Hackney WickED
Mark Farid | Fabio Lattanzi Antinori & Sara Ludy | Florian Tuercke | Spontaneous Combustion
1-3 August 2014
Hackney WickED is an annual festival celebrating the creativity and artistic life of Hackney Wick and Fish Island.
For this 2014's festival arebyte will feature four of our projects: two new projects with artists Mark Farid and Fabio Lattanzi Antinori, alongside two previous projects with Florian Tuercke and the performance app from Spontaneous Combustion.
Profile Picture is an interactive installation by the artist Mark Farid, challenging our relationship with social media and our online presence. The project looks at the commodification of our online activities by digital bodies such as Facebook and Google and the lack in our understanding of their role in in a capitalistic power orientated systems.
These two mega-corporations have transformed the world as we know it. Facebook replaced many of our social activities from the most basic one of verbal dialogue to the more complex ones of making new connections whilst Google is practically in control of our informal education and knowledge in general, and all that is placed somewhere in the skies, far from our reach, close to their use.
The power of the digital is increasing with no slowing down in sight, but where are we standing in relation to this rapid growth? Are we to sit idly by as it continues to feed our fictional social desires, or shall we question this ever growing reality?
Farid invites us to experience this relationship with the invisibility of the digital and asks us to question the medium and the changes it brings.
Fabio Lattanzi Antinori & Sara Ludy – Dream Home (Affordable Wick)
Dream Home is a multi-faceted media installation looking at the gaps between reality and fantasy as manifested in the online and offline experience together with a critical examination of the recent housing and financial crisis. The installation features the work of two very talented artists Lattanzi
Antinori and Sara Ludy, who’s work use the digital, offline and online as their main artistic tool. The piece, Olympic Walk by Fabio Lattanzi Antinori manipulates and hacks the methods of description used by online and offline real-estate agents and services to portray different aspects of a property in order to make it appealing and attractive, thus transform and expose its poetic and lyrical nature making them absurd and fantastic.
Adding to the fantasy, the work Dream House by Sara Ludy shows a tour of 3D rendered architectural and interior landscapes floating in space. Each shot is carefully constructed and planned resembling the very familiar home décor and architecture magazines aesthetics. The installation is placed within the wooden cabin made by Affordable Wick as a research for alternative spaces within the city.
The cabin and the two works create a dialogue between the physicality of the space it is situated in, the texts and poems which are intended to make us dream and the house which only exists in our dreams and fantasies. This circle, which may feel endless in our pursuit of material happiness, brings us to find alternatives and settle for what we can afford rather than what we wish and therefore draws us away from the physical possibilities of the fantasy. But can the fantasy which exists online satisfy us or does it only keep the dream alive?
Title: Olympic walk
Year: 2014
Medium: Algorithmic poems, on-line found property ads, custom code, photo digital frames.
Title: Dream House
Year: 2014
Medium: Video, 10 min.
Other works:
Structural Sound Project London by Florian Tuercke at Mother Studios
Spontaneous Combustion roaming performance app