Kinetica Artfair
Goldsmiths MFA
Goldsmiths MFA
Ric Carvalho explores the alienated sense of modern identity portrayed through so-called new social networks. His work questions individuality and creative expression by injecting irony or absurdity into the fabric of urban experience.
In Global Warming, the trail of pee hitting on the urinal is recorded and used to control the navigation of a 3D globe, leaving a trace of thousands of Google Earth place markers on its surface.The spectators action is reminiscent of spraying, the animal behaviour of identifying and marking territory. Global Warming is an ironic take on how primitive territorial instincts can be exercised through supposedly intelligent and networked devices and at the same time disguised by them.
Avolition is about the enactment of automated self-consciousness. It is a counselling session in which the spectator is asked to take on an impossible role outside the relationship of patient and analyst (or human and machine): the displaced spectator witnesses a very strange conversation between two computers as they try to speak about their problems to each other. Ric´s circular thinking reflects his desire to challenge the habitual dialogue that society has developed with technologies.
James Irwin was born in Lincoln, England in 1980. His recent work examines the role of interaction in art in relation to more traditional notions of form and content. For Kinetica he presents two new light-based installations: Monument to the Alphabet and on/off/(off/on).
Of his work, Irwin says:
I want to simplify interaction as a means of breaking down and questioning how we communicate with each other nowadays. Im trying to bring back a sense of the `here and now´ by mimicking or rendering dysfunctional the tools which real-time technologies rely on to operate.
