Tag: #collaboration

Social distancing – Week 11: The state of our lives

 

In the past weeks, we saw people dying from a new virus. We locked ourselves in our homes and started wearing masks to protect us and our beloved. We started working remotely, and everything went digital. We met on Zoom and had virtual dinners with friends. Exhibitions and art fairs have been converted into VR. Private views happened online. Museum collections have been made accessible to the public online. Gallerists, artists, critics, and collectors talked on live streams. Podcasts and online Yoga sessions boomed. Many of us lost their jobs. Many of us have been furloughed. Nearly two million people claimed Universal Credits. Air transport has been stopped, and planes grounded. We pledged for the universal basic income. We mourned for the killing of George Floyd.  “Please, I can’t breathe” reached the ears of the whole world but the ones of his murderer, the policeman Derek Chauvin. Rage stirred up our hearts. We flooded the streets to protest in support on BLM and against systemic racism. We tore down colonialist monuments of slave-traders. City officials boarded up monuments in London to prevent further damage. Far-right supporters arrived in London to counteract BLM protesters. Protecting British monuments was their pretence. “All lives can’t matter until black lives matter”. We have been alone but together. Parks are full of litter and oceans of plastic. Climate change and global warming are still happening. Our planet is still in an emergency. Now we are preparing for the reopening. Lockdown rules have been relaxed. From Monday, some art Galleries will open again by appointment only. We keep using masks. Planes are still mainly grounded. Anyone entering the UK has to self-isolate for 14 days. France closes its borders to Britons reciprocally. BA, Easy Jet, and Ryanair combined to sue the government over the quarantine. The country GDP reached its lowest record in history (-20% in April). Recession is knocking. Brexit trade meetings are ongoing. Turmoil is the state in which we live.

Social distancing – Week 10: Days of Protests

On Monday 25th May in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the policeman Derek Chauvin, held his knee to George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. Floyd kept repeating “Please, I can’t breathe”, but Chauvin did not listen to the imploring man. By the time the paramedics arrived, it was too late. George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was dead.

The murder has been filmed, and its video went viral straight away, stirring the anger of thousands. Soon, enraged protests sparked in Minneapolis and in response, president Trump threatened black American citizens with barbaric murdering by tweeting: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” As a result, protests took place all over the country, also counting several episodes of violence. In an attempt to counteract violence in the streets, on Monday 1st June, NY Mayor De Blasio, announced a citywide curfew (the last curfew was put in place in 1943). Since the curfew announcement, protesters got together against police brutality and systemic racism worldwide.

The makeshift memorial outside Cup Foods where George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer
MINNEAPOLIS , MINNESOTA – MAY 31: The mural and makeshift memorial outside Cup Foods where George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer on Sunday, May 31, 2020 in Minneapolis , Minnesota. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The art world rose its voice in solidarity with rioters too. Alongside joining demonstrations, artists have been painting murals in Floyd’s memory in the US, Europe, Syria, and elsewhere. Email inboxes flooded with newsletters stating the organisation’s support to the Black Lives Matter movement. Emails which often include tips on how to safely protest amidst the threat of Coronavirus.

In Minnesota, the Walker art Centre and the Minneapolis Institute of Art have pledged to cut ties with the Minneapolis Police Department by stopping hiring police at their events. Collecteurs – the collective museum of private collections based in NYC – converted its Instagram profile into a live archive of the BLM movement. Their Instagram page showcases historical images related to black people long-lasting fight for their rights as well as real-time footage of current protests. Cultural organisations from around the world are campaigning in support of BLM. These vastly share bail funds and reading lists to inform their audience while providing the tools to help protesters.

All these are just some example of an overall soft contribution. However, hopefully these small actions will lead to a more radical change within an industry which is still predominantly white.

Raised fist – black power symbol – image taken from Pinterest

 

Social distancing – Week 7: Home Cooking – “Collective Intelligence” a collectively owned artwork

Home Cooking, “a digest of new artworks, scores, events, and actions started during this time of suspension.” Its first post on Instagram is dated 22nd March 2020, the day the lockdown started in London. The project was kicked off by the British artist Marianna Simnett together with peer artists and friends. Home Cooking is a platform where artists, creatives, and thinkers from around the world share their ideas and projects. How? Through Instagram posts and takeovers, Livestream interventions, conversations, and interviews on Instagram, Twitch, and Zoom. Art is the beating heart of the project.

It is though Home Cooking that I learnt about the new typeface, “Emergence”, created by artist Agnieszka Kurant in collaboration with designer and typographer Radim Pesko. The font is the result of a couple of years of work during time which the duo has been collecting and analysing 26 different typefaces. Like in a puzzle, “Emergence” has been made by assembling small parts obtained by breaking down the structure of the 26 fonts. On Friday 24th April, during the project presentation in Home Cooking, Kurant and Pesko unveiled the first version of “Emergence.”  They explained that the font could take on different shapes and change by diversifying the assembling combinations. After the initial presentation, Kurant launched an open call inviting artists, writers, and thinkers to participate by submitting a sentence that reflects on the Coronacene. The gathered sentences will form a collectively owned artwork, “Collective Intelligence.”  The open call announces that the collectively made work would be auctioned so to generate revenue to be shared among the artwork’s authors.

