Hasta La Creative!

Ears are amongst the five sense organs that allow you to hear sounds coming to you from various sources around. Without hearing capacity, you may not respond to certain things and people present around you. Like all other body parts and organs, problems or health issues related to ears also arise in a large number of people. Such issues may create problems in the normal hearing process. There may be pain, swelling, infection or other problems such as deposition of wax in the ears. Whatever the problem maybe you certainly need to visit the best ear clinic to get the requisite treatments done on your ears. First, you need to choose an ear clinic that is best suited for you.

Here are some points worth consideration in this respect:-

Get References From Your Contacts

To choose the right ear clinic London, you must prefer getting references from your contacts. People in your social circle may let you know about the finest clinics from their own personal experience. Thus you may contact them and ask for the best options for ear clinics.

Give Due Attention To Their Certifications

Again it is important to check the certifications of the professionals working in the given ear clinic before you choose and pick one for your needs. By checking their certifications, you may remain assured that you are getting treatment from appropriately qualified and experienced professionals.

Think About The Costs Involved

Before you pick any of the ear clinics for your needs, you must also think about the costs involved. It is because you may actually pick and hire any of the clinics if their treatment charges are just reasonable. You may prefer comparing costs for some specific type of ear treatment that you need from different clinics and then prefer one that is highly competitive and easily affordable for you.

Check What Technologies They Use For Treatment

In this high-tech arena, everything is going technological. Therefore the use of technology in the form of some technical devices is obvious. You must check from the given ear clinic about the specific type of technologies they use for ear treatments of various types.

Patient Reviews Must Be Checked

While hiring any ear clinic London you need to be attentive about patient reviews too. You must check the reviews given by other patients for the given clinic over their website and see what they say about it. From patient reviews, a ready idea about the suitability of the given clinic can be obtained.

After taking into consideration all these important points, you may very carefully choose the right ear clinic that is best suited for your needs. It lets you get the requisite treatments in a safe and excellent manner.

The post How To Choose An Ear Clinic Right For You? appeared first on 10AD Blog.

A clubby gathering spot attracts a who’s who of the film industry, and reminds them of a time when movies were still king.

I discovered Theo Triantafyllidis‘ work while reading my favourite game art blog but I experienced it for the first time a couple of weeks ago at the opening of Radical Gaming at HEK (House of electronic Arts) in Basel. I haven’t stopped talking about his Pastoral installation ever since. As soon as I was back home, I booked a train to Milan to see his solo show at the NOVO gallery.

Theo Triantafyllidis, Radicalization Pipeline (exhibition view), 2021. Photo: The Knack Studio, Courtesy the artist and NOVO – Eduardo Secci Milano

Even the name of the exhibition is intriguing: Radicalization Pipeline. The title is a reference to the theory that YouTube is an engine of socio-political radicalization. “A significant amount of commenting users systematically migrates from commenting exclusively on milder content to commenting on more extreme content,” the authors of a research published in 2020 wrote.

Theo Triantafyllidis, Radicalization Pipeline (frame), 2021

Theo Triantafyllidis, Radicalization Pipeline (frame), 2021

Theo Triantafyllidis, Radicalization Pipeline (preview), 2021

Radicalization Pipeline, the live simulation audiovisual work at the center of the exhibition, portrays radicalised people as they furiously throw weapons and blind hatred at each other. The video, dense in action, swarming in characters and constantly regenerating is pell-binding and disorientating. It also escapes any attempt to be fully absorbed. A bit like the endless stream of bad news, trolling and conspiracy theories that assaults us every day.

Most of the figures in the melee are familiar: white nationalists brandishing KEK flags, the usual Medieval warriors, fantasy creatures out of World of Warcraft, police officers wearing helmets and bulletproof vests, anarchists wearing similar attire, MAGA-type maniacs, etc. Most of the characters are male. Because of the visual composition and darkness, I was reminded of Hieronymus Bosch’s vision of Hell. Because of the theme, I thought about the fetid alt-right. And indeed, the work draws connections between the world of fantasy and real events that happened in the US such as the invasion of the Capitol earlier this year and phenomena such as the rise of QAnon.

