Ground Floor, Building F Monash University, Caulfield Campus 900 Dandenong Road Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia

Presented by MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART in association with Melbourne Festival TECHNOLOGISM: MEDIA KIT

Aleksandra Domanović From yu to me 2013 HD video, colour, sound, 35 minutes courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin

www.monash.edu.au/muma Telephone +61 3 9905 4217 muma@monash.edu Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 12 – 5pm

Technologism

EXHIBITION DATES 3 October - 12 December 2015 Opening function: Saturday 10 October 2015, 3-5pm

ARTISTS Cory Arcangel (US), Dara Birnbaum (US), Chris Burden (US), Ian Burns (AU), Antoinette J. Citizen (AU), Simon Denny (NZ), Jan Dibbets (NL), Aleksandra Domanović (SI/DE), Harun Farocki (DE), Benjamin Forster (AU), Isa Genzken (DE), Greatest Hits (AU), Martijn Hendriks (NL), Lynn Hershman Leeson (US), Matt Hinkley (AU), Jenny Holzer (US), Edward Kienholz & Nancy Reddin Kienholz (US), Oliver Laric (AT), Mark Leckey (UK), Scott Mitchell (AU), Rabih Mroué (LB), Henrik Olesen (DK), Nam June Paik (KR/US), Nam June Paik & John Godfrey (US), Joshua Petherick (AU), Matte Rochford (AU), Jill Scott (AU), Richard Serra (US), John F. Simon Jr. (US), Brian Springer (US), Hito Steyerl (DE), Ricky Swallow (US), Jeff Thompson (US), Pia van Gelder (AU), Ulla Wiggen (US) and Dennis Wilcox (AU). Curated by Charlotte Day. INTRoduction MUMA concludes our three-part series on watershed moments in art history — Reinventing the Wheel: the readymade century and Art as a Verb — with Technologism, a major group exhibition bringing together thirty-two historical and contemporary artworks, including several new commissions from Australian practitioners. Technologism wrestles with the profound cultural, social and political impact technology has made on art since the 1960s.

Charlotte Day, Director, MUMA says, “Across this series we move from the artists working with found objects, to dematerialisation of the object and emphasis on performance and action, to thinking about the intersections of art and technology – the transition from hand-made to the machine, analogue to digital, and physical to virtual worlds.”

Conservative cul-de-sac’s of the community are often sceptical of technology and its ever increasing presence in our lives. However many artists — with a natural propensity for constant upheaval — have whole-heartedly embraced radical changes in technology over the last sixty years. Featuring artworks that engage both physically and conceptually with electronic systems — television, computers, the internet, smartphones — Technologism focuses on the ways artists critique and disrupt official uses of the media, or construct their own machines and data systems. Riffing on both the aesthetic and conceptual characteristics of technology, artists in Technologism document technology’s advancement in a plethora of ways: Ulla Wiggen’s intricate paintings of circuit boards from the mid 1960s, see the development of an aesthetic inspired by the complex intersection of electrical wires, connectors and components, working to manipulate and rewire the physicality of technology; some

thirty years later, John F. Simon's Art Appliances series of the 1990s uses the circuitry of small LCD screens to disrupt pictures and patterns, recreating them over; in Matte Rochford’s video Progressively Degrading Test Pattern 2013, humble VHS tapes are copied and recopied, in a process of metaphysical reduction; while in Joshua Petherick’s new work, one technology is employed to record another soon to be superseded, revealing new visual dimensions and the ‘ghosts in the machine’.

A story of advancement inevitably turns into obsolescence, and Technologism seeks to document the early use of broadcast technology as a way of bridging the gap (and finding a space) between the image on the screen, the physical presence of the viewer, and the broader community. Jan Dibbet's TV as a Fireplace 1968, documents television as a collective experience — even if viewers were separated physically, they were united through time and space like pre-historic cave-dwellers by a communal broadcast. However with the advent of the internet, personal computer devices and streaming services, technology has again changed the relationship we have with the world around us to a more singular yet proliferating existence.

