Event
CHICKS ON SPEED at Radialsystem: WIR SIND DATEN (we are data)
06 Dec 2014
Berlin, Germany
Exhibition
CHICKS ON SPEED: DATASTRAVAGANZA
7 Dec 2014 – 28 Feb 2015
401contemporary is delighted to present artist collective CHICKS ON SPEED for the first time at the gallery space.
About
CHICKS ON SPEED
DATASTRAVAGANZA
7. December 2014 – 28. Februar 2015
Opening: 6. December 2014, 6 pm
Chicks on Speed are avant-garde artists. Everything they say and do how they live and breathe is avant-garde art. Provocative, subversive and interactive - with great ingenuity and creativity they merge the boundaries of art, music, poetry, new media and politics.
Today’s data can be chaotic, beautiful and dangerous, it can also be knotted, unpredictable and slow. By combining artistic and scientific experiments, developed at media institutes such as ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany) and Hangar (Barcelona, Spain), Chicks on Speed present new sets of data at their exhibition DATASTRAVAGANZA, combining hi-tech/no-tech, slow craft processes, painting, patchwork, rapid prototyping, ‘objectinstruments’, wearable computing and e-textiles. The exhibition includes ubiquitous and tangible objects visualizing and sonifying data into a giant “data footprint”.
John Whitney’s development of analog devices to produce complex representations of mathematical patterns in the 1960s, as well as in Nam June Paik’s combinatory media aesthetics of the 1970s, to Sadie Plant, Lynne Hershman or Dick Higgins (Fluxus) media art visions are all artists who shared a zeal for seizing upon the available technologies of their day allowing them to extend the possibilities and parameters of a technology and it’s data into critical artistic output.
As suggested by Mika Satomi and Perner-Wilson in 2000 "Craft materials are more often praised for their aesthetic, decorative and material qualities, than their ability to convey technological concepts". In support of Satomi and Perner Wilson and opposition to the traditional view of craft, The Objectinstruments (self made musical instruments of Chicks on Speed) take rare craft techniques and couple them with new digital hardware as well as analogue technology. Their research highlights the importance of reinventing older technologies such as tapestry weaving, macrame and electric field research, and morphing them to invent contemporary audio visual tools for new artformative expression.
In Berlin, on the basis of Peter Weibel’s song WIR SIND DATEN (We are data), the artist collective deals in a multi-media, interactive and spontaneous mix of performance, music and visual art with the daily presence, exploitation and manipulation of our data.
Parallel to the opening of the exhibition DATASTRAVAGANZA in the gallery 401contemporary, Berlin the collective invites to an ‘artformance’ on December 6 into Radialsystem Berlin, where they will develop the song WIR SIND DATEN (We are data) into the leading theme of the evening.
WIR SIND DATEN (We are data), recorded at the ZKM Karlsruhe together with Peter Weibel, is on the new album ARTSTRAVAGANZA (Chicks on Speed Records, CD / Vinyl / Digital).
Participating artists and technicians at DATASTRAVAGANZA are Sam Ferguson (Creativity and Cognition Studios, University of Technology, Sydney), Shannon Williamson / SymbioticA / The Sleep Department / The University of Western Australia, Tina Frank, Ramon Bauer, Pilar Roch, Kathi Glas and Johnny Dogday.
