CIRCLE JERKS
CIRCLE JERKS
A
fragmented social media circle consisting of artists from various platforms, brought together via online messages, asked to reflect on online messages, featuring artists working in hybridized mediums ranging from Virtual Installation to Chatroom Performance. Fragments of private messages, quotations, status updates, speech bubbles and other units of online conversation are often dismissed as transient or inconsequential – this exhibition posits these messages as the trace of the labour enacted in order to sustain the internet user’s identity, a process of mediation that is undermined to maintain the semblance of a stable subject.
https://www.facebook.com/circlejerks2015
The curator of this show contacted the artists under different user names across online platforms, assuming different positions and attitudes while interacting. Multiple discursive tangents running throughout the artworks arise through this pseudononymous performance of immersion within online communities. The intention in employing this relational strategy was to open up themes via the performative dimension of messaging, rather than negotiate them as a central agency in full command of one’s own language, ‘gestalting’ a curator as an empty space between conditions that inform his identification with a consumer of information.
Katy Roseland
K
aty Roseland is an artist, curator and co-founder of Basement6 Collective, an artist-run experimental space run out of an underground bunker. With a focus on social art practices, her work is public centered. Through the means of performance installation, she builds events and strategies for all to experience. This has given her insight into collective consciousness. She is now experimenting and performing in the parameters of Chinese social media and specifically Wechat.
Entering Basement6 is always like the first time, like walking into an open grave just as a circus is about to begin.
http://www.basement6collective.com/
Artist’s Statement
My work is people-centered through means of performance installation, situational theater and social art practices. I am concerned with arranging humans. These parameters create inherently passive results; I set something up to watch what happens, surrendering aesthetic to pure chance. Recent work has pushed me into the landscape of the online media. Taking notes from ritualistic and time based land and body artists like Andy Goldsworthy and Ana Mendieta, I inhabit the new terrain of social media and the post-human body of internet identity. I question how to intervene or leave a lasting impression in a rapid fire domain like the internet. Situated in mainland China, regional information sharing reverberate against the firewall. Internet regulation has led me to take note from the Chinese webosphere and limit my practice to proximity. I function only in the parameters of wechat, making my work thereby site specific. Exploring this pandemic of a social media platform, I build online strategies for users to manipulate. Randomizing group chats, altering identity, creating online societies; these are all games I consider both research and performance. The internet is the most universal stage with an audience of active participants and viewers are users of this revolving spectacle.
The Olo Method In this documentation of a social media performance, Katy initiates chats with various WeChat users under a pseudonym, copying and pasting the chat messages each one sends her, and then redistributing words across her contact list, sustaining multiple conversations for over an hour without having a single word originate from her. “Promiscuity is the promise and threat of digital culture. It represents a possible freedom, the potential to reinvent our social roles in fluid, polymorphous fashion. But it also brings us into relationships with myriad “middle men“—all of the systems and websites and apps we use, which structure our interactions for worse and for better.” - Frances Stark and David Kravitz: Opening the Kimono, newmuseum.org Translations by Wang Rou.
Wankchat
“Last weekend i had a booth at a fair. This booth was a WeChat station, basically a 2mx2m box with a QR code in it. Anyone who passed by could scan into the group chat using the QR code. The group's purpose was to document the festival we were in by using WeChat sights only. no one was allowed to speak or text. I was able to see most of the festival from my WeChat account. but after it was over, the group kept documenting. They kept making sights about their daily life, even referencing each other, all shooting their coffee at the same time, like a morning greeting. or making pranks to make each other laugh. Bear in mind, these are all strangers. most do not know each other. The results are the most beautiful thing that I have made and only these 48 people can see it. ” Katy’s chat group will be exhibited in the gallery for two weeks, allowing visitors a glimpse into the gradual evolution of this sight-based group.
Gabriele de Seta
G
abriele de Seta is a media anthropologist studying digital folklore and media practices of vernacular creativity in contemporary China. He collects, curates and narrates the genres of user-generated content, local humor and platformspecific aesthetics circulating across Chinese postdigital media ecologies. He sometimes meddles with experimental music and Internet art. •Media anthropology •Ethnographic approaches to media practices •Digital media cultures •Contemporary Chinese society •Social theory •Digital art & vernacular creativity •Underground & popular music http://paranom.asia
Radio 朋友圈
We’re used to consider chatting a video-textual activity, and to preserve it as log files or screenshots. In China, the mobile messaging app WeChat has pioneered the implementation of voice messages, small snippets of lo-fi audio recorded and exchanged with mobile phone contacts. Combined with the possibility of sharing short video sights and uploading longer video clips, voice messages have transformed smartphonemediated chatting in China into a markedly sonic experience. Radio 朋友圈 is a collage of all audio elements shared in a twenty-people WeChat group over the course of two months. Literally meaning “Radio Friend Circle”, this sonic ethnography approximates the experience of smartphone messaging in contemporary China, condensing viral videos, crowdsourced field recordings, stolen conversations, invasive advertising and pragmatic communications into a 24-minute stereo stream from different places around the world.
