particular and universal are re-negotiated in the context of ambivalent (non)belonging by human kind of the post-everything. The work is hybrid and experimental, with subjects oscillating between personal and collective, conscious and subconscious, carrying characteristics attributed to transnational art: multiplicity, liminality and hybridity.
Awards include: 2018 LCN award, supported by SPACE studios, 2017 ARTAGON III prize, 2016 Red Mansion Art Prize, 2016 Tenderflix, 2016 LUX Critical forum, 2015 Arts Council Grant. Recent exhibitions include: X Shiryaevo biennale, Recontres Paris/Berlin festival 2018, LOOP Barcelona 2017, Manifesta 11, Bristol Biennale 2016, 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary art, 15th WRO Media Art Biennale, Miden 2013 Festival of Video art, Now&After Video art and retrospective. Natalia holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, London and MA History from the Russian State University.
To coincide with inauguration of a public UnNational Monument as a pat of Deptford X 2018, Natalia’s residency will explore the possibilities of creating a digital public monument that can act as an extra-territorial and beyond-national point of gathering, while incorporating the attributes of a public monument. The UnNational Monument opposes humour to power, softness to hierarchy, pinkness to large scale. As national monument converts an everyday space into a pilgrimage space, the UnNational Monument proposes transnational existence and system-thinking, and challenges the forces behind national identity construction.
ABOVE & BELOW
Opening new spaces
01/07/18 - 25/07/18
ABOVE & BELOW was founded by artists and designers Daria Jelonek and Perry-James Sugden. We focuses on interactive and immersive projects, based on hands-on research at the intersection of art, design and technology. Studio ABOVE & BELOW is specialising in the field of sustainable futures in which emerging technologies and code have the potential to improve well being.
The emergence of another form of 'Augmented Reality' creates the possibility to merge the physical and digital – therefore it is crucial to question where does the use of this technology enrich our culture and where long-lasting change can appear with our surrounding? A large part of the urban spaces that surround us are filled with consumer culture – on(line) and off(line). With our experimental video artworks, we will research and rapid prototype alternative portals to create a space in which people can view their surrounding in other ways. This will all be documented and shown through isthisit? online residency space and Instagram feed, over the course of the next 25 days.
Dani Ploeger
post-apocalypse smart city lagoon
01/05/18 - 25/05/18
Dani Ploeger combines performance, video, computer programming and electronics hacking to investigate and subvert the spectacles of techno-consumer culture. Re-purposing, misusing, and at times destroying everyday devices, his work exposes seemingly banal and taken-for-granted aspects of digital culture as objects of both physical beauty and political power.
Among others, he has worked with traditional metal workers in the old city of Cairo to encase tablet computers in plate steel, attended firearms training in Poland to shoot an iPad with an AK-47, made a VR installation while embedded with frontline troops in the Donbass War, and travelled to dump sites in Nigeria to collect electronic waste originating from Europe.
Ploeger’s artwork has been shown at transmediale (Berlin), WRO Media Art Biennale (Wroclaw), Dutch Design Week (Eindhoven), and Arse Elektronika – a festival of sex and technology (San Francisco). Reviews and features of his work have appeared in The WIRE, VICE Motherboard, VICE Creators, Times Higher Education Supplement, La Libération, and on ARTE television, Deutschland Radio, and Dutch national public radio. He holds a PhD in media, performance and cultural studies from the University of Sussex, UK, and is currently a Research Fellow at The Royal Central School of Speech of Speech and Drama, University of London. www.daniploeger.org
During the residency Ploeger will be developing an offline/online work for the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2018. Connected to the Ideal Spaces Working Group’s exhibition at Palazzo Mora, he will prototype a post-apocalyptic ‘ideal space’ that connects mundane everyday environments with digital imaginaries. Inspired by Jean Pierre Dupuy’s concept of enlightened doomsaying, his intervention will reimagine Venice – a prime example of a touristopian dreamland – as a pseudo smart city that invokes visions beyond the impending catastrophe of techno-consumer culture. After the water has risen, trash cans will remain as architectural landmarks of refuse...