From Home Cooking – 12th May 2020:

Dear friends and friends of friends,
A few days ago on Home Cooking, we launched a collective-intelligence artwork that I developed together with the typographer Radim Pesko — the typeface we called “Emergence.”
A video of the presentation and discussion we had for Home Cooking with the sociologist Janek Sowa and the theorist Stephen Wright around the concepts behind Emergence can be found here:
https://vimeo.com/414483803
We are kindly inviting artists, writers, and thinkers to send us a single phrase or sentence, reflecting on the ways in which today, especially during the Coronacene, both the self and the crowd have mutated into new, unexpected forms. Let’s think and talk about collective intelligence, the evolution and plasticity of the social brain and social bonds, self-organization, solidarity, the multitude, the self as polyphony, and the future of singular versus hybrid/collective authorship and sympoiesis/collective creativity. Please send us single phrases or sentences around these questions and we will turn them into individual posters using the Emergence typeface. This collection of posters will form Collective Intelligence: an artwork based on collective authorship, collective ownership, and profit sharing. Our goal is for this artwork/collection to be exhibited as a whole and collectively owned by many “shareholders,” both institutions and individuals. We hope to auction the poster collection’s “shares” several times and each time redistribute the profits among participating artists, writers, and thinkers who need it most these days. It could develop into many interesting directions. Please send your contributions (a single sentence or phrase) to Radim Peško mail@radimpesko.com or myself info@kurantstudio.com. Please share this freely with other artists, writers, and thinkers.

The investigative aspect of “Collective Intelligence” dominates the whole project. The resulting artwork and its potential sales and profit will test not only the possibility to generate income for a group but also the concepts of collective ownership and authorship. Whereas, it is no doubt that thinking about Universal  Basic Income and testing its feasibility is crucial in the age of Coronacene. As the project requires the mental switch from individual to a collective mind-set with the subsequent knockdown of capitalistic ideas, I expect this to generate extensive debate. So, let’s stay tuned and follow the project on #collectiveintelligence and  @____homecooking____

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Social distancing – Week 6: “2 Lizards” by Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki

Have you ever read “The Best and The Worst of The Art World” which Artnet publishes every Friday? It is a bullet point list of news divided into two categories, predictably “Best” and “Worst”. Reading it is for fun. It is like taking a quiz in which one can also learn by reading just the news in capsules. Often, while going through the list, I become curious about something and decide to go deeper by clicking on the article links. It was in this way that I found out about the popular video series, “2 Lizards”. The project was launched on Instagram IGTV in early March by artist Meriem Bennani, in collaboration with documentary filmmaker Orian Barki (both millennials and based in New York).

The series is presented in 2-minute episodes mixing 3D-renderings of animals set against real footage. The main characters are two lizards living in Brooklyn during the lockdown sharing their thoughts, concerns, and feelings of isolation. The neighbours are animals of other species. Since the first episode (there are five to date), the artist duo has been contacted by creatives willing to contribute to the project. So, they opened up and started remote collaborations with friends and peers, adding soundtracks and voices to the films.

Episode 1 went viral getting more than 154k views at the time of writing. How comes that these short videos are so popular??? They are comforting. We can easily identify with the animated characters as they express our own feelings perfectly. In fact, both plots and dialogues are taken from everyday situations we are all living through in this strange time of social distancing. In the first chapter, the 2 lizards snoop at their neighbourhood from a terrace while conversing on the quarantine optimistically. “In a fucked up way, I’m loving this,” says one. The other answers back: “That is such a quarantine week one thing to say.” 

Episode 4 is about a feline nurse’s day-to-day life who talks with the two reptiles. The cat-nurse reports one heart-breaking event that happened during one of her shifts at the hospital. A patient connected to a ventilator, telephones his wife. The nurse, who was holding the mobile to the patient’s ear, explains how bad she felt as all the wife could hear was a ventilator. The video ends with the ubiquitous clapping for carers from balconies, and the nurse asserting “this pandemic has made me way cooler than I really am.”

Episode 5 is probably the most iconic of the series until now. The 2 reptiles go out for a stroll in a deserted New York City. They discuss how the city has changed and how, after all, still looks normal if not for the frozen economy. At a certain point, one of the lizards gets a call from her French mother. The mother-daughter chat reveals a condition familiar to many living in big cities, living overseas from their families while having news updates from home countries. When the phone call ends, the other companion needs to pee. Soon the buddies realise nothing is really the same during the lockdown. Starbucks is closed, and the lizard answers the call of nature in Time Square, pointing out that there is nobody around.

Bennani and Barki cunningly translate what we hear and see on TV and social media onto these witty micro-videos. What I felt from watching the episodes is that I am a person like many others. I find in these short animations something that belongs to me too, hope and anxiety. The reptiles’ lives and their dialogues perfectly embody our current ordinary in the uncertainty of the pandemic.

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