RAYGUN

An interesting exhibition currently under way at Prince Gallery in Copenhagen by artist Kristoffer Orum. If you’re in the neighbourhood go and  Check it out

The exhibition presents materials pertaining to the exploits of a fictional subculture: A series of hand made versions of everyday foods such as milk, pasta or watermelons, embedded with Wi-Fi transmitters. As well as five video interviews with what appears to be anonymous members of the subculture that made these objects. Drawing on inspiration from hackers, Soviet Nonconformist Art and sub cultural theory the show imagines a subculture that uses wireless networks to establish zones of exception within the everyday.

Text from the show
I stare at the little plastic box in my window stilt that weaves my most intimate communications into the vibrating layers of wireless networks that fill most of the public spaces of the city I inhabit. Nano vibrations that heat up the city streets, making room for new animal species and plants. An invisible metronome setting the pace of those walking in the street, hearts pumping in sync with the ebbs and flows of radio waves.

As I sit there surrounded by invisible objects and phenomena. Things that, over time, have become so familiar to me, that I have stopped registering their existence. I wonder how I can track these invisible objects down, how I might once again, flush them out into the open and make them visible to me again ?

I access a random open wireless network, to Google something or other. But all that I manage to access is a single line of text that twists its way across the screen: “Hello, fellow Citizen. Let the yourself become invisible, a non virulent algae bloom in the sea of, a weird religion or an intense and all-consuming hobby network. Together we can steer the development of our host society in a less stable direction, without becoming dominant. ”

As night falls the unchanging blueish light from the screen keeps my body thinking that it is daytime, and objects around me start to emanate wireless signals. The stool that I am sitting on broadcasts disinformation and the watermelon on the table floods the neighbourhood with hundreds of fictitious wireless networks. In the kitchen some leftover pasta from last night is broadcasting a modified version of the Internet and I wonder who might be on the receiving end of these signals.
Kristoffer Ørum (b. 1975) is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and organiser based in Copenhagen, Denmark. His physical, digital and performative work creates new associations for familiar objects and phenomena.

Robert Irwin talking at Stanford University March 2016

Published on Mar 29, 2016
The 2016 Burt and Deedee McMurtry Lecture features distinguished guest artist, ROBERT IRWIN who speaks about perception as the fundamental issue of art. Irwin, who began his career as a painter in the 1950s and became the pioneer of the L.A.-based “Light and Space” movement in the 1960s, has, through a continual breaking down of the frame, come to regard the role of art as “conditional,” or something that works in and responds to the specific surrounding world of experience.

It just doesn’t get better than this (especially for our 500th post!)

Our Netflix recommended weekend viewing, documentary True Cost. Clear the slate for a few hours and take a sobering look at out capitalist culture and how far we’ve come.

Toowoomba writer Sandy Pottinger has written a super informative review in the Chronicle paper, of Johns current show. Thanks Sandy

Art that makes you think, that rattles the cage of complacency, art that hauls elegant order from the spontaneity of scribble, a variety of explorations that lurk beneath and enigmatic title, and succulent painterly surfaces that pay homage to memory are all part of the current crop of local exhibitions.

RAYGUN, 249 Margaret St, is hosting “Mediterranean,” consisting of two video works by John Conomos, a Greek-Australian academic, artist, and writer based in Sydney. Each film features the sea either as metaphor or an anonymous, seething space that links the islands we inhabit. In “The Absent Sea” the artist/author sits on a park bench while a voice-over articulates memory as the passage of time through a “sea” of history from ancestral roots in Kythera, the hybridity of post colonial Australia, and cultural and societal ambiguities, to a philosophy that underpins a set of values that reflects survival in the face of compromise.

The second video, “Sea-Na-Ma” has the artist emerging from the sea, a looming latter-day Poseidon, god of the sea, his trident replaced by a Greek shepherd’s crook. The halcyon potential, however, is challenged by reality: the backdrop of the city skyline, the thrusting towers of industry and the culture of capitalism. These filmic essays are autobiographical performances that touch on universal themes as they traverse inter-disciplinary art forms.

Sandy Pottinger

The Chronicle Paper Friday, June 10, 2016

Promise it’s not an inspiring speech. Just a brilliant guy. Happy Friday folks.

On Friday night Conomos’s install consisted of a looped, two part video work titled ‘Mediterranean’. As the title suggests the works  “The Absent Sea” and “Sea-Na-Ma” are centred (autobiographically) around Conomos’s ideas and memory of the sea. Slowed down to an almost meditative ‘time-lapse-slow-motion’ the works (one silent, the next a lyrical essay) are powerful evocations of forgotten space whilst simultaneously addressing the impact of technology, globalisation, and neoliberalism on the high seas. Speaking of his Greek island (Kythera) background, the work is a stunning, experiential installation portraying Conomos’s cultural standpoint linking with his aesthetic interests between contemporary art, cinema, new media, photography, critical theory and radiophonic and installation art.

Available for viewing until June 23rd.

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