Talk

Some key visual aids of my own practice and others and influential texts for a presentation I gave to my classmates and lecturers about where my thoughts and creations have taken me since dissertation.

Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation

"retro fascination"

"only nostalgia endlessly accumulates"

Video and Still from One Day in America video installation

Ars Industrialis: International Association of Industrial Policy and Mind Technologies

Manifesto 2010

“It is such a context that the question of care can be posed in a new and political way, not confined to the medical field or the ethical field: the question of care must go to the heart of political economy – and with it, clearly, a new cultural, educational, scientific and industrial political culture capable of taking care of the world. This is why we propose as an axiom of our reflections that – as the first meaning of the verb “economiser” say, and as at bottom each of us knows – to economise means first of all and before anything else to take care.”

McLuhan's and Fiore's The Medium is Massage

Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle

The Spectacle is 'not a collection of images,' but rather 'a social relation between people that is mediated by images.'

Superflex

Superflex stages unconventional artworks that use social intervention as a means of calling attention to such issues as democratization, environmentalism, and consumerism.

SUPERFLEX BIOGAS IN AFRICA

In 1996-97 Supergas invented a new biogas system. Due to the innovation of a pressure equalisation system and a provocative new construction method and design, biogas technology can finally be disseminated at the gigantic markets in the rural and suburban areas around Equator.

Superflex has collaborated with Danish and African engineers to construct a simple, portable biogas unit that can produce sufficient gas for the cooking and lighting needs of an African family. The system has been adapted to meet the efficiency and style demands of a modern African consumer. It is intended to match the needs and economic resources that we believe exist in small-scale economies. The orange biogas plant produces biogas from organic materials, such as human and animal stools. For a modest sum, an African family will be able to buy such a biogas system and achieve self-sufficiency in energy. The plant produces approx. 4 cubic metres of gas per day from the dung from 2-3 cattle. This is enough for a family of 8-10 members for cooking purposes and to run one gas lamp in the evening.

"Superflex Biogas in Africa" installation at The Louisiana Exhibition 1997. The results from the pilot installation in Tanzania 1997 were shown in the museum. The museum was a main sponsor of the first biogas installation in Tanzania.

Thomas Hirshhorn

Work made by Consumers with me when working as an Arts and Crafts leader in Upstate New York

Tommy from Aestheticizing the Workplace print series

Pull

Detail from Constants and Variables 2010

Jeff Koons

'The idea of empowering the viewer - any viewer, independent of his or her origin, culture or education...'

'... what I care about is letting the viewer know that they're what is important...'

Image from Collections Part II

Stephen Willats

Extracted from: Stephen Willats, Multichannel 

Workshop – Practice in the Art Museum, 

Control Magazine Issue 16, 2001

Within the institutional reality in which contemporary 

art predominately currently exists, a realm of art museums, 

art journals, art schools, art collectors etc., there is still 

an innate aversion to the agencing of practices in art 
that are founded on the complexities of social exchange. 

Thus the ‘art museum’ is represented as a context that 

defines a social environment that from the outside is to be 

looked up to as a symbol of transmissional authority, and 

from the inside operates as a modus operandi for 

society’s institutions that is increasingly at odds 
with the social processes of exchange that are actually shaping modern daily life.

"...Intervening in the fabric of society."

Institutions

Practice in the Art Museum, 2001

"Within the institutional reality in which contemporary art predominately currently exists, a realm of art museums, art journals, art schools, art collectors etc., there is still an innate aversion to the agencing of practices in art that are founded on the complexities of social exchange. Thus the ‘art museum’ is represented as a context that defines a social environment that from the outside is to be looked up to as a symbol of transmissional authority, and from the inside operates as a modus operandi for society’s institutions that is increasingly at odds with the social processes of exchange that are actually shaping modern daily life.

It is in other areas of art activity, in other social environments in which art exists such as in educational art, community art, psychiatric art, that models of exchange in communication between people and the rich complexity that they generate are seen as valued practice.

But within the realm of the institutional art world these more mutualistic social practices in art are at best marginalised, if not excluded altogether as they are deemed to undermine the authoritative criteria of authorship and of ownership based on possession. And this is the crux of the problem for within these social practices there is an implicit divestment of authorship, and the emphasis on art practice being a process-based experience, a process in time, not contained in an immortalised object. But the point I wish to emphasise is that the way in which we approach an institutionalised space is all dependent on our starting point, ie. the physical environment may be beyond our capabilities to rebuild as we desire, but what we represent within it, how we use that space, can enable our psychological approach to change and embrace quite divergent ideologies and perceptions. For the space in reality is relative to how we enter it, what perceptual framework we bring to bear on the experience."

I'm really enjoying your ethos...

Stephen Willats!

I've been told by a couple of people to have a look at this guy and finally managed to get round to doing some proper research rather than just once a week looking blankly at his website. Basically realised that when I do my second draft of my dissertation I should probably give his thoughts and practice a wee shout out!

Art as a function

Transforming peoples perceptions

Life = A Multi-channel experience, entirely variable and that we create order, reality is our own construction

How do I discover that we are dependent on others

Art and its function with people entirely balanced, a homeostatic existence