Cassie McQuater
Black Room
01/04/18 - 25/04/18
Cassie McQuater (b. 1987, Detroit) is a new media and video game artist currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. Her games and experimental narratives have been shown at the 21st International Symposium of Electronic Art in Vancouver, on the main stage at Madison Square Garden in NYC, in DIY gallery arcade spaces in Detroit, and at various alternative game festivals around the world. She received her BFA in painting from the University of Michigan School of Art & Design in 2009. She taught herself to code and started working in interactive media and video games in 2013. Her current work is in part influenced by her grandmother, who stayed up every night playing Zelda until dawn.
In this residency, she will be creating, releasing, and incorporating several new web pages into her ongoing, browser based, video game, "Black Room." Conceived as a feminist dungeon crawler, "Black Room," features a majority female cast of popular video game characters from the 1970s to current day. Each level, or scene, puts the player in the room with, or in the role of, a powerful, resisting and complicated woman.
You can read more about "Black Room," here.
Anon
you i i i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
01/03/18 - 25/03/18
Bob: i can i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to
Bob: you i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me
Bob: i i can i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me
Bob: i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to
Bob: you i i i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Alice: balls have 0 to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to
Bob: you i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to
Jennyfer Haddad and Deirdre Sargent
Can u follow my order, please?
01/02/18 - 25/02/18
Exploring an exchange between two fictional friends, Itian and J. Itian, created by Deirdre, shares videos of her unorthodox life inside a smoky apartment. J, played by Jennyfer, takes moments of these videos and responds with short clips of mimicked, visual abstractions.
Jennyfer Haddad was born in 1983 in France. Jennyfer mixes the boundaries of fiction and reality while she often takes the role of the silent narrator, the observer and the operator who stages situations, investigating the story behind it. Each project begins almost as a crime scene. She sets them up and slowly investigates the space and the people involved, such that Haddad is forced to participate in her own narratives, showing that the act of interpretation can never reach an exhaustive end.
Deirdre Sargent was born in 1985 in the USA and is currently living in Brooklyn, NY. She explores culture’s obsession with youth, novelty, and beauty. A focus is the individual who blissfully accepts their own fast destruction over a slow, public deterioration. A highly manicured character shows signs of breaking down when the natural imperfections come into play. The lighting kit causes sweat on the browline, the hair begins to frizz from humidity. These malfunctions and breakdowns serve as climaxes in the work. Yet, a question generally remains whether these moments are liberating or futile.
Katharina Joy Book
every word was once an animal
01/01/18 - 25/01/18
- new window - new tab; pop ups, zoom - / sign up forms and social media, email literature - ; the choreographic, rhythmic qualities of moving versus static elements on a screen. also: ways of language being simply an environment - a viewer caught in the sensation of swimming, being awash in language. ultimately: ‘every word was once an animal’ is about testing the performative qualities in all this; how - and in how far - a reading experience can be constructed online.
Katharina Joy Book works in extended choreography and performative writing. Her current practical research concerns itself with states of divided attention, as well as processes of noticing and listening. Recent performance work includes koordinat, substitution, etc., with Stephanie Johnston, performed as part of Next Choreography Festival 2017. Together with Damon Taleghani, she initiated the collaborative project sound writing kollab, which met for the first time in November 2017. She graduated from Central Saint Martins, London in 2017 with a BA in Performance Design & Practice.
Rosie Back
below/beyond
01/12/17 - 25/12/17
"There’s first nature, the earthly or as Latour calls it, the “world of below”, and there’s second nature, the transcendent “world of beyond”, to have knowledge of both worlds means we must exist in both worlds, whether physically or cognitively. So when asked is this it? I don't know. "
Using animation software and physical computing to make work, Back aims to encourage a different view of the Internet. Not as merely the cold machine, faithful servant or an inescapable entity, but as a conceptual idea that existed long before its invention, that has been continuous throughout our history. Employing narrative to examine the intersection between the digital and our perceived reality, she investigates the ever-closing gap and friction in between these two spheres as they intertwine together and exist co-dependently.
Back states "as technology continues to evolve, it seems like time speeds up. We look back on 10 years of technological progress the same as we look back on 100 years of human history. Our creations seem to have completely bypassed us, leaving us in a fluctuation of exhilaration and concern. We recreationally dabble in and aggressively depend on digital friends whilst simultaneously not understanding their needs, wants, or true potential. I use humour and 'relatable content' to mock and scrutinize the merging of the human and technological to consider the true core of human’s relationship with the virtual and devices used to access it."
