Event overview
Internet, art and film by ajaykumar and 8technology, running from 8 September 2010 - 8 September 2011.
Goldsmiths academic and artist ajaykumar, from the Department of Drama, presents a new internet artwork and two films, that invite the audience to reflect on the way they use iPhones, iPads, Facebook and Twitter accounts, and all other everyday gadgets and technologies.
The work will also question the way the audience considers art in this Digital Age and the way they think about ecology today. ajaykumar’s aim is to look at what kind of creativity can be developed using the things that are already around and, beyond the gallery to find the beauty in daily life.
ajaykumar said: “The internet artwork – http://www.8-technology.net – plus the two films ‘zero = every day?’ and ‘relationship – place (in Japanese: naka-ma)’ - all engage with an idea of art that is not a picture on a wall or a shark in formaldehyde but where the art exists in the every day and in each moment through the nature of perception, and the cultivation of our apperception.
“The nature of spectatorship can be thought of as ‘art’ here. Such a notion has resonance with many other ideas and practices. For example Marcel Duchamp stated toward the end of his life: ‘If you wish my art would be that of living: each second, each breadth is a work inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It’s a sort of constant euphoria’.”
This idea of art resonates furthermore with Zen philosophy and Zen art, such as the Japanese tea ceremony, a sophisticated space of inter-action and immersion at many levels, encouraging the viewer to find art and the sublime in our daily lives. This art project which has the umbrella title – ‘Towards a Poor Technology’ - engages also with Animist, Buddhist and Tantric notions that all phenomena are sacred.
ajaykumar creates the http://www.8technology.net art as if he was tending a Zen garden or conducting a daily tea ceremony: a deliberate, ritualised process of reconstruction and re-creation, according to mood, season and context. Each page is unique: constructed with minor compositional variation. He follows an aesthetic in Japanese art such as the tea ceremony of creating work with deliberate imperfections on each page. The feeling when one experiences the site is more akin to a hand made work then one by a machine, yet it is also made with the most simple website making software that almost every body can access and use. While most sites are designed with fast interaction in mind, this one allows the viewers to immerse themselves in the work.
‘zero = every day?’ vividly takes the viewer on a history of technology, from the conception in India of zero, to our contemporary Digital and Information Age, which could not exist without zero’s conception.
The exquisitely beautiful film ‘relationship-place’ is taken from an idea in Japan that we exist always only in relationship to the surrounding space. So a building on its own is not architecture – the architecture includes us who travel though it as well as a wider landscape. This has profound implications for our ecology in this age of climate change.
In his art works ajaykumar and the ‘8 group’ increasingly use lo-tech, and everyday technologies to create work. For example: The animation film ‘zero = the every day?’ is made by deliberately using simple corporate and education applications such as PowerPoint and Keynote and pushing them to their creative limits. The film ‘relationship-place’ is made with some images shot using a camera phone.
For his theatrical production, ‘i-magine’, instead of using normal theatre lights he lights the show with domestic lights – such as cycle lights and table lamps. For another work presented in Tokyo, he deliberately lit it using lights he found in a Pound Shop.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 9 Sep 2010 | 8:00pm - 12:00am |
Accessibility
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