Liz Solo
L
iz Solo is an interdisciplinary artist with a long history as performance artist, writer, media artist, activist and musician. Liz works independently and as part of various collectives and partnerships to produce works that merge the live performance stage with virtual (online, game) environments. Her performances often span multiple venues and online platforms. Liz Solo is co-founder and member of the Black Bag Media Collective and the online performance collective The Second Front Performance Art Collective. She is a composer and performer with The Avatar Orchestra Metaverse and is the current curator and manager of the Odyssey Contemporary Art and Performance Simulators. Her performances, videos and online events continue to be
www.lizsolo.com
screened and presented around the world. Recent live performance and video work has been seen at: ISEA Istanbul; FILE Electronic Language International Festival, Sao Paolo; Chromatose Anymation Festival, St. John’s; MaMachinima International Machinima Festival, Amsterdam; The Big Screen Project, Times Square NYC; Inhuman Resources (co-exhibit with Mez Breeze), Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, Kelowna BC. Festival of New Dance, St. John’s,Vancouver Fringe Festival, Vancouver. Liz Solo is based in Newfoundland, Canada.
The Odyssey Simulators
The Odyssey Contemporary Art and Performance Simulators are dedicated to contemporary art with a focus on performance art. The Odyssey Simulators are made possible due to the support of a small group of independent artists. Odyssey’s online studio space includes a member-owned virtual space in Second Life and a group of simulators on the experimental macGRID, (newly launched by McMaster University). Founded in 2005 the Odyssey Simulators provide studio space and host projects by an array of International artists and groups – in particular artists working in online synthetic environments. Odyssey also provides educational resources, studio and exhibition space and technical assistance to support artists working in virtual places. Currently managed and curated by artist Liz Solo, Odyssey is home to many working artists including The Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, Bibbe Hansen, Alan Sondheim, Patrick Lichty and the Senses Places Project by Isabel Valverde. Odyssey produces a semiannual Performance Art Festival and has presented scores of Artists over the years including Joseph Delappe, Eva and Franco Mattes, Micha Cardenas, Elle Mehrmand, The Second Front, SaveMe Oh, Stelarc and many more.
Nebulosus Severine
N
ebulosus is a visual artist who has worked with acrylic & oil painting, ink drawings on paper, digital composition, printmaking, and virtual reality/New Media art. Much of their recent work has been created in the virtual world of Second Life, where they have been exhibiting since 2005. Nebulosus is drawn to New Media arts and to virtual communities for their groundbreaking experimental and interactive potential.
Blood. Flesh. Pain. Fire. Grief. Tears. Rage. Sharp objects. Memes. Distortion. Facial expressions. Crumbling buildings. Feeling inhuman/ unhuman.
http://www.nebulosus-severine.com/
Too Many Flowers
Exhibited in Odyssey, a virtual art space within a physical one, Too Many Flowers is an installation revolving around the topic of female body autonomy, sexual violence, gendered imbalances of power, the subjugation of women, rape culture, and abortion. Quotations about these topics juxtapose a surreal, disorienting, virtual environment that the viewer can interact with in threedimensional space. The work is intended to be polemical; in the context of this show it also doubles as a work about specific words and imagery that can trigger traumatic emotional responses in survivors of abuse and violence.
Sudarshan
S
udarshan is an improvisational sound artist, actor and performance artist. In the more theatrical incarnations of his act his stage presence is typified by an intense dark humor accompanied by a sensibility that straddles the borderline between kitsch and authenticity.
Fairuz Sulaiman
A
new media artist whose first artwork was a karaoke video clip made using a N93 phone. A large component of his practice revolves around live video manipulation, often complemented by non-digital elements like puppetry, shadow play and miniatures. Pertaining to his practice, Fairuz is also the creative director of Digital Arts and Culture festival, an artistrun event featuring a synthesis of technological and traditional mediums within the Malaysian context.
Untitled Performance
Sudar’s performance, a collaboration with Fairuz, mines the discomfort of self-scrutiny in the cycle of broadcasting and responding to personal gestures objectified as data. Animating the temporal lag between (archival footage as) objective data and (the performance of) subjective reflection, this piece evokes the dissonances between the social media user and his online image, internalized in an alienating manner.
https://soundcloud.com/sudar
https://vimeo.com/fairuzs
Min Jie
M
in Jie 闵桀 (b. Beijing, China, 1990) - Min Jie, currently based in Berlin, is a Chinese new media artist who is heavily influenced by net art and celebrity culture. Shifting between the physical and the metaphysical, her artwork explores mental models through an interaction design and scientific modelling approach.
