TONIGHT /// Poster Club /// Preview & Artists' Talk at NEW Wheat, NEW Mud, NEW Machine, 4.30 - 7.30pm

Tonight marks the launch of Cooper Gallery's exhibition NEW Wheat, NEW Mud, NEW Machine, by Glasgow based artists' collaborative group Poster Club. There will be an Artists' Talk from 4.30 - 5.30pm in Cooper Gallery, followed by the Preview from 5.30 - 7.30pm.

Poster Club, Wheat, Mud, Machine, part of CURRENT | Contemporary Art from Scotland, 
Shanghai Himalayas Museum, 2015.

NEW Wheat, NEW Mud, NEW Machine is a newly created installation of posters, garments and sculptures by Glasgow based artists’ collaborative group Poster Club. Poster Club are Anne-Marie Copestake, Charlie Hammond, Tom O’Sullivan, Nicolas Party, Ciara Phillips and Michael Stumpf.

NEW Wheat, NEW Mud, NEW Machine sees the artists create a new body of work stemming from their participation in Phase One of Cooper Gallery’s major international project CURRENT in Shanghai in 2015.  Curated by Cooper Gallery in collaboration with curators and art organisations in China, developed in partnership with the British Council, CURRENT is a two year contemporary art exhibition and forum programme in Shanghai that showcases for the first time in China the distinctiveness of contemporary art made in Scotland, its grass-roots spirit and its keen debates with the social and political dimensions of art and culture. 

Installation view of NEW Wheat, NEW Mud, NEW Machine by Poster Club.

Poster Club uses the medium of print as a site for experimental collaborative practice. Revisiting previous artworks and utterances is one of the key apparatus in Poster Club’s practice which they describe as a humorous 'institutional self-critique’. Through their use of elusive and humorously provocative slogans and utilisation of the ‘poster’ in its inherent multiple form, Poster Club’s works embody the plurality and complexity of contemporary cultural practice.

During the Preview there will be speeches by esteemed guests from the Consulate General of China in Edinburgh, the Scottish Government and the British Council Scotland.

Poster Club, CURRENT | Contemporary Art from Scotland, Shanghai Himalayas Museum, 2015.

For more information about the event, please see our website: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/exhibitions/events/poster-club-new-wheat-new-mud-new-machine-preview/

For more information about NEW Wheat, NEW Mud, NEW Machine and the artists, please see our website: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/exhibitions/exhibitions/poster-club-new-wheat-new-mud-new-machine/

STUDENT CURATORIAL TEAM ///

PROJECTile

Exhibitions DJCAD Student Curatorial Team members Sophie Suominen, Lily Hassioti, Ally Kay and Genni Meikleham have developed the collaborative project PROJECTile for Cooper Gallery Project Space. Read on to discover more about their project and its development...

PROJECTile is a collaborative workspace fuelled by the ethos of open-source and a passion for digital art and realized through our collective learning of Projection Mapping.

Inviting people from across Dundee, PROJECTile transformed the Cooper Gallery Project Space into a space for experimentation and the sharing of ideas. Together we discovered the world of projection mapping and created moving-image works.

Please join  us at the Exhibition on Thursday 25 February 2016 in Cooper Gallery Project Space from

18:00 – 20:00. Come celebrate our discoveries and a have a beer and a chat.

The PROJECTile exhibition is the outcome of a 2-day WorkRoom in which we collectively learnt projection mapping through experimentation, discovering new open-source software and sharing of ideas. 

WorkRoom participants include:

Scott Smith (Postgraduate Research, DJCAD);

Tina Scopa (Fine Art DJCAD);

Paige Barrett (Animation DJCAD);

Anna Hedstrom(Fine Art DJCAD, Exchange from Australia);

Adam Rapley (Ethical Hacking, Abertay);

Ilona Gatherer (Visual Communications, Abertay);

Naya Magaliou-Soulein (Fine Art, DJCAD);

Caitlin Bowbeer (Illustration, DJCAD);

Ally Kay( Fine Art, DJCAD) and

Genni Meikleham (Art, Philosophy and Contemporary Practice, DJCAD).