A history of DIY jamming and hacking presents the way artists have continued to subvert conventional uses of technology and challenge the status-quo, from the internet as militarily-designed, to corporately-exploited, civilian-employed, artistically-manipulated, and back again. For instance, Lynn Hershman Leeson's work investigates how media is used as a tool for censorship and political repression, while Simon Denny's work co-opts the aesthetic and rhetoric of language of multinational corporations in order to question their power. In presenting these works and others, Technologism seeks to consider what is the value of such subversion, or is it merely a perpetuation of the problem?

Artist Hito Steyerl asks, ‘is the internet dead?’ Although, hyperbolic in its prognosis, Technologism recognises that sceptical questions such as this are an important part of how artistic practice negotiates technological advancement. Technologism proceeds from the idea that technology in all its forms, physical and immaterial, needs to be interrogated in order to be perpetually remade.

Technologism considers changes in infrastructure, such as telecommunication networks and the internet, and the cultural implications of technological innovation and considers from the position of the developers of these technologies as well as from the end user. Technologism asks ‘how does technology effect artistic practice?’ As well as, ‘how can artistic practice effect technology?’

CATALOGUE The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with commissioned texts by Philip Brophy, Bridget Crone and Sean Dockray.

Sound Spaces A program of innovative experimental and improvised music, mining the rich territory of sonic experimentation with recent technologies.

Saturday 17 October 3pm / FREELiquid Architecture: workshop and performance by 'Critical Engineer' and artist Julian Oliver

Saturday 24 October 3pm / FREEAustralian Art Orchestra: musicians Austin Buckett and Martin Ng will present RELAY, a new collaborative work for multiple turntables, graphic EQ and four speakers

MEDIA For all media enquiries please contact Kelly Fliedner kelly.fliedner@monash.edu | +61 418 308 059

Presented by MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART in association with Melbourne Festival TECHNOLOGISM: SELECTED ARTIST PROFILES

Aleksandra DomanovicAleksandra Domanović’s work is concerned with the circulation and reception of images and information, particularly as they shift meaning and change register, traversing different contexts and historical circumstances. Her works create strange taxonomies and manic associative chains that poke and prod at copyright laws, unpack the geopolitical implications of web domains or explore the model of exhibitions. Most recently, Domanović has turned her attention to the complex ways in which image culture and information flows have formed the postwar environment of former Yugoslavia. From yu to me tracks the history of the Internet in the former Yugoslavia and specifically the involvement of female internet pioneers Borka Jerman Blažić and Mirjana Tasić. Blažić, the President of the Internet Society in Slovenia, is the founder and first general secretary of the Yugoslavian Network for the Academic and Education Community, which introduced the first internet services in the former Yugoslavia in 1991. The video comprises both archival and interview footage with Tasić, Blažić, and Belgrade-based art historian and curator Ivan Manojlović, and resulted in Domanović’s accidental discovery of an unusual Yugoslavian contribution to science: the Belgrade Hand (pictured).

Nam June Paik Nam June Paik was a pioneer of video installation in the 1960s, and was associated with the international conceptual movement Fluxus. Paik regularly collaborated with other Fluxus artists such as Joseph Beuys and George Maciunas.In 1976 John Kaldor invited Paik and his collaborator, the cellist Charlotte Moorman, to create a Kaldor Public Art Project in Australia. As part of the project Moorman played the TV cello. Paik’s first TV cello, which was created in 1971, was made by attaching a bridge, tailpiece and strings to three TV monitors housed in clear boxes so their inner workings were revealed. As part of the Australian project, Moorman played TV Cello at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, while the screens showed closed-circuit footage of the gallery and the performance as it happened.

Hito SteyerlHito Steyerl is a documentary filmmaker and writer whose practice encompasses film, essays, and installations. Her work, which examines issues such as globalisation, feminism, and postcolonial critique, also focuses on mass proliferation and dissemination of images and knowledge brought on by digital technologies.Steyerl’s work takes the digital image as a point of departure for entering a bizarre world where politics, war, genocide, capital flows, digital detritus, and class warfare always take place within images and their online digital manifestation. How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File 2013 is a sly parody of an instructional film based on the idea of becoming invisible in the digital world (the first part of the title is borrowed from a Monty Python sketch). Each of the work’s four sections outlines some tongue-in-cheek strategies to avoid being seen—from hiding in plain sight, to shrinking down to a unit smaller than a pixel, to living in a gated community, to being female and over 50 years old. A seemingly automated male voice reads out the instructions in a droll English accent and Steyerl herself, along with several faceless figures, demonstrates the proposed methods. Many of them, such as to shrink, to swipe, and to take a picture, are accompanied by gestures familiar from use of mobile phones—point to the fact that the bodies in question here exist in (and take their choreographic cues from) a world that is at once virtual and material.

(from top) Aleksandra Domanović From yu to me 2013 HD video, colour, sound, 35 minutes courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin

Nam June Paik TV Cello 1976 Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales Gift of the John Kaldor Family Collection 2011

Hito Steyerl How Not To Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File 2013 courtesy of the artist

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Presented by MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART in association with Melbourne Festival TECHNOLOGISM: SELECTED ARTIST PROFILES

Jan Dibbets Jan Dibbets is a Dutch artist who works predominantly with video and photography. After teaching abstract painting during the 1950s and early '60s, Dibbets visited London on a British Council scholarship and met Richard Long and other artists involved with the land art movement. In 1968, Gerry Schum, a German filmmaker, was interested in transmitting artworks to West Berlin, then behind the Iron Curtain. Television, he realised, could allow artworks and viewers to be connected across the closed borders. Fernseh-Galerie (Television Gallery), a pioneering series of video art, was commissioned by Schum, including two broadcast exhibitions in 1969 and 1970. The first exhibition, Land Art, was broadcast on the public station Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) on 15 April 1969. Many notable artists contributed films that were then transferred to videotape, including Jan Dibbets (with TV as Fireplace), Richard Long, Walter de Maria, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson. Between 25 and 31 December 1969, public television station WDR III in Cologne rebroadcast Dibbets’ video of a burning fire every night for three minutes. The logs were lit on the first night, and the fire grew in intensity before slowly dying on the last. Dibbets’ piece turned the home’s living/sitting room into a flickering fire for just a few moments at an historical moment when the TV set had gone a long way toward replacing the hearth as the focal point of domestic space.

Edward Kienholz & Nancy Reddin KienholzEdward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz were American installation and assemblage artists whose work was highly critical of aspects of modern life. Edward's skills in carpentry, metalwork and auto repair, as well as their close relationship with artists from the Beat generation such as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Norman Mailer, shaped their unique artistic vision of large-scale tableaux from assembled and constructed objects that sharply criticised contemporary politics and cultural discourses concerned with progress, technology and innovation. The Kienholz's destroyed monitors, tubes, screens, circuitry, cabling, shells and frames to create sculptures that poked fun and undermined the technology they deconstructed. Philip Brophy comments, 'These operations sought to retool the televisual medium by blocking its reception and emission. In a sense, this amounts to a "de-mediatising" of the television by instituting a perceptual focus onto the object in an act of retrograde radicalism.'

Pia van GelderPia van Gelder is an electronic artist, curator and teacher. She develops performances and installations by working with media machines, both custom-built heirloom technologies like the audio-video modular synthesizer, and common electronic devices which are hacked and opened up to perform in ways that negate their use or assumed design. In her recent work, she has been interested in presenting opportunities to experience AV mysticism and what she calls ‘machinic affinity', feelings of closeness to a machine. Involving methodologies of hacking within her practice at large, van Gelder also explores interdisciplinary research into theosophy, technology, science, counter-culture histories and DIY pedagogy. Apparition Apparatus 2012, is an autonomous audio-visual setup presented on a table-top installation. This work presents the no-input vision mixer’s audio and visual performance through a speaker and CRT field monitor. The title indicates the mystical nature of the audio-visual outputs from the media-machine, in this case a Panasonic WJ MX 12 (c.1989), an early digital video mixer whose own video output is plugged into its input, and so too for the audio, resulting in a continuous stream of abstract electronic feedback phenomena.

