#nyap

About

SCAN (Spanish Contemporary Art Network) is pleased to present #nyap, the first solo project by Antonio R. Montesinos in the UK.

This project is part of a series of art projects curated by a SCAN in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Guy Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’ aiming to examine the Situationalist legacy in a post-Internet society.

#nyap revisits the so-called tips or hacks that circulate online in the form of video tutorials and which show how to solve different everyday situations using objects in a different way to their original function.

Marisa Olson, in her book Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture, talks about artistic practices based on appropriation and change of meaning of images found on the net. These practices also occur at a user level, since much of what is produced online follows the dynamics of “recycling” memes. If we use situationalist terminology, it is obvious that we are witnessing a massive practice of détournement. And if we return to the distinction between tactics and strategy that Certeau described, these “deviations” function as tactical operations inside the preset space of the network.

#nyap performs a similar exercise to that proposed by Olson, compiling and reviewing some of these video-tutorials or hacks, but also paying attention to the “changes of use” that these tricks teach us. These audio-visual self-productions - heirs to the spirit of DIY and “hacker” from the magazine Whole Earth Catalog or Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione (1974) manual - show how to alter the traditional function of objects to solve everyday problems, to avoid rules, or to satisfy desires without having to resort to experts, or even without leaving home. #nyap challenges the concept of tutorial beyond problem solving. Departing from a neo-materialistic and speculative perspective, it questions the way in which we relate to objects, focusing on that relationship as a symmetrical encounter. These tricks will be the beginning of a work that analyzes how this “tactical knowledge” may cross the relations between objects, change their ontological sense, and allow them to achieve other possible meanings, assuming that “the effects generated by an assembly have emerging  properties” (Jane Bennett).