Record Memorandum - Auto Awac 1981

26-03-2007

DVD/CD release of the famous collective Auto Awac.

Record Memorandum - Auto Awac 1981:
DVD- In The Interest of Science and Technology
CD - DATAX VIDEO 1981 (first release)

€ 15,- (excluding postal costs)

Auto Awac was an Amsterdam-based collective founded in 1981 by Kees de Groot and included other artists at different times, such as Emile Toorop, Ron Sluik and Frank Morssinkhof. Auto Awac pursued a mixed-media practice, in which sound experiments played a prominent role. Their work has been exhibited throughout Europe and the members have realized various artistic and cultural projects on their own since they stopped working together in the mid-1980s. Auto Awac primarily used video in order to create 'video diaries' or 'visual memos' that document spontaneous performance actions done by the group. Often occurring in studio settings prepared by the artists, these activities include the creation of basic electronic music using analogue instruments and found objects, and spontaneous movement performances intended to bring out the subversive potential of video and performance art by undermining individual artistic control. These performances sometimes employed theatrical costumes and objects, evoking religious symbolism or mystic ritual traditions, demonstrating how culturally recurring signs and symbols gain their meaning based on context. This attitude was grounded in the group's emergence during a period dominated by postmodernist techniques of collage and sampling, which in video art often took the form of video collages that borrowed imagery from dominant media sources in order to critique their ideological content. Auto Awac's works depict history as consisting of a series of cultural narratives that emerge through an intersection between performance, ritual, individual action and authority.

 AND CALL IT AUTO AWAC

And make it trash aesthetic: do it yourself
And there must be images of society in crisis
And get together: Kees and Ron and Emile.
And lean into the screen, and move through the corn, and don’t sing: it is already too late for that, you know - 25 years ago!
And make washing machines as in a Laundromat into the stars of the show: tape them, record
And spread the word: a signal which is intended to go out and be reflected back must be strong enough to cover twice the distance between the sender and the target
And assert musical improvisation: these must be instruments blown and sung for the first time
And appropriate popular culture: grab images from the half watched TVs of Enschede, bland town of factories that it is
And get the calm voice of the radio announcer too, that bastard: he is preparing our consciousness for war, or for boredom, or both
And be there, in at the beginning of post-modern scepticism about ‘science’ and ‘technology’, perhaps it was even without realising it
And the girl must fold her arms, in that sullen sexy way: the door, the hair, the stairs, the hair
And carry out airborne surveillance, detecting aircraft from up to 400 km away, well out of range of most surface to air missiles, except the SA-5
And what’s wrong with punk?
And lick the proud achievements of our affluent Western economic society, with a grinning lick, and a lick, lick, lick
And whatever they say about ‘high speed’, ‘digital', and ’efficiency’, remember this: the robot is your enemy, their industrial pretensions are to be disrupted by your leather jackets and industrial noise music
And you were angry young men: get more dangerous as you get older!

Mike Waite, watching Auto Awac in 2007.