Twenty Thousand Years of Yarn
Future Gallery, Berlin
Oct. 30 - Nov. 22, 2014
Curated by Rubén Grilo. Featuring works by Mark Chang,
Megan Cotts,
Chemical Guys,
Earth,
Alicia Framis,
Jochem Hendricks,
Elf Stacy Rose,
Anne de Vries,
Ran Zhang, a facsimile of the booklets of
the Petrified Lightning project reproduced with the permission of
Allan McCollum and a
copy of Bleached Copyright #5 by
General Idea.
Rubén Grilo: «I've made a list of things that happened while you were a student at Hunter College: between 1956 and 1963, the first computer with a hard-drive and the first videotape recorder came out, DARPA was founded, the first International Congress of Cybernetics took place, the Bank of America released credit cards for the first time, Eisenhower made the first transmission of voice by satellite, and the number of computers grew exponentially in the US. Do you think any of this events, showing the fast development of information and communication technologies at the time has, in some way or another, directly or indirectly affected your work?»
Robert Barry: «Not in any way.»
Interview with Robert Barry, unpublished. 11th of March, 2014
The entrance of the gallery was sprayed with New Car Smell, a product manufactured by the company Chemical Guys. The substance is a naturally derived fragrance developed to emulate the smell of a new car. The scent reproduces VOCs, volatile organic compounds, and materials found at the assembly line of a car-factory.
DIN C0 (2013) is a piece by Ran Zhang that shows a pencil trace drawing blown up 400 times using a microscopic camera. The sizes of the resulting images were organized according to the DIN 476 (now ISO 216 or DIN EN ISO 216) an industrial standard which allows scaling without compromising the aspect ratio from one size to the next.
Left to Ran's piece there was a replica of the contract used in the 1972 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Elf Stacy Rose recreated this prop using as much of the real text as she could from the 40th anniversary DVD set and a screenshot of the one in the movie. We printed the 3MB digital file on a wooden board.
Eye Catchers, three new small works by Anne de Vries were also displayed across the space, interfering with other pieces. They were spiderwebs caught onto formed slim steel rods coated with orange minium-like paint, recalling elements from eyeglasses.
Artist and electrical engineer Mark Chang made a new version of Singing Candle (1997), a video in which the flame of a candle is modulated by a high voltage audio signal, similar to the techniques used to create a plasma tweeter or plasma speaker with a tesla coil or CRT flyback transformer. This time he used linear HV plasma modulation on a radio frequency carrier, allowing the voice of the candle to come directly out of the wick.
In 1992, Jochem Hendricks made the series Augenzeichnungen, drawings done directly with his eyes by means of infrared, video and computer techniques; tracing, digitizing and rendering the movement of his pupils. We presented Hands, a triptych that has never been exhibited before.
Megan Cotts showed two pieces informed by a set of patents for honeycomb paper-technology. The patents were originally developed in 1901 in Halle by her great-grandparents and were expropriated by the Nazis in 1938. Together with these works, there is a new publication, as well as a selection of mass produced honeycomb party decorations.
A fulgurite is a fossil formation made when a lightning hits the ground and melts silica on a conductive surface, fusing mineral grains and casting the path and dispersion of the energy into the earth. In the gallery we have two specimens from the collection of Richard Riediger. Alongside, we are also showing a selection of booklets reproduced with permission of Allan McCollum. He originally edited these papers as additional material for his exhibition THE EVENT: Petrified Lightning from Central Florida (with Supplemental Didactics) at Hillsborough County Museum of Science and Industry of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum in 1998, where he exhibited 10000 fulgurite replicas and 13000 booklets.
Alicia Framis’ Secret Strike vs Inditex (2006) is a 14 minute video shot in the facilities of the fast-fashion company Inditex in Spain, responsible for subsidiaries like Zara or Pull and Bear among others. Framis navigates through the various departments of the factory with a Steadicam while all the workers and production chain remain still for the camera.
In the exhibition, there was also a copy of Bleached Copyright #5 by General Idea, dated 1987. The piece consists of a Copyright symbol bleached on indigo denim textile and stretched on a frame.
Special thanks to Allan McCollum, Richard Riediger, Patrick McGraw, Hendrike Nagel, AA Bronson and Esther Shipper Gallery, Berlin.