CAMPFA Wed 29th Jan – Sat 29th Feb 2020
SUPERFREIGHT draws together work that considers our relationship with storytelling, production and technology. Based internationally and in South Wales, the exhibiting artists often draw upon digital culture and the internet to explore ideas around futures, social norms, and our personal and social relationships to communication technologies.
Nadja Buttendorf with Sabrina Labis
360° Nail
Video 2:05 min (part 1), 360° Video 12:10 min (part 2), 2019
A 360° camera is attached to the fingernail. With this setup a scene can be recorded from the perspective of the fingernail. Nobody can escape the 360° Nail's-eye view.
360° cams belong to the much broader field of the typical action-cams. These small, water and shock proof cameras are usually mounted on helmets, bicycles or motorcycles etc. While the typical action-cam style often depicts extreme sports etc., the 360° Nail opens a completely new perspective. The fingernail itself becomes a tripod.
In the tutorial video it is shown how the extended gel nail is drilled while being attached to the finger. A 6mm hole is necessary to mount the tripod screw. In the following 360° Nail's-eye view the Nail Art Resident Sabrina Labis and Nadja Buttendorf can be joined through a greasy lense, eating fries and talking unfiltered tech talk.
Dina Kelberman
I'm Google
Tumblr blog, 2011 - present The Goal is to Live
Infinite looping video, 2019
I’m Google is a Tumblr blog comprising batches of found images and video manually culled and arranged to form a long visual stream-of-consciousness. The batches move seamlessly from one subject to the next based on similarities of form, composition, movement, and theme. Contrary to frequent assumptions, no algorithm is used to generate the blog and most content is found through keyword searching and related content (i.e. not by using “visually similar.”) This work has been ongoing for 9 years and continues to be updated whenever the artist feels like it.
The Goal Is To Live is an infinitely-looping assemblage constructed out of repurposed content from the popular show, How It’s Made, which chronicles the factories that create everyday objects. The film takes my practice of accumulation and recontextualization into a large-scale time-based work for the first time. Reorganizing short clips into a long Rube-Goldberg-like narrative, and featuring a hypnotic minimalist soundtrack, the film portrays a mesmerizing and surreal process in which materials are transformed in myriad ways, ultimately finding themselves back at the start of the film.
Paul Granjon
Insect Buzz / The Future, 2020
Paul Granjon has questioned our usage and understanding of technology for many years. Informed by scientific studies and engineering reports, recent work addresses the effect of capitalist civilisation on the ecosystem, the future of resources, and citizen action.
For SUPERFREIGHT, Granjon is exhibiting a selection of new work that include sonic placards made for environmental protest, a totem that records and tells views about the future and a conversation table where visitors can discuss their views about ecology, technology, sustainability and any other topics. The work presented is largely made of recycled material with hand-assembled electronic circuitry designed for low power consumption.
Ian Watson
Pylons and Spires, Video 23:00 min (2020)
Pylons and Spires is a collection of ruminations broadcast as a looping monologue from a distant source. The first in a series of works that reflect upon states of contemporary life on earth via simultaneously particular and roundabout themes and observations delivered from characters living in the folds between the factual and the perceived.
SUPERFREIGHT draws together work that considers our relationship with storytelling, production and technology. Based internationally and in South Wales, the exhibiting artists often draw upon digital culture and the internet to explore ideas around futures, social norms, and our personal and social relationships to communication technologies.
Nadja Buttendorf with Sabrina Labis
360° Nail
Video 2:05 min (part 1), 360° Video 12:10 min (part 2), 2019
A 360° camera is attached to the fingernail. With this setup a scene can be recorded from the perspective of the fingernail. Nobody can escape the 360° Nail's-eye view.
360° cams belong to the much broader field of the typical action-cams. These small, water and shock proof cameras are usually mounted on helmets, bicycles or motorcycles etc. While the typical action-cam style often depicts extreme sports etc., the 360° Nail opens a completely new perspective. The fingernail itself becomes a tripod.
In the tutorial video it is shown how the extended gel nail is drilled while being attached to the finger. A 6mm hole is necessary to mount the tripod screw. In the following 360° Nail's-eye view the Nail Art Resident Sabrina Labis and Nadja Buttendorf can be joined through a greasy lense, eating fries and talking unfiltered tech talk.
