Artist Statement

It's often surprising to see how certain things that seem completely obvious, aren't taken for granted by others. This could be indicative of a slight autistic tendency. However, while this used to frustrate me in the past, through time I've gradually grown more pleased about it. It comforts me to imagine that other people have this same experience. In the end, publishing and broadcasting are a social activity. In order to achieve progress, a reversed process is required: we have to take a step back.

In order to gain deeper insights into the inner workings and logic of a system we are required to disassemble it, to break it down into parts and to apply reverse engineering. This is not a reactionary, but a progressive attitude. Fields such as software engineering and product design have effectively constructed strategies of description, but furthermore, aid in shaping reality. It's about solving an equation with too many variables. Every single parameter depends on all the others, and my interference amplifies as a feedback loop. Complexity, inconsistency and contradiction do not necessarily call for a solution. It's ok. Just try to connect the personal with the universal; approach the general by being subjective. The most valuable moments emerge when the coincidental and the intuitive balance the rational—an irrationality without being esoteric.

Installation courtesy of the artist and Wilkinson Gallery London.

The Lunar Society’s members* have been called the fathers of the Industrial Revolution. The importance of this particular Society stems from its pioneering work in experimental chemistry, physics, engineering, and medicine, combined with leadership in manufacturing and commerce, and with political and social ideals. – Jenny Uglow

LUNÄ arises out of Dijkman’s ongoing fascination with the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Also known as the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment stressed the importance of rationality and science. Faith in logic and technology led people to believe in the possibility of progress and mankind’s ability to conquer nature. The framework for Western thought and culture as we know it today was largely developed during this period and Dijkman’s frequent references to it convey her overarching interest in why we think and behave the way we do. LUNÄ is a facsimile of the original table around which an influential group of industrialists and thinkers known as the Lunar Society would meet monthly in Birmingham. Members included James Watt, Josiah Wedgewood, Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin.

Dijkman’s flat pack version of this grand dining table is typical of the artist’s wry humour, collapsing the optimistically progressive value systems that were promoted during the Enlightenment into the mass production and globalised retail environment that can be seen as their legacy today. The table will travel with the artist and be used for an ongoing series of discussions updating topics that occupied the Lunar Men's minds. The audience is invited to actively participate in rethinking ideas of the Lunar society and the effects of their ideas and encourage others to think more experimentally towards the future.

LUNÄ, produced for IKON Gallery in Birmingham and Spike Island in Bristol, Marjolijn Dijkman, 2011
 

3D printing has developed from a quick translation of virtual 3D models into tangible objects, to a graspable possibility of organ printing and tissue engineering. As Moore's Law predicts, the yearly development of processing and memory capacity doubles per dollar. 3D printing hints at a comparable fate. A bicycle is downloaded, printed and used (a process reminiscent of the ephemeralization of recorded music and film). Companies that offer 3D printing services such as Shapeways claim a position similar to early copy shops stocked with Xerox machines, the only difference is that customers are more geographically spread out.

The objects include a cellular spiral cuff designed by ‘Nervoussystem’ in stainless steel which was inspired by microscopic cellular structures and created using computer simulation and 3d-printing.

Gyro, the cube designed by ‘Virtox’ in alumide in motion, is accused of being fake, witchcraft and simply impossible… This kinetic sculpture is inspired by the unlimited freedom of 3d printing, it wobbles and turns with a slight movement of the hand. After giving it a good spin or puff of air, it erupts in erratic and wild behaviour.

The interlocked cubes were designed by Shapeways.com

XYM is a web-based project bringing you the longest short-term temporary and transient yet constant database of possibilities to download individual Portable Data Format (.pdf) Publications. Presenting a wide range of artists and connected to more than one branch of knowledge, the artist becomes the author and editor of a history making free-downloadable pdf file with a rapidly nearing best before date and conservation as its’ immanent future.
Activated on its’ moment of release on www.xym.no, individually varying but at the same time permanent countdown periods are programmed to each publication with limitless possibilities that lie between one second and infinity. Within the given format, not exceeding a download friendly 25 MB, a self-generating launching base sets the framework for a diverse number of voluminous artistic data files, literally functioning between the margins of your computer screen and the edges of your desk.
XYM is initiated by Marlie Mul, http://www.xym.no/

The DRUGSTORE BEETLE (Sitodrepa Paniceum) is the most notorious of the book-worms, whose high reproduction rate sends larvae in the hundreds of thousands each year burrowing into books and shelves.
In an edition of 30, David Horvitz organized exhibitions containing small works by 27 artists. They were all bound in a four-flap, an archival enclosure used in libraries for the purpose of shelving loose prints. An ISBN was purchased for the exhibition. Meta-data was also inputted into WorldCat, the cataloging database librarians use to input and retrieve a
publication’s information. With the exhibition’s meta-data existing in two digital databases, all thirty of them were sent to libraries around the world through the transaction of a book-donation (they were all made to exist, initially, as gifts, and only as gifts). The idea was that, since they were already legitimately placed in the two widely used digital systems,
that they would slip with ease into the respective library’s collection. If accepted, they become subject to the rules and regulations of the library. Some may circulate, some may be held in special collections that are only accessible by appointment (where they can be handled with white gloves and looked at in the surrounding silence of the library). Some libraries may allow them to go on loan, making them an exhibition-ready-to-be-
checked-out-and-displayed. Or, in the cases where they may be refused admittance, they may disappear, like the used-book with no place to go that one finds in the discarded-pile at a library sale.

A blog serves as the project’s documentation. Only 7 of the 27 artists’ pieces can be seen here. To see the rest, it is suggested, that you go to a library near you. http://drugstorebeetle.wordpress.com/

The piece presented at NIMk is part of the collection of the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD)
 

Artie Vierkant's Image Objects are works which question the division between material objects and immaterial images. The predominant method of cultural experience today happens through some kind of mediation, be it a screen or another type of interface. In Vierkant's work, objects installed in gallery space are used as a starting point from which to generate countless derivative works. These images -documentation photos altered using a variety of photo retouching techniques, digital watermarking techniques, and collage methods- equally stem from the original sculptures and come to be associated with the original work itself. In viewing the objects in gallery space, one gets a certain experience of the work, whereas simply to see the images through their altered, abstracted documentation produces a profoundly different experience. By adopting a methodology of versioning and watermarking, the images are free to disperse in a variety of forms, none more authentic than another. The objects become expanded, caught between all of the versions and distribution channels they come to inhabit, each in association with each other but never the same image.

For the installation at NIMk, Vierkant has created a website of unique versions of these Image Objects, continuously updated and rotating over the course of the exhibition. Viewers can access these versions equally through projection at NIMk and by visiting IMAGEOBJECTS-NIMK.info.

flatpack assembly - Ikea malm chest assembled from flatpack is part of a series of videos which take sculptural form as objects modeled from styrofoam. Each of these objects begins as a video, either recorded by the artist or found on the Internet. The video then is transformed to be viewed spatially rather than temporally by reducing each frame to a curve depicting the relative levels of light and dark in the image (the original image's histogram). These works continue a thread in Vierkant's practice which assert that "nothing is in a fixed state, everything is anything else, whether because any object is capable of becoming another type of object or because an object already exists in %uFB02ux between multiple instantiations.”

In her work Marisa Olson often uses her own experience as a filter through which to explore the nuances of contemporary digital visual culture. The Search is an enquiry into the performative aspects of the act of searching the internet and its relationship to the cultural values expressed in the popularity of science fiction phenomena like Star Trek, which also revolve around narratives of searching--for intelligent life, or for answers to deeper questions about ourselves.

"The last birthday gift my mother ever gave me was a stack of floppy disks containing 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'-related sound files found in her exhaustive search of what was then the early-internet, circa 1996. At the time I rejected the gift. My teenage self hated it's freeness. I thought it was a cheap gift. The cultural significance of the content also escaped me. The disks were recorded in a moment in which Star Trek fans were among the first to flock to the web in search of a new life.”

Olson's project entailed performing a search that attempted to "recover" this data from the internet. In the gallery, this piece manifests as a stack of floppy diskettes containing the search results of her performative effort to rewrite a negative memory. Like the memory written into the diskettes' magnetic tape, ultimately these artifacts are meant to wither. The sounds contained in the files will continue to float within the popular preconscious of those spectators old enough to have seen the show or who have taken interest in excavating its reruns. But in relatively little time, even their suggestion will fade, and all that will exist are the hard plastic carcasses that once housed these nomadic blips.

In the series New Age Demanded the various stylistic registers and production strategies that Jon Rafman explores separately in his work come together to form a complex language. The centre of each of these images is occupied by an eerie, mysterious, faceless figure, somewhat between a deformed classical bust and a sci-fi character. The materials used vary from work to work – from spiky and iridescent to porous and opaque. The skin is based on paintings by artists belonging to the art historical canon such as Franz Kline and Jean Dubuffet as well as images from popular culture, like manga and digital painting effects. But the loan is almost entirely illegible, fully integrated into the vision. The Photoshop levels accumulate, as do the literary, philosophical, artistic and alchemical references. Each piece is a trip through time, between past and future, high art and low art, history and narration.

- Text by Domenico Quaranta

Ryan Trecartin’s Any Ever comprises seven autonomous but interrelated videos. Taken together, these videos embark on poetic, formal, and structural elaborations of new forms of technology, language, narrative, identity, and humanity, portraying an extra-dimensional world that channels the existential dramas of our own.

Re’Search Wait’S comprises four movies: Ready, The Re’Search, Roamie View: History Enhancement, and Temp Stop. The setting is a complicated industry predicated on the supremacy of metaphysically evolved market research. As a picture of modern consumer society literalized to an extreme, Re’Search Wait’S verges on social science-fiction; and a yin and yang of nihilism and boundless meaning.

The exhibited piece Roamie View: History Enhancement reveals JJ as a husk of his former self, overwhelmed by too many experimental personalities and reverted to factory presets. He hires Roamie Hood’s (Alison Powell) company to roam backwards through time to research an opportunity for an edit that could alter his future-present. Traversing times and possibilities as physical places, Roamie View: History Enhancement collapses the importance of grasping who one is, in favor of where. Who is incidental, contained, monotonous; but an inhabited context is what informs and is informed by an active identity.

–text by Kevin McGarry

Assembly Instructions (IKEA) examines the possible use of a retail store as a modern mnemonic device in the manner of a renaissance memory palace. The placement of objects and goods is used to record information that will later be recalled by the consumer traversing through the retail environment. The Ikea furniture stores represent the ideal incarnation of this idea being located all over the world and yet all sharing a common internal layout with very little difference between the individual stores. This idea of a memory palace recording the external world is then inverted and explored along the liens of Giordano Bruno's suppositions about the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosms. The layout of wardrobes, divans and cushions in the Ikea showroom become, rather than being a reflection of the external world, the levers enabling us to manipulate the universe. The movement of a single cup or the renovation of a kitchen display unit causes the destruction of existing spheres of human knowledge and the creation of entirely new realities.

Courtesy Monitor, Rome, Art:Concept, Paris, Sprueth Magers, Berlin

In his work Martijn Hendriks questions the changing status of the art object in times of global and social networking. It has lead to the current situation in which images are subjected to continuous circulation, translation and re-contextualisation and nothing seems to be permanent. Images that were made in one context are effortlessly copied and reused in another context. Medium specific traits reappear on other media while every exchange leaves and shows its traces. For Hendriks the artwork is an object that is by far the most representative of this fragmented situation that we currently live in.

By Means of Precise and Finite Summarization could be described as several things: as a sculpture, a painting and as a collage. It's a large print based on a photo taken in Hendriks' studio, but is no longer recognizable as such. Enlarged and photoshopped, it has been stripped of its colours and put on the ground together with other materials causing the image to lose its original meaning and reminding us of abstract painting without actually being one. The themes or re-contextualisation and transformation return as well in the shape shifting nature of the artwork. Within the context of The Greater Cloud it is a reinterpretation of a work that was previously shown in London in an exhibition called Rhododendron II, an exhibition that itself was an interpretation of an exhibition with the same title in W139. The title of the work is derived from the text 'Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art' by the French philosopher Alain Badiou.