“IG celebs think artists are not stylish enough. artists think IG celebs are not arty enough. whatever man. choose ur platform and shut up. u can also be the queen of linkedin.”
https://instagram.com/picky_1997
Tinder Timeline
A pick-up line is a conversation opener with the intent of engaging a stranger for romance or dating. I received a neutrally scripted pick-up line from a Tinder match. Presumably the sender will make full use of the creation and send it to multiple matches. Having no intention of disparaging their inauthenticity in this work, I’m interested in how speech bubbles are repeated on a timeline spatially.
Ikan Bilis
W
illiam Sim is an artist who works in the photographic medium, based in Kuala Lumpur. His primary work revolves around the idea of existence and his place in society, and is an expansive study on the self. He is currently expanding his practice to include installation and performance art.
“society has labels for everything... I visualise different labels i have experienced... these labels evolve into flat and unemotional images.�
http://www.william-sim.com/
LoLog
This installation doubles as a durational performance running throughout the duration of the show, in which William will animate a conversation between two politicians using the printers. Two receipt printers, linked to two social media feeds. What are they talking about? Are they talking to each other? Who are they talking to? How much is the price behind it? Is this our history?
St. Michael
M
ichael Walker, born in 1987 in Rochester NY, has been using marginal social positions and the zeitgeist he found himself in as basis for his art. Immersing himself on the internet, he has carefully and generously opened his art as a means for people to inspire themselves and further exercise a movement. By studying film, he used the idea of moving pictures in his photography. Juxtapositions of social understandings of the world, especially when it comes to internet spaces, is Walker’s main stage. As a director, he manages to let go of appropriation of his art, which is extremely rare nowadays in the art world, altruistically calling everything a collaboration. This is because when people can claim the work, they share it, and the more is shared, the more the audience grows and pushes the artist.
“...being together with others whilst stuck to a computer. I agree that to an extent, the portal reiterates the state of isolation however, it allows me be everywhere at once.
#LIVINGROOMTODAY
#LIVINGROOMTODAY is an exploration on collaboration, community and connection by creating a portal into a virtual room that anyone can exist in -- people from anywhere, talking about anything, sharing the same audio/visual experience while being able to communicate between each other be it publicly or privately. In both our physical presence as a monthly nomadic interactive art installation, and our worldwide presence in the collective unconscious of cyberspace, #LIVINGROOMTODAY exists as an IRL-URL multimedia platform charged with two objectives: Organization and immersion . The sights and sounds are curated each month by the #LIVINGROOMTODAY team headed by its creator, Michael Walker, 33
www.saintmichael33.net
#ProjectMOT
A
ndrew T Crum recognizes the Pacific Northwest as a key source of his primary cultural influence. Bridging cultures via communications beyond conventionally accepted mediums fuels an ongoing exploration that pumps his heart. 2007 saw him accept Project Moments Of Truth, literally riding off into the depths of the creative process. Thus beginning an ongoing journey initiated on a CB650 from Vancouver BC south through the USA and Mexico. Surviving this journey has sent his project global. Aside from contributing work, Andrew is also moderating and documenting talks in Circle Jerks delineating specific cultures and identities amidst a flurry of globalised, hypermediated communication.
http://projectmot.com
Stones & Sticks
make conversation starters work better than ice picks in deserts of hollow riffs. you our me and together we; drill down on social medieval throwing sticks and #s like you toss trash bags last sentence is a snap back throw back ...
Michelle Proksell
M
ichelle is an independent researcher, curator, artist, musician, photographer and writer currently based in Beijing, China. The majority of her research and curatorial practice is published under an archive she started, documenting and interviewing emerging digital and post-internet artists in China at netize.net. As an artist, she works with video, sound, performance and her ongoing Chinternet Archive - a collection of vernacular digital artifacts from the Chinese Web. She is most interested in the physicality of the Internet and its relationship to human behavior, emotions and social interactions.
www.netize.net/
Wang Rou 网肉 is the project of the interdisciplinary artist who curated Circle Jerks, exploring the subjective effects of social networks in the context of globalization. Works reflect on the nature of spectacle, collaboration, labor as performance, and identity. Psychological models are commonly utilized to explore how mental borders arise in the absence of structural ones in internet communities.