Theo Triantafyllidis, Radicalization Pipeline (frame), 2021

To be honest, I thought about the video several times over the past few days. When no masks/no vaccine people created disorder inside a church in Pescara (Southern Italy), when drivers were fighting over fuel at a petrol station in the UK or any time i see the social media comments that accompany every single apparition of French far-right polemicist Éric Zemmour on TV. Can this type of brutality reach new levels in the coming years? Am I getting paranoid? Radicalization Pipeline, however, is never as gloomy as my vision of the future. Some of the figures are quite grotesque, others are incongruous (did I see pink furies?), even the soundscape conceived by sound creator Diego Navarro manage to enlighten the atmosphere here and there.

Theo Triantafyllidis, Steal Stoppa, 2021. Image Eduardo Secci Contemporary Gallery

Theo Triantafyllidis, Alpha Skiver, 2021. Image Eduardo Secci Contemporary Gallery

Some of the weapons that the characters in the video are swinging around have been recreated in ceramic. The glazed stoneware pieces are a strange mix of craft, DIY and industrialised commodities. They look amateurish and are reinforced with more sophisticated materials such as tennis overgrip tapes and pieces of laser-cut acrylics. The names given to the ceramic weapons include Chadslayer, Normie Slicer, Anprim Talon, Snowflake Skorcher and Soyboy Shredder. This type of vocabulary echoes the rage found in incel forums, far-right chats, black bloc groups, the manosphere and other rancid circles.

Theo Triantafyllidis builds installations and experiences where the virtual and the physical dialogue with each other. He’s not the first artist who attempts to establish this kind of alliance. He is certainly one of the very few who blends both worlds in a way that is exquisitely natural, poetical and full of humour. His works are also deeply anchored in today’s socio-political preoccupations. Add to the picture that they are visually seducing. Very very seducing. I’m a fan.

Theo Triantafyllidis, Radicalization Pipeline (interview with the artist), 2021

Theo Triantafyllidis, Hippie Breaker, 2021. Image Eduardo Secci Contemporary Gallery

Theo Triantafyllidis, Commie Choppa, 2021. Image Eduardo Secci Contemporary Gallery

Theo Triantafyllidis, Wrong Side of Freedom, 2021. Image Eduardo Secci Contemporary Gallery

Theo Triantafyllidis, Wrong Side of Freedom (detail), 2021. Image Eduardo Secci Contemporary Gallery

Theo Triantafyllidis, Kristal Klaw, 2021. Photo: The Knack Studio, Courtesy the artist and NOVO – Eduardo Secci Milano

Theo Triantafyllidis, Radicalization Pipeline (exhibition view), 2021. Photo: The Knack Studio, Courtesy the artist and NOVO – Eduardo Secci Milano

Theo Triantafyllidis‘s solo show, Radicalization Pipeline, remains open until 2 October 2021 at NOVO, Eduardo Secci’s project space in Milan.

Related stories: Radical Gaming – Immersion. Simulation. Subversion, The feminist and the manosphere. An interview with Angela Washko, “Universalization is a colonialist heritage.” An interview with video game curator Isabelle Arvers, Gaming Masculinity. Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture, etc.

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The exciting city of Bologna and a biennial dedicated to photography on Industry and Work. Say no more, I’m in!

This year’s edition of the Foto/Industria biennial explores the food industry and its complex connections to wider questions of philosophy, politics, history, science and technology, culture, economy. Mixing archive material and contemporary photography, the works selected cover a period of a century. The time frame allows visitors to get a sense of the evolution in the food industry, in our relationship to it but also in photography’s approach to food.

Bernard Plossu, Hollywood, California, 1980

Jan Groover, Laboratory of Forms. Exhibition view at MAMbo. Photo: Foto/Industry

I’ll start this quick overview of the 11 exhibitions of the biennial with a body of work that reveals the massive gap between, on the one hand, our perception of a food system based on ancestral agricultural and farming practices with cows grazing in the meadow, jolly farmers on tractors bringing vegetables to local markets and, on the other hand, a reality made of the advanced technologies, stringent hygiene and safety controls and increased volumes of production.