Claire Davies
What the hell is this?
01/11/17 - 25/11/17
Claire Davies' practice stems from semi-autobiographical tropes influenced by everyday experiences from teaching and conversations with her friends as containers for broader narratives surrounding the materiality of contemporary existence. Using narrative based film, installation, animation and performance she combines personal memories and moments from day-to- day life with her interest in the evolution of technology and our individual methods for processing and understanding. As a teacher of digital technologies to a broad range of skill levels, she regularly adapts her language and methodology to transfer the knowledge to the particular user. This then informs her practice through an undefined process of merging the two paths of the complete beginner and a user of advanced technological understanding. This combination of the basic questioning and complex understanding has formulated a path for her to explore the developing reality of these technologies and the limitations of human experience in our evolving digital world. As much in the teaching process as her art practice, she applies humour as a means of transferring the content and idea to extend the narrative into a variety of contexts and applications. These activities such as anthropomorphising her cat and considering her perception of objects or events are all applied as a means of breaking down the processes of understanding and experience.
Claire Davies is a Nottingham based artist who uses semi-autobiographical tropes to consider the materiality of contemporary existence. Using fictionalisation and humour, narratives and moments from day-to- day experiences, teaching and conversations with her friends, family or her cat are introduced as the foundation for investigations into the questioning of stuff and our individual experience of it all. This residency will be the starting point for an investigation into the developing technology of VR and questioning our mechanisms and processes of understanding, desire, the unknown, fear and our physiological resistance to these digital worlds. Throughout the residency I’ll be contemplating the environment of VR and it’s relationship to pseudo-natural environments such as planted forests or man-made caves as the crossover points to physical existence.
Trystan Williams
Smiley Occulture
01/10/17 - 25/10/17
Trystan Williams is a London based artist who spends a lot of time aimlessly drifting around the internet and also aimlessly walking around IRL. He then tries to make interesting things out of the stuff he accumulates on these parallel drifts through digital and physical spaces.
The work for this residency is an illustrated story, the illustrations being composed of nothing but resized and layered emojis and the "story" being tapped out on a keyboard by me after work, and probably a couple of beers. It is a gradual descent/ascent into lunacy, suicidal ideation, darkness, despair, occult symbology, psychedelic drug use, magical ritual, degrees of enlightenment, possible redemption and oneness with the universe.
:)
Jeff Ko
Wayfinding
1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10+
01/08/17 - 25/08/17
Jeff Ko is a multidisciplinary artist and curator currently based in Ireland. His work stems from a research based practice that is concerned with the navigation and presentation of information through aesthetic and narrative forms.
Wayfinding encompasses all of the ways in which people (and animals) orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place. This residency intends to examine the self in relation to current globalised and digital landscapes. Wayfinding uses Pangea as a starting point and attempts to find forms of clarity regarding identity considering many subjects including; place, nationalism, architecture, geography and language. Wayfinding is a research based project and along with addressing the mentioned themes will also consider varying approaches to exhibition, curation and narrative.
Ellen Moss
I'm Your Venus
01/09/17 - 25/09/17
Ellen Moss is a performance artist and waitress based in Manchester, UK. Her practices currently investigates the how the ‘self’ can be performed, particularly when it understands it is being watched, online or in reality. Using a mix of performance, photography and video, her work deals with romanticism vs reality, particularly living as a woman. Ellen’s work is somewhat informed by classical depictions of the Greek goddess Venus and how the once ‘passive’ woman can now speak out and perhaps bite.
'For this residency I am my own Venus, keep my own fire and suit my own desires, unless you're watching...'
Pete Jiadong Qiang
Architectural and Digital Material Cultural Probe (ADMCP)
1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10/11/12/13/14/15/16/17/18/19/20/21/22/23/24/25
01/07/17 - 25/07/17
Pete Jiadong Qiang's architectural practice focuses on hyperisation and gamification in relation to architectural, digital anthropological and material cultural significance.
The residency project ADMCP seeks to form a new definition of hyperisation and gamification in with regard to architectural, digital anthropological and material cultural spectrums. From conventional physical architectural references to alternative contemporary digital game and cultural examples, this mediation will seek to retain a unique indexical approach, to shape essential conceptions of aesthetics, bricolage, colour, digital materiality and movement.