Confessional Chat Booth
Michelle Proksell has curated a small group of poets and artists who will embark on a social experiment within the realm of a WeChat group transformed into a kind of digital confessional booth. Collectively attempting to see what levels of trust can be made amongst strangers, sharing in the universal experience of navigating this world, they will post at will their "coded confessionals" in an attempt to use the virtual world to collectively connect and release. Inspired by the concept of AA groups and the ritual of Catholic confessions, this small chat group will explore how technology can be used to empathize, sympathize, confess, relate, build trust (or question it) and express varying degrees of psychological states through poetic foreplay. “Coded confessionals” allow each member to hide and reveal, while releasing and enlightening themselves together. The chat booth includes (in order of their screen names): 媚潇 Mutedrainbow, clisviolet,?katy?rosey?, Kassy Lee, Kelly MC, kjskor, and Wang Rou (网肉). This exhibition’s incarnation of the confessional chat booth (a video playlist simulating the WeChat interface) was put together by the Circle Jerks curator, Wang Rou, the only participant of the chat group not based in China. Referencing the fact that Youtube is a platform banned in China, this installation teases out the gradients of accessibility between public and private through structural limitations that simultaneously inform and hinder these attempts at building trust. A new selection of confessional material will be updated live throughout the duration of the show via Youtube annotations.
Aurelia Guo
A
urelia Guo is an artist and writer living in Melbourne.
https://twitter.com/aurelia_guo
Hela Trol Pis
magical-masters.tumblr.com
666rankevilviolentpoliticsdiscurse
idk liek risk ~~~~ pain ~~~~ behaviours go hard on urself push thru painseeking contemporary culture pain discurse pain politics 666 \m/ high girls sleep outside i think thats from a poem by cristine brache but im not sure anna gave me 1/4 xanax to get thru SRC shift call centre job is a weird MMPG. katherines recipe: 1 green teabag 1 peppermint rank undergrnd darkhole deepspace swalow ppl/eat alive swalow money xtines work name came frm smthng i said in gdoc playd8 alrdy abt sleeping outside lol fullcircle ouroboros abyss. holywater. we love xtine. I HAve The right to Desotry mylsef sex drive death drive story of a girl crawling thru gardens i am a storyteller . crave stories eat dirt and roses my self destruct button is between my legs P Goring devil shit
Afterword
I
would like to congratulate Ray for his relentless determination, perseverance and integrity in the organization, curation and execution of Circle Jerks, which I believe is a pioneering group exhibition of post internet art here in Malaysia. Although “Circle Jerks� may refer to groups of men masturbating, this exhibition is not about the consumption of internet porn nor is it about the American hardcore punk band that goes by the same name. It is about our daily virtual rituals and how we navigate through this plurality of realities in our fragmented existence. For me the plurality of reality has been a phenomenon that extends back to the beginning of civilization, through the age of industrialization and modernization. In our postmodern era of hyper-referentiality and appropriation, it has taken on another meaning. From the invention of the first telecommunication devices to the birth of the virtual world leading to the manifestation of the Internet, our perception of reality has developed into an atemporal and androgynous one. As the consumption of trends and culture has become our nature, the real has become the virtual and the virtual the real. We criss cross between the material and digital, building up our identities and self-esteem through the consumption of hyped-up commodities, using social media as a platform for expression and connection, interweaving realms that connect us to the unfamiliar and distant while simultaneously detaching ourselves from preconceived notions of impression, expression, time and space. We have gone from cave painting Neanderthals to finger tapping homophilic cosmopolitans bringing the world closer together virtually.
What is of interest here, in this exhibition, is the application of new media tools and gadgets for artistic inquisition, a questioning of the Internet and how it has affected the way we consume and react to virtual content. Through the installations, performances and talks at Circle Jerks, the artists will observe, demonstrate and reflect upon the illusion of immediacy, our androgynous existence and the ways we digest information and access sensation through digital technology while narrating how it has lead to a culture that reproduces and exploits the virtual, contributing to the evolution of an insatiable appetite for convenience, affirmation and sensory stimulation that transcends the limitations of time and space, leading us towards an age of atemporality. - James Ly Founder & Director Minut Init Art Social
Acknowledgements
Bibbe Hansen
Dali Abdul Azis
David Shane Smith (Videa Gam)
Deidre Sajitha Valluvar
Emir Nazren
James Ly
Jin Hien Lau
Nazreen Abraham Stein
Peetura Luttenbacher
Veronika Neukirch
Minut Init Art Social
Minut Init was founded on the 10th November 2010 by Dali Abdul Azis and James Ly with the intention of diversifying the artistic climate of Malaysia. Minut Init represents a select group of artists from the obscure to the esteemed, committed to introducing art from all mediums and in all media, who sees art as a platform for experimentation and a means of interaction with society. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or archived without explicit prior consent from the artist and gallery. Catalogue Š 2015 Circle Jerks and Minut Init Art Social, Petaling Jaya Artwork and Images Š 2015 Respective artists This catalogue was published to accompany the Circle Jerks group exhibition at Minut Init Art Social from Novemebr 14th to November 28th 2015.
Š 2015 Minut Init Art Social 29B Jalan SS21/37 Uptown Damansara Utama, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia http://minutinit.com/