Henk Wildschut, Prototype, Myne Food processing technology, Amsterdam

The result of 3 years of fieldwork and research in The Netherlands, Henk Wildschut‘s Food shows what food manufacturing is like today: optimised, industrialised, accelerated, globalised and engineered to respond to changing demographics, accelerating climate disruptions and the need to produce within the limits of planetary boundaries.

Wildschut’s series brings to light a nuanced picture of the food industry. “I started this assignment with a notion that many people probably have: that our food production system has all kinds of failings,” he explained. “I’ve changed my mind about that. Large-scale production also means innovation, energy savings, better food quality control and even better animal welfare.”

I have my own vision of what a significant improvement of animal welfare would mean and it looks nothing like what I see on Wildschut’s images. #GoVegan and leave animals in peace if you live in a Western country.

Henk Wildschut, Stichting Wakker Dier, Amsterdam, March 2012. Animal welfare organization Wakker Dier (‘Animal Awake’) gave this breed of industrially bred broiler chickens the name ‘plofkip’ (chicken fit to burst) because of its rapid growth within six weeks from a chick to a 2.3 kilo bird, having consumed exactly 3.7 kilos of feed to get there. The chicken in the photograph is getting a health check from a vet at the request of Wakker Dier

Henk Wildschut, Brushing, Velzeboer, Middenbeemster

Henk Wildschut, Maatschap Stroo, Slootdorp, July 2012. After three weeks in the Patio module, the chicks–now a full 700 grams–are carried by a conveyor belt to the ‘ground floor’, where within three weeks they will grow to 2.5 kilos. After each cycle, the two levels are washed and disinfected. Once the manure is removed, the whole area is cleaned with a detergent and later thoroughly disinfected with a sprinkler. The process of cleaning takes three days for the Patio module and two days for the ground floor.

Henk Wildschut, Torsuis Ei, Putten, March 2012. 2,400 m2. Torsius has a total of 120,000 laying hens. Besides the standard free-range birds, the hatchery has a further 5700 organic laying hens. At Torsius there is no need to debeak the chickens; the barns are minimally lit with special high-frequency strip lighting so that the chickens are kept calm. They also have enough distractions and enough room to move. Stressed-out chickens tend to peck others, something that happens a lot less at Torsius

Henk Wildschut, Verbeek hatchery, Zeewolde, July 2012.. As for white poultry, there has been no success as of yet in achieving a clear visual distinction between the sexes. A specialized external firm is enlisted to sex these chicks. The difference can be read off in the wing feathers. One specialist can sex 25,000 chicks a day. The male chicks are carried off on a special production belt to the gassing unit

Henk Wildschut, Varkens Innovatie Centrum, Sterksel, August 2012. In the VIC (which translates as Swine Innovation Centre), Wageningen University is working with trade and industry on innovations in pig husbandry. Research on Pigsy, a toilet for pigs, began in 2012. Its development was informed by the pig’s natural behaviour. A pig usually looks first for a place to sleep and then – at a comparatively great distance away – a place to defecate. The research focuses on stimulating and facilitating this natural behaviour as much as possible within the confines of a standard company

Vivien Sansour, Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, 2019

In 2014, Palestinian artist Vivien Sansour started looking for seeds to grow baladi bandora, a drought-resistant heirloom tomato. People in her community told her there were none left. Sansour later found that a huge range of other local vegetables bred by Palestinian farmers over thousands of years for their ability to thrive in their particular geologies and climate might soon disappear if nothing was done to rescue and revive them.

Her project Palestine Heirloom Seed Library attempts to save and revive her people’s agricultural heritage threatened by the spread of Israeli settlements, by climate change, by the challenges of growing food under militarily-enforced apartheid and by the introduction of industrial methods in the 1960s that saw the adoption of hybrid seeds – sterile and dependent upon manufactured fertilisers and pesticides.

