Occasional Table #3: Mel Franklin & Alex Pollard 'Chain'

About

London based Mel Franklin and Alex Pollard’s work is grounded in live production processes taking place concurrently in the world of commercial design. Feeding into the energy and speed of these active networks, their work emerges as a parasitic entity, drawing subversive and dreamlike new possibilities from the fast-evolving flow of these commercial systems.

For the third instalment of Occasional Table, Franklin and Pollard have developed a piece of malware that abuses a weakness in the latest iPhone software. This malware hijacks any device that comes close to the phone on display, provided that device is running IOS 8. Every five seconds, hijacked devices will enter an infinite loop where the malware checks the phone’s connectivity and then proceeds to stealthily mine Bitcoins on the artists’ behalf. The ‘queen’ phone is displayed in a copper-coated case in which is embedded a copper coin artwork by the Venezualan/American artist Meyer Vaisman. The phone itself produces an ambient environment helping to create a symbolic space within the gallery where the viewer themselves are hosts to a parasitical form of accumulation.