Dina Kelberman
I'm Google
Tumblr blog, 2011 - present The Goal is to Live
Infinite looping video, 2019
I’m Google is a Tumblr blog comprising batches of found images and video manually culled and arranged to form a long visual stream-of-consciousness. The batches move seamlessly from one subject to the next based on similarities of form, composition, movement, and theme. Contrary to frequent assumptions, no algorithm is used to generate the blog and most content is found through keyword searching and related content (i.e. not by using “visually similar.”) This work has been ongoing for 9 years and continues to be updated whenever the artist feels like it.
The Goal Is To Live is an infinitely-looping assemblage constructed out of repurposed content from the popular show, How It’s Made, which chronicles the factories that create everyday objects. The film takes my practice of accumulation and recontextualization into a large-scale time-based work for the first time. Reorganizing short clips into a long Rube-Goldberg-like narrative, and featuring a hypnotic minimalist soundtrack, the film portrays a mesmerizing and surreal process in which materials are transformed in myriad ways, ultimately finding themselves back at the start of the film.
Paul Granjon
Insect Buzz / The Future, 2020
Paul Granjon has questioned our usage and understanding of technology for many years. Informed by scientific studies and engineering reports, recent work addresses the effect of capitalist civilisation on the ecosystem, the future of resources, and citizen action.
For SUPERFREIGHT, Granjon is exhibiting a selection of new work that include sonic placards made for environmental protest, a totem that records and tells views about the future and a conversation table where visitors can discuss their views about ecology, technology, sustainability and any other topics. The work presented is largely made of recycled material with hand-assembled electronic circuitry designed for low power consumption.
Ian Watson
Pylons and Spires, Video 23:00 min (2020)
Pylons and Spires is a collection of ruminations broadcast as a looping monologue from a distant source. The first in a series of works that reflect upon states of contemporary life on earth via simultaneously particular and roundabout themes and observations delivered from characters living in the folds between the factual and the perceived.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS: Nadja Buttendorf questions current norms and codes of gender constructions and value creation mechanisms of the human body in our digital society. Her works make it clear that our understanding of technology is also linked to patriarchal power relations. Her interactive works and video projects, on the other hand, draw multi-layered new narratives in which women become visible again as an elementary part of the history of technology. She extracts communicative moments of participation in the Internet both in her performative jewelry objects and in her tutorial workshops. DIY, as a widespread online aesthetic, is used specifically as a strategy of access and rejection of neoliberal work ethics.
nadjabuttendorf.com
Sabrina Labis works with video, installation and performance. Her artistic practice deals with concepts and processes of digital imagery, which she uses to understand value systems, gender relations, power structures or social mechanisms. In this context the internet is an important source of inspiration and material for her. From a profound research her poetic, multimedia pieces are a combination of divers materials through which she shares her personal observations with the viewer.
sabrinalabis.net
Dina Kelberman is a multi-media artist known primarily for her meticulously-arranged large-scale works of reappropriation. She has created pieces for the New Museum and The Marina Abramovic Institute and participated in numerous design and photography biennials around the world. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Art21, NPR, Known and Strange Things (Cole, 2016), Wasting Time on the Internet (Goldsmith, 2016), and most recently the textbook The Focal Press Companion to the Constructed Image in Contemporary Photography (Shindelman & Massoni, 2018) and internet-art pioneer Olia Liliana's essay 'An Infinite Seance 3'. In 2018 she was invited to speak at the UbuWeb conference in Athens and the Post-Photography Prototyping Biennial in London. She is currently ranked 5th in the world for Most Lines in Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
dinakelberman.com
Paul Granjon is interested in the co-evolution of humans and machines, imagining solutions for alternative futures and sharing his experience of creative technologies. He has been making robots and other machines for exhibitions and performances since 1996. Granjon’s work became known for a trademark combination of humour and serious questions, delivered with absurd machines that made use of recycled components. His Sexed Robots were exhibited in the Welsh Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005. He performs and exhibits internationally, with recent commissions in Garage Museum Moscow and Azkuna Zentroa Bilbao. He regularly delivers Wrekshops, public events where participants are invited to take apart electronic waste and build temporary new machines from the bits they find. Granjon’s current work is driven by an ecologist and participatory agenda. He teaches Fine-Art in Cardiff School of Art and Design, UK, and his work is funded by the EASTN-DC project at Cardiff School of Art and Design.
zprod.org
Ian Watson is a Cardiff based artist currently taking part in the G39 Fellowship with support from Freelands Foundation.