(from top) Jan Dibbets TV as a Fireplace 1969 video on television set distributed by LIMA, Amsterdam

Edward Kienholz & Nancy Reddin Kienholz The Block Head 1979 various materials with transistor radio courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

Pia van Gelder Apparition Apparatus 2012 panasomic W3 MX12, video mixer courtesy of the artist

Presented by MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART in association with Melbourne Festival TECHNOLOGISM: SELECTED ARTIST PROFILES

Lynn Hershman Leeson Lynn Hershman Leeson has been probing the idea of what it means to be a cybernetic organism since the 1960s. Long before the digital revolution and the virtualisation of everyday life, Hershman Leeson created surrogate personas to investigate relationships between humans and technology, and the media’s potential as a tool to counter censorship and political repression. Her practice traces these prophetic concerns through photography, collage, sculpture, and interactive installations. CyberRoberta displays Hershman Leeson's ongoing interest in notions of the split self and the double-bind of voyeurism and surveillance, and is the reincarnation of an ongoing alter-ego 'Ruby', a cyborg character initially created and controlled by the artist but gradually altered through her experience of the world. CyberRoberta, is a custom-made doll with blond hair and webcam eyes, programmed through the internet, and ruminates on our obsession with, and the relationship between, private surveillance and the online world.

Isa GenzkenIsa Genzken’s began exhibiting in the mid-1970s. Working with a language of found objects and collage that ranges from smaller sculptures, diorama-like works to room-filling installations, Genzken has created an idiosyncratic aesethetic that has helped to redefine assemblage practice in contemporary art. World Receiver, a concrete reproduction of a portable radio receiver mocks the readymade—a term describing prefabricated, often mass-produced objects elevated to the status of art by the mere act of an artist’s selection and designation. Genzken once declared, “A sculpture must be at least as modern as the most modern hi-fi systems.” When first exhibited, World Receiver was shown with a group of Ellipsoid and Hyperbolo sculptures (computer-designed sculptures installed on the floor that resemble garish, gigantic needles) as well as a series of Ear photographs (small artworks worn as earrings) and one true readymade of an unaltered multiband radio receiver—a contextualization that attemps to describe and critique the intersection of aural and visual perception.

SIMON DENNYSimon Denny’s work has challenged numerous themes entrenched in modern society’s globalised culture: the internet, technological obsolescence, corporate culture, television broadcasting, and national identity. He is interested in technology’s role in shaping global culture and in the ways information is controlled and shared. The rapid technological growth and innovation seen by large corporations and start-ups alike since the dot com boom is a phenomenon which motivates Denny’s practice. He creates a dialogue with these ideas through installations that combine sculpture, graphics, and moving images. Simon Denny's New Management is part of a series of works that function as a documentary of the South Korean technology giant Samsung and its global success story. The title, refers to the legendary management philosophy that Lee Kun-hee, Chairman of the Samsung Group, infamously introduced in the early 1990s. “The New Management” principle. While the market success of Samsung that Denny retells is well-known, recontextualising it in this way highlights its currency and raises questions about globalisation, economic dominance, nationalistic aspiration, and expansion. In this, as with his broader practice, Denny attemps to monumentalise Samsung and other corporations' powerful cultural messages to interogate the global material language of corporate pride and presentation.

(from top) Lynn Hershman Leeson CybeRoberta 1996 Telerobotic made-to-order doll with web-cam eyes, computer, software, monitor Courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC

Isa Genzken World Receiver 2014 concrete, metal, aerial Collection Daniel Buchholz and Christopher Müller, Cologne

Simon Denny New Management 2014 Anodised aluminium, digital print on perspex, screws, Samsung TV, remote control collection of Elevation Capital Limited, Auckland New Zealand