The research establishes its own intrinsic index by incorporating idiosyncratic urban, architectural, art, anthropological, archaeological, technological, digital subcultural materials from multiple mediums of virtual reality (VR), video, photography, painting, manga, animation and game. This unique cultural composite crosses from academic sphere, banal everyday scenario to subcultural circle.
Ultimately, the hyper ADMCP primer, hyper domesticity, hyper landscape and hyper architecture propose a new architectural design approach intermediating between the physical and digital decoding that transposes in-game aesthetic environment with non-game architectural and urban context, it demonstrates a new architectural epistemology eradicating the physical digital boundary and introducing hyper indexical design research approach on contemporary art, architectural and technological media practices.
Luke Smith
Carnival Network
01/06/17 - 25/06/17
Luke Smith’s practice categorises the circulation of digital information as parallel to other natural developments on earth, understanding information flows and the digital image as an evolving species, opening debates regarding the emergence of a transcendental cyberspace in opposition to the world of flesh and physicality, as well as the relationship between technology and evolutionary processes. Through using the transient existence of the carnival / fairground, Smith seeks to map out the virtual geography of digital networks in which these lively technological species inhabit. An archive of digital media and physical objects are accumulated based on their evolutionary potentials, using attention economic strategies to inform all selections.
Rotating smoked sausages, cute kittens and visceral pornography collide with one another and compete in a Darwinian struggle for survival, with human attention acting as the scarce resource required to sustain their evolution.
Smith identifies himself as an intermediary or Ferris wheel operator, guiding the viewer on a rotation through the grey areas between virtual and real, polis and carnival. Unfortunately, the limitations of our biological corporeal bodies prevent us from fully entering this network. Therefore, through this residency he intends to evoke shifting mind-sets of attraction and repulsion, innocence and perversion to momentarily simulate the spectacle of the Carnival, whilst simultaneously catalyzing the evolution of his selected technological species.
Samantha Harvey
Analogue Glitch
01/05/17 - 25/05/17
Video artist Samantha Harvey works from an open source platform ‘Trireme’, set up in 2016 whilst studying MA Photography at Central Saint Martins.
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Using video art and a ‘pop’ aesthetic as a bridge to combine open source software and data to create works that are culturally relevant and thought provoking.
Operating within a discourse inspired by Geert Lovink and Florian Schnieder's idea of a 'Virtual World' and how to radicalise the rules of access.
Exploring the potential of open access by welcoming rather than restricting to see what environment this can create.
Stacey Davidson
Share It With The World
01/03/17 - 25/03/17
Contemporary painting forms the foundation for all the work Davidson produces. Relying on experimentation to build her methodology, she utilises formal elements such as colour, shape and texture to form compositions, considering space as the overriding theme throughout. These elements provide a context within the abstract nature of the work; which often re-examines online and printed surfaces and the dislocation of meaning through the narrative of personal online streams of consciousness such as social media posts.
Her current area of research is motivated by an investigation into how a painting practice is viewed and stays relevant in the 21st century. She is interested in the Internet and how over sharing has become an issue in current society; aiming to explore how interconnected her practice is to her online scrolling habits. Using platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr she produces a selected impression of her practice and an invented level of production through a new project titled, share it with the world.
Tabitha Steinberg
Visions for the future of tomorrow
01/04/17 - 25/04/17
Tabitha Steinberg is a London based artist working in mediums such as video, sound and installation. Her practice is concerned with the relationship between images and language.
Ventral is Golden
Echoes From The Internet
01/02/17 - 25/02/17
Ventral is Golden is a Graphic Designer, Collage Artist, Tutor and occasional fruit and vegetable picker.
His current interests are centered around how the evolution of electric media coincides with the evolution of consciousness.
Where 'outer body experience’ or ‘altered states’ draw parallels with new modes of communication, where nano technology can be represented through ancient shamanic techniques, and how the high tech digital world intertwines with the low tech vegetable world, are all constant sources of inspiration for his artistic experiments and essays.
Ventral is Golden also writes more in-depth articles regarding these phenomena on Visual Melt
The more socially applicable aspect of his research has led to the creation of Tiny library, an egalitarian art and music project, highlighting the social function of the creative process.