PROJECTile Exhibitors include: Naya Magaliou-Soulein; Adam Rapley and Anna Hedstrom; Caitlin Bowbeer; Ilona Gatherer and a live music set by Callum Mackie, Jamie Watt and Kieran Milne, Visuals by Sophie Suominen and Lily Hassioti.

Projectile WorkRoom, Everyone is busy playing and discovering. The Cooper Gallery Project Space, Photograph by Lily Hassioti. 2016.

The WorkRoom... 

We began the first day with a discussion of current art works and practices at the forefront of moving-image and digital production around the globe. This was followed by a brief showcase of methods which utilize the open source software available to successfully wrap a video round an object: thereby rendering the object reanimated. Playing and working collaboratively over coffee and the necessary biscuits, the WorkRoom became illuminated with moving image.

The next day we looked at ways in which our relatively basic software could be expanded. We gathered ideas for the upcoming exhibition of work produced within the workspace.  Moving away from mapping simple geometric shapes to showcasing moving image onto performers, distorting text, splitting beams and making the images dance across the room. Together we created environments viewers could become enveloped in or displays fit for VJ nights.

Experimentation by Ilona Gatherer, Tina Scopa and Paige Barrett.

The Cooper Gallery Project Space, Photograph by Lily Hassioti, 2016.

Its safe to say we all had fun and pushed moving image beyond the frame.

PROJECTile, the idea beyond the happening, came from what we recognise to be a desire to make and experience digital art in Dundee and within Scotland.

The WorkRoom was a chance for artists and practitioners in Dundee to have the ability to work collaboratively and learn together. Digital art online is for the most part open-source: the software is shared freely to enable people to create art works in which quite often, they then give back to the ‘system’ by publishing the means of how to make their works for anyone to learn from, as well as re-create the results.

Photograph by Lily Hassioti. 2016.

Digital art is autonomous in some respects and characteristics of this open-source community appear to correlate with the art scene within Dundee. We recognize the city to be a hive of practitioners that thrive on the inspiration of each other’s practices. At the forefront of community-based work here are collaborative practices. Our aim is to bring another artistic face to Dundee by working together to facilitate more opportunities to share our creations and knowledge, which can in turn feed into our individual practices. Each one of us has a certain set of skills and sharing them not only enables a wealth of knowledge, it also encourages new ways of thinking and different forms of practice.

PROJECTile, we hope will be the kindling for future sparks of open sharing and happenings in Dundee....

For more information about the Student Curatorial Team, an initiative developed by Exhibitions DJCAD, please see this webpage.

ALL SYSTEMS... go /// Reading Lists

Cooper Gallery's 2016 moving image exhibition opened on Thursday 21 January 2016 with the Preview & Performance conceived by Liam Gillick & Anton Vidokle and presented by award winning Scottish actor Billy Mack.

Image: Billy Mack presenting "The Incomplete Curator", a performance conceived by Liam Gillick & Anton Vidokle at the Preview & Performance at ALL SYSTEMS... go. Photo credit: Tom Nolan.

To coincide with ALL SYSTEMS... go, we asked the artists to share with us a ‘suggested reading list’ of essays or publications that expand upon ideas related to their practice.

 

Below are the suggestions...

Liam Gillick & Anton Vidokle Suggested Readings

Liam Gillick, “Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three? Part 1 of 2: The Discursive”, e-flux journal #2, 01/2009. link: www.e-flux.com/journal/maybe-it-would-be-better-if-we-worked-in-groups-of-three-part-1-of-2-the-discursive.

Liam Gillick, “Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three? Part 2 of 2: The Experimental Factory”, e-flux journal #3, 02/2009, link: www.e-flux.com/journal/maybe-it-would-be-better-if-we-worked-in-groups-of-three-part-2-of-2-the-experimental-factory.

Liam Gillick, “The Good of Work”, e-flux journal #16, 05/2010, link: www.e-flux.com/journal/the-good-of-work.

Anton Vidokle, “Art without Work?”, e-flux journal #29, 11/2011, link: www.e-flux.com/journal/art-without-work.

Anton Vidokle, “Art Without Artists?”, e-flux journal #16, 05/2010, link: www.e-flux.com/journal/art-without-artists.

Anton Vidokle, “Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art”, e-flux journal #43, 03/2013, link: www.e-flux.com/journal/art-without-market-art-without-education-political-economy-of-art.

Miranda Pennell Suggested Readings

Bertolt Brecht, War Primer, (1998), ed. John Willett (London: London : Libris).

Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, (2004), (London: Reaktion).

Italo Calvino, Invisible cities, (1974), (London: Vintage).

Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters : Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, (2008), (Minneapolis, Minn. ; London: University of Minnesota Press).

Bruce Jenkins, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: the Writings of Hollis Frampton, (2009), (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press), 33-55.

E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction’, in The invention of tradition, (1983), Hobsbawm, T. O. Ranger, (eds.)(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Allan Sekula, The Body and the Archive, October, 39 (Winter, 1986), 3-64.

Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen : Modernism’s Photo Synthesis, (1999), (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Isabel Strengers, Reclaiming Animism, (2012), e-flux journal #36, 07/2012. link: www.e-flux.com/journal/reclaiming-animism.

Film and video:

48. Susana De Sousa Diaz, (2010), Portugal. 93 minutes.

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu. Andrei Ujica, (2010), Romania. 180 minutes

Unsere Afrikareise. Peter Kubelka, (1966), Austria. 13 minutes

Dominic Watson Suggested Reading List

John Fante, Road To LA, (1986), (Black Sparrow Press).

Bertolt Brecht, The Street Scene: A Basic Model for Epic Theatre from Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic Ed., (1950), ed John Willet (London: Methuen).

John Gray,  The Soul of The Marrionette, A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (Allen Lane).

Eugene Thacker, In The Dust of This Planet (Horror of Philosophy), (2011), (Zero Books).

Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic, (2000), (Cambridge University Press).

Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, (2010), (Gollancz).

Image: Installation view at Preview & Performance of ALL SYSTEMS... go. Photo credit: Tom Nolan.

ALL SYSTEMS... go is Cooper Gallery's 2016 moving image exhibition featuring internationally respected artists Liam Gillick & Anton Vidokle, esteemed film-maker Miranda Pennell and emerging artist and recent MFA graduate Dominic Watson.

For more information about the exhibition, please see our website:

http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/exhibitions/exhibitions/all-systems-go/

Exhibition: 22 January - 27 February 2016
Dance & Poetry: Wednesday 17 February 2016, 6.30 - 8.00pm
Screening & In Conversation: Wednesday 24 February 2016, 6.30 - 8.00pm

For more information about these events, please see:

www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/exhibitions/events/dance-and-poetry

www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/exhibitions/events/screening-conversation-miranda-pennell

TONIGHT /// Preview & Performance event at ALL SYSTEMS... go, 5.30 - 7.30pm

Tonight marks the launch of Cooper Gallery's 2016 moving image exhibition ALL SYSTEMS... go, featuring internationally respected artists Liam Gillick & Anton Vidokle, esteemed film maker Miranda Pennell and emerging artist Dominic Watson. A live performance conceived by Liam Gillick & Anton Vidokle will be presented by award winning Scottish actor Billy Mack at the Preview.

Liam Gillick & Anton Vidokle, still from A Guiding Light, 2010. Image courtesy of the artists.

Taken from the space missions of the 1960s, ALL SYSTEMS... go is the terminology of an irreversible act. Still used at the launch of space missions and ballistic missiles, this phrase has now entered the banal vernacular of project management and institutional administration. Wherever it is uttered, 'all systems go' implies that there is no turning back and no escape from what has been initiated.

Dominic Watson, still from Like a Rolling Stone, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

Screened in a synchronised arrangement, the three moving image works in ALL SYSTEMS... go hollow out moments in unstoppable systems, underscoring the inescapable conditions of contemporary power infrastructure and its discourses. Enabling the discursive and the improbable, the compromise and the negotiation as disruptive practices, the featured works interrupt the hardwired trajectories that are pre-loaded into the systems propelling all aspects of our world.

During the Performance at the Preview, award winning actor Billy Mack will present a new performance conceived by Liam Gillick & Anton Vidokle.

Miranda Pennell, still from Tattoo, 2001. Image courtesy of the artist.

For more information the event, please see our website: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/exhibitions/events/all-systems-go-preview/

For more information about ALL SYSTEMS... go and the artists, please see our website:
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/exhibitions/exhibitions/all-systems-go/