Fulfilment Services Ltd., Arvid&Marie, Surveillance

About

Forms of Hidden Intent is a series of work which explores how objects of technology have become opaque black boxes drifting towards simpler and smoother shapes (the rectangle of smartphones, the globe of Alexa, etc.) behind which hide more and more issues. 

New smart technologies fulfil our lives. Yet their shape, always a perfect geometry, hides the social, environmental, and ethical issues behind it. Together with a new generation of artists and designers Arvid&Marie propose different ways to break the silence of these muted forms. By creating fictional objects and products that take the opposite approach: informational, baroque, highly decorated. Exhibiting either their materials, their production lines, or their social impact.

With designer Batlabat the deflated thinker gets absorbed into the perfect smart assistant sphere. Artist Manjot Kaur replaces the blank, reflective stare of security cameras with a view into surveillance infrastructures. Studio Post-Neon interrogates the global resources hidden within opaque smartphone bodies.  As we explore alternatives to the smooth, shiny surfaces of ‘smart’ technologies, we question the tech-industry’s doctrine of simplicity.

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At Fulfilment Services Ltd. we begin at the logistics of the systemised supply chain: algorithm to ‘click to buy’ to factory worker to shipping container to gig delivery driver to momentarily satisfied and fulfilled consumer; from there we link, de-link, and re-link. With Gasworks as the nexus of a series of public interventions, we invite international artists Arvid&Marie, DNA, Florence Jung, and Frank Wang Yefeng to respond to the contemporary provocation of an anti-fulfilment narrative. 

Under existing infrastructures of production and consumption, networks are constantly in multi-directional movement building new needs once existing ones have been satisfied. In an ever-expanding and dissatisfying system we ask crucially: is capitalism fulfilling consumers or are consumers fulfilling capitalism? 

The four new artist commissions situate themselves in and around London on billboards, delivery vehicles and digitally on an e-commerce platform and website. These works come together under the unified spirit of corroding existing networks of dissemination. At Fulfilment Services Ltd. our disseminated medium is very much part of our message: join us in imagining alternative realities of fulfilment by interrogating the chain of production, networks of transportation, and the extortionist quality of fabricated needs. 

Fulfilment Services Ltd. is curated by Andreanne Beguin, Zidong Chen, Sarah Daher, Zifei Ge, Hayley Gibson, Jiawei Gu and Brenna Horrox from the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme as part of the Graduate Projects 2021, Royal College of Art in partnership with Gasworks, supported by Jack Arts and Print&Digital.