“There is a universe of content out there.
There is a universal content out there.
This is the redirectory. Be here with us right now.
Be there in a few mins. Be well, This is presence”
- The Institute for New Feeling, This is Presence, 2016.
Project 88 is pleased to present Strange Terrains for the fourth exhibition of Artists' Film International with the theme of ‘technology’. Organized annually since 2009 by the Whitechapel Gallery, Artists' Film International showcases artists working with film, video and animation, selected by 14 partner organizations around the world and presented over the course of a year at each venue.
Rohini Devasher represents Project 88 in the fourth edition of it's collaboration and her selection comprises Dark Content by Eva and Franco Mattes, POV by Igor Jesus, Disarming by Mak Ying Tung, Germs by Rachel Maclean, and This is Presence by The Institute for New Feeling. Drawing on themes in her work Devasher has selected these five films, which explore the interface between the human and non-human, natural and technological where intersecting patterns between the two are made visible. “Technologies, whether networks of interacting technologies, social and economic arrangements, cultural values, or constructed environments, become as much an encounter with the self as experiences of space and horizon. All the films interrogate the various sites where these encounters take place, and question how we construct our environment, both physical and virtual, and how those environments in turn construct us.”
This is Presence (2016) The Institute for New Feeling – Ballroom Marfa, Texas The Institute for New Feeling is a research clinic committed to the development of new ways of feeling, and ways of feeling new. The Institute is the inventor of its own authority, borrowing from the language of corporate branding and new age healing, as well as that of mainstream medicine, therapy, health and beauty. Our work takes the form of treatments, therapies, retreats and wellness products that acknowledge the contemporary digital age’s modes of production, consumption, distribution of goods and services.
Dark Content (2015) Eva and Franco Mattes – GameC, Italy
A series of videos about internet content moderators: the extraordinarily significant, yet elusive, individuals who determine how much breast is too much breast for Instagram, or are tasked with scrubbing photos of Osama bin Laden from search engines.
POV (2015) Igor Jesus - MAAT, Lisbon
A sound speaker is perfectly framed on the TV screen or on the projection, producing an indecipherable sound. After some time one hears a bang and the static speaker is lying on the floor. And the video starts again with the speaker in freefall, altering its shadows and the landscape, sky and land, in its framing, until the bang of the fall is heard again. POV, the abbreviation of point of view, destabilises the viewer's space, in which the sky-land axis can be inverted at a dizzying speed. The perception of a given reality or situation establishes its limits and amplitudes in different perspectives, without choosing a privileged one. In this way, what each viewer sees and the way they see it have their own truth. Like a direct line whose vertical nature is only perceptible at the time of the fall and of the bang that wakes us up and clarifies our ideas and concepts of the visible.
-Igor Jesus
Disarming (2013) Mak Ying Tung - Parasite, Hong Kong
Disarming (2013) is a video which records the artist picking the spine out of a cactus using a plier, trying to take away the defensive ability of a cactus. The video questions purposeful activity, suggests latent maliciousness, challenges people's habitual behavior in the urban society, and references creativity as destruction. The artist would like to use such intriguingly disturbing acts to destabilize the audience's ingrained perception of the things around us.
Germs (2013) Rachel MacLean – WhiteChapel Gallery, London
Germs, a 3-minute green-screen video, which follows a glamorous female protagonist through a series of advertising tropes. Moving from a perfume to a bathroom cleaner advert, she converses with a persuasive masked woman and becomes increasingly paranoid about the omnipresence of microscopic germs in an artificially-coloured and hyper clean world created by digital technology.
