Avril Corroon’s new project uses the water collected from ultra damp homes to make visible how the prevalence of damp within homes has become an indicator of social inequalities in the UK
Category Archive: art in London
Using quantum computing as both medium and subject matter, Libbey Heaney explores parallel worlds, probing the futures of powerful new quantum computing systems
The artists who opened their own bank, printed their own money and then bought £1 million worth of predatory debts, which were then blown up in the shadow of London’s financial district
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An art installation at Furtherfield Gallery and on the Internet explores what happens when networked surveillance tools and AI capabilities get sick in the head
The installation reveals the mechanisms of the blockchain as much as it challenges their promises and limits. It also raises questions about art funding, authorship, value systems, decentralised sharing economies, wealth distribution and many more issues
How local and transnational acts of resistance are making use of technologies (such as drones) in order to monitor the impacts of extractive industries and develop micropolitical strategies
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Avril Corroon gave a pungent visibility to the problem of rogue landlords and poor living conditions in rented accommodation by making artisan cheeses using bacteria cultures collected from the mould growing in London housing
Hutchison’s artworks include canvases involving BOTH an investment banker and an Occupy protestor, an exhibition orchestrated by members of the Sapporo Police Department, a video starring employees of a peanut factory without peanuts and a series of consumer goods that explore the (possible) “well-meaning dictatorship” of design
A sound work in which three anthropomorphised ‘trees’ personify the different kinds of work trees are required to do in contemporary society
Artist Maria McKinney uses ‘semen straws’ to explore genetics in cattle breeding as well as the hidden systems beneath beef and milk production
Ancestry DNA testing has been widely embraced as a new way to understand our identity. But how does this removal of identity from its narrative and social dimension impact on understandings of race and relationships? And what is the scientific validity of this testing?
I interviewed Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke about The 3D Additivist Manifesto and The 3D Additivist Cookbook for this year’s edition of the Digital Design Weekend 2017 in London
The artists and activists of Art the Arms Fair want to raise awareness about the London arms fair and the deadly consequences of selling arms. Hundreds of artists have submitted work, including Guerrilla Girls, Peter Kennard & Darren Cullen
In January 2017, artist Louise Ashcroft invited herself to be an artist in residency at Westfield Shopping Centre. That’s the mega mall in Stratford, East London. Because there’s nothing remotely boring, mass manufactured nor glittery about her work (and also because she is quietly plotting the demise of capitalism), Ashcroft spent her time there undercover, pretending she was only looking for a bit of shopping fun
Where are we going to find satisfaction and self-worth in the coming years when, as experts predict, automated systems replace 50 percent of all jobs? Will our countries have to face waves of unrest as citizens flood the streets asking for employment, dignity and a reason to get up in the morning?
By obfuscating the limited number of emotions offered to you by Facebook, this plug-in allows you to fool the platform algorithms, perturb its data collection practices and appear as someone whose feelings are emotionally “balanced”
Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line covers 100 years of maps, reminding us of all the traumas, cultural revolutions, social mutations and technological advances the world has gone through over the course of the 20th century. It’s been a fierce time and mapping technology has echoed and sometimes even shaped every moment of it.
The newly commissioned works investigate repetition through works as diverse as an improvised performance based on the sounds of war, the exploration of the traces left by an UFO seen over the village of Bir-Nabala, a patchwork blanket that is knitted and then unravelled in echo of the Palestinian-Syrian refugees who have to rebuild their life with each displacement, the reviving of an archival photo of a 1970s Palestinian female fighter through various moments in the history of post-Nakba Palestinian art, etc.
Session 5. The Extended Body: Biomedicine, Micromatter & the Transhuman was the most eclectic and unpredictable one. It investigated issues as diverse as the use of forensic methodologies in art, the presence of human cells outside of the body and the possible role of bacteria in creativity
This session was one of the most fascinating sessions for me. Full of weirdness and wisdom. It started with a 19th century sculptor who made a life-like statue of himself complete with his own hair and teeth, proceeded with a set of artists who work with tattoo and the latest technology and ended up with artworks, socks and other artifacts made of human hair.
With the arrival of 3D printing prosthesis using bio-compatible material, we might see more and more extreme body modifications reaching the mainstream. What could once only be imagined is now only a matter of time
The second session of the symposium dedicated to the use of the human body by artists was titled “Blood & Bone: Post-mortem Afterlives, Trauma & Ethics.” And it involved many uncomfortable trips to the autopsy room
Semen, cell cultures, urine, feaces, tears, blood, hair, skin– the human body has been used not merely as the subject of art works, but also as their substance.
Last week, the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London held a symposium that explored the use of “biomaterial” in modern and contemporary art practices
The young designer uses radically different entertainment channels to explore questions of radicalisation, spying and UK government role in spreading a climate of suspicion
Bruce Gilden, Factory in the Midlands, from the series The Black Country, 2014 Evelyn Hofer, Crossing Guard, London, […]
The mobile ecosystem has a robotic core wrapped in twelve garden modules. Whenever the lowermost plants require more sunlight, they ‘vote’ to have the sphere gently roll over. If it becomes too hot for the majority of them, they will steer the structure towards the shade
Ploeger is an artist who looks at the broad picture, who realizes that e-waste, sexuality, ecology or violence are all valid points of entries into the study of the many paradoxes, complexities and entanglements of our consumer culture and its impacts on the planet
In 1980, the Sunday Times Magazine asked war photographer Raymond Depardon to go and photograph Glasgow. His images was deemed too upsetting and Sunday Times Magazine never published them
The main exhibition space presents objects and evidence collected from 24 real-life case files. Some of them relate to the capital’s most notorious crimes. From the Great Train Robbery to the Kray twins. Other cases earned their place in the show because of the important role they’ve played in the the development of forensics, because they’ve changed the law or because of the impact they had on society
Alec Soth spent five years crisscrossing the country in search for the hippies, hermits, monks, survivalists and other loners who are ill at ease with society and decide to live off the grid
The exhibition presents eleven case studies spanning the period from the invention of ‘metric’ photography of crime scenes in the 19th century to the reconstruction of a drone attack in Pakistan in 2012 using digital and satellite technologies. These offer an analysis of the historical and geopolitical contexts in which the images appeared, as well as their purpose, production process and dissemination
A few days ago i popped by the The World Press Photo exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall in London. It’s a show i always look forward to visiting. The quality of the prints is often ridiculously low but the photos that win the photojournalism competition give me some time to reflect on the stories that made the news over these past few months but also to discovered under-discussed cultural or political issues
The exhibition is what you would call a crowd-pleaser (although the £15.00 entrance ticket is definitely not crowd-pleasing.) Which in conservative art speak is a bit of an insult. It shouldn’t be. Because art doesn’t need more snobs and because if gigantic slides, bouncy Stonehenge and rain rooms are what it takes to get everyone to experience and discuss contemporary art, that’s good enough for me
Two of the presentations i enjoyed covered the representation of intelligence agencies in films and tv fiction, another was about the influence that new forms of surveillance are having on the rise of home-grown (‘home’ being the U.S.A., the symposium was organised by the Institute of North American Studies) white extremist groups. And a fourth talk commented on the delusory quest to control State information
Struth’s most recent photographs of scientific research suggests a one-sided belief of progress. The increasing degree of fascination for the tools we construct to investigate into scientific and material progress distracts us from the equal need for progress on social and political levels
In the wake of the Snowden revelations about the surveillance capabilities of intelligence agencies, this interdisciplinary symposium gathers experts to discuss the place and implications of secrecy in contemporary culture and politics
Objection!!! pushes the court strategies and dramatizations to their most cinematographic limits. Using a series of models, objects, images and a fictionalized case in which a tv National Lottery draw is fixed, Gaynor exposes how the language of film-making manipulates the way a case is presented to the court and how it is understood by it. According to the whim of the team that scripts, shoots then edit the trial, the unfolding of a court case could be made to look comical, suspenseful, romantic, tragic or even satirical
Photographs taken seven months after the fire bombing of Dresden are shown alongside those taken seven months after the end of the First Gulf War. Images made in Vietnam 25 years after the fall of Saigon are shown alongside those made in Nakasaki 25 years after the atomic bomb. The result is the chance to make never-before-made connections while viewing the legacy of war as artists and photographers have captured it in retrospect
In September 2012, the English Disco Lovers movement was founded, as a subversive Google-bombing campaign, looking to replace the English Defence League website as the top result when ‘EDL’ was searched on Google
Gigantic dark inflatable castles, celebrations in Grozny, Russian prisoners tattoos, poverty across Britain and straw booties for soldiers freezing their feet off during WWII