GREAME ARNFIELD (UK)
Graeme is an artist living in London, raised in Cheshire. His work explores issues of communication, spectatorship and history and has been presented at Courtisane Festival, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Kasseler Dokfest, LUX, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Aesthetica Film Festival, Manchester Cornerhouse and on Vdrome. He graduated with a Masters in Experimental Cinema at Kingston University.
LITO KATTOU (GR/UK)
Lito is a graduate from Athens School of Fine Arts and currently attending the MA Sculpture program at the Royal College of Art, London. Kattou examines the back and forth relationship between writing and materiality. She develops bodies of works were notions of agency, networking,distance andproximity, attack and defence strategies speculate the ideas of the posthuman or the nonhuman underconditions of transformation and becoming. Potencies of materiality brought together, their volume and flatness capacity, their realisation into objects and their reconfigured ontologies are set in a constantdialectic with a conjunction to written speech and aural narrations. She has participated in: “The Equilibristsâ€, New Museum, NY in collaboration with DESTE Foundation, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece, “Handsome, Young and Unemployedâ€, KOMPLOT, Brussels, Belgium, “A Natural Oasis†Viafarini DOCVA, Fabricca del Vapore, Milan, Italy.
GIACOMO RAFFAELLI (IT)
Giacomo is an Italian artist and researcher. His practice operates an examination of the more peripheral and anthropological aspects of scientific research. Raffaelli’s works are based on the deconstruction of both documentary footage and archival materials, through the use of green screen and 3D scanning technologies. The final outcomes take the form of video installations and films questioning the relationship of images with matter and the value of photographic indexicality within the digital realm. A dialogical approach is also crucial to his practice, through texts and performative lectures exploring the production of unexpected knowledge in cross-disciplinary contexts.
Notes in the text:
(1) Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter, Mass Effect. Art and the Internet in the twenty-first century, p. 26, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, England, 2015
(2) Hito Steyerl, Too Much World: is the Internet dead?, p. 441, published in e-flux journal, 2013
The Surf Club originates following to several pressing and unanswered questions dealing with the feeling of a contemporary life ruled by technology as ours seem to be today. Firstly, what can art tell us about the behaviours of the digital realm we experience in our daily life? In a time when more traditional practices reveal a transversal use of internet to grab the invasive nature of our digital unconscious and the impact of technology on both contemporary life and culture has altered deeply our existence, the effect on the images of our environment (and their implications), conceived as a creative element of relations between individuals, is at stake. Moreover, how do the flourishing technological progress and our constant relationship with it shape the experience of modern identity, subjectivity and social interaction? And what, in the twenty-first century virtualized life, determines such individuality, if it can still exist?
The exhibition aims thus to reflect collectively and individually on similar questions, opening by each work a specific autonomous path of research. Rather than providing fixed answers to such looming issues, The Surf Club presents different perspectives investigated by Graeme Arnfield (UK), Lito Kattou (UK and GR) and Giacomo Raffaelli (IT); three artists born between the 1980s and the 1990s whose visions echo in different ways the overwhelming hangover our technological addiction brings in our daily lives.
Following to the extreme presence of images today, reached mainly thanks to the easy access provided by the Internet, a reflection on how they are produced, their role, their social involvement and how the technology uses them to engage individuality and community is still emerging. In this high-tech-driven panorama, a survey about the role of matter and materiality in such virtual dynamics is very central. As a matter of fact the Internet itself, together with virtual realms such as 3-D printing, augmented reality and virtual communities appear as effective material fields, determining relations - real or artificial - between subjects and environments. The works exhibited acutely expand upon such considerations by showing how technological craving and online hyper-sociality deeply affect the collective imagery of both artists and observers. In view of this, it is clear how the infiltration of the digital into every sphere of our lives has led us towards a new age that characterizes our time. As a matter of fact, the last century is marked by a fundamental shift in how we consume, produce and relate to each other. Such a shift, evidently determined by the massive usage of technology, drastically shacked also the realm of communication, a space full of apparently limitless possibilities and characterized by an intense excess of images and information.
As curators Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter clearly pin point:
“Today, the connections and operations once confined to desktop computers and laptops have grown to encompass almost every aspect of our lives, keeping us connected through our phones, our televisions, our cars. The sites of input and output continue to proliferate, pushed forward by the speculative engines of the market, most dramatically represented in recent years by the rise of 3-D scanning and printing, which heralds a new dematerialization and rematerialization of the object in everyday life.†(1)
Artist Hito Steyerl describes further the way digital images exist in the real world, exploding into physical shapes by medium and sites. As a matter of fact she states that:
“Data, sound and images are now routinely transitioning beyond screens into a different state of matter. They surpass the boundaries of data channels and manifest materially. They incarnate as riot or products, as lens flares, high rises or pixelated tanks. Images become unplugged and unhinged and start crowding off-screen space. They invade cities, transforming spaces into sites, reality into reality.†(2)
According to Steyerl’s ideas, the project by Giacomo Raffaelli seems to remark such a sensitive argument. His installation FARO gathers together several objects, which belong to the specific material vocabulary of the 3-D scanning world used specifically to map architectural structures and buildings. Without producing a scan of the surrounding environment, the artist evokes a parallel and ephemeral reality by exhibiting the means that might produce it. By this approach, the work explores how such artefacts cross the boundaries of the digital, shaping the relationship between our living spaces and image-worlds, as well as influencing strategies of display in contemporary art. In such a panorama, how can the body be mediated by both virtual and physical space, where people complain about the fact that we create technologies that alienate us? Lito Kattou’s intervention revolves on such issue creating a network where objects, images and viewers function together as actors, generating a hierarchy of speculation where materiality is conceived in relation to the body according to the experience of the observer. The video projection Battlespot I is accompanied by and put in relation with a text, reflecting on post-human issues and exit strategies through materiality. By assembly and configuration, Kattou creates a network revealing how objects and materiality are participants of it, leading to question also the nature of contemporary humanity itself and wondering which directions are still possible to take under the constant eye of the Web. Following such considerations, the immersive environment hosting the projection Sitting in Darkness by Graeme Arnfield explores and digs into how images circulation, representation and its repercussions might have among virtual communities and real life. By using footage materials found on the Web, Arnfield surveys an unknown phenomenon spread on YouTube. The sound of what was believed to be an otherworldly message from the future results to be the sound of a far catastrophe trapped in the atmosphere for years, and the many videos both real and fake act as real witness. Such images suggest the extraordinary expansion of the ways in which images are generated and flow today, considering them as an index of image circulation and recalling a process of world-making made by the assemblage of various images, textures and perceptions of possible realities.
Moving from a wider reflection that attempts to deconstruct the role of the photographic image, The Surf Club navigates through uncertain waters, ironically discovering peculiar transformations of images by engaging with technological advancements and the virtual world. The selected works offer the viewer an insight of how art and artists are still involved in this accelerated environment. Such generation of artists tends to use the Internet and its technological infrastructure not as a mere medium for artistic production, but rather as a true mass medium able to perform deeper and wider, playfully acting with the ability of art to anticipate and investigate aspects of realities and human conditions.