Vivien Sansour, Cauliflower harvesting season, Hebron 2020. © Vivien Sansour. Palestine Heirloom Seed Library

Sansour began crisscrossing the West Bank, searching for heirloom varieties to save and propagate not just as seed but also as cultural stories. To stimulate conversations and exchanges, the artist built a Traveling Kitchen, which can be dismounted and packed inside a car.

She firmly believes that saving ancient seed varieties means preserving cultural roots. With each seed comes a tradition, a way of life, a recipe, a set of knowledge, a story of who a community is. Palestine Heirloom Seed Library addresses thus what Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called epistemicide, a marginalisation of the knowledge and wisdom that had been in existence in the global South following the arrival of a colonising worldview.

Furthermore, heirloom seeds could actually offer a possible insurance policy against climate change. Some Palestinian varieties have remarkably drought-resistant properties that, in the context of climate change and water stress, could ensure greater food sovereignty for communities who have been living under Israeli occupation of the West Bank for decades.

Vivien Sansour, Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. Exhibition view at Palazzo Boncompagni. Photo: Foto/Industria

Vivien Sansour, Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. Exhibition view at Palazzo Boncompagni. Photo: Foto/Industria

The center of Sansour’s show in Bologna is a huge communal table covered in fresh produce to celebrate the importance of sharing food and saving both heirloom seeds and the stories that accompany them. In Palestine and everywhere around the world.

Mishka Henner, Scopes, 2021. Courtesy the Artist and Galleria Bianconi

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Archival pigment print, variable dimensions.

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Mishka Henner, Coronado Feeders, Dalhart, Texas. From the series Feedlots. © Mishka Henner. Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Bianconi, Milano

Mishka Henner doesn’t shoot photos. He “makes” photos by grabbing images from the web. He then appropriates them and reveals realities that would otherwise be invisible to us. This was the process he used for the three projects selected for this exhibition.

The show opens with the iconic Feedlots, a series of blowups created by stitching together hundreds of Google Earth images. Seen from afar, the images look abstract. In reality, what you see are huge cattle farms or feedlots.

Also called CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations), feedlots host thousands of animals that are fed grains for the few months preceding their slaughter. In order to accelerate the growth of the livestock, their diet is “enriched” with hormones and antibiotics. Once fattened up, they are sent to the slaughterhouse.

The scale of the farming operations means that the amount of urine, manure (both tainted with the drugs fed to the animals) is massive. Further chemicals are needed to break down the waste as it collects in lagoons and drains into the soil. Different chemical cocktails explain the varying hues of each lagoon. The direct discharge of manure and the accompanying pollutants causes a serious public health risk. Feedlots have been associated with the contamination of groundwater, antibiotic resistance, air pollution and health problems suffered by farmworkers and nearby residents.

What makes Henner’s images particularly precious is that they show what should not be seen. Just like the vast majority of slaughterhouses in the USA and in Europe would not allow visitors to witness their operations, feedlots do not welcome of scrutiny of journalists and animal rights activists. So-called ag-gag laws were passed in several US states that make it illegal to photograph or document these farms. Henner somehow encountered a loophole in the legislation.

Mishka Henner, Scopes, 2021. Courtesy the Artist and Galleria Bianconi

Another series exhibited at Foto/Industrie is Scopes, which uses various videos found on YouTube and edits them to show a pig, an elephant and a lioness (at least I think it was a lioness) discovering a camera fallen from the sky, ingesting and then digesting it.

Mishka Henner, The Fertile Image, 2021. Image courtesy Foto/Industria

The third work on show is a new version of The Fertile Image. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) churn out photos of impossible animals that are the visual descendants from two parent images. The results are charming, eerie and fearsome.

It made me think of an article I read this week about the craze for lilac dogs and, more generally, all the animals we modify, commodify, crossbreed and otherwise engineer to suit our narcissistic and capitalistic imperatives. The AI-generated photos are bizarre and I wish I could share good close-ups of some of them. Unfortunately, the biennale only shared the one above and the photos I took are truly horrific.

Henner’s exhibition in Bologna is called In The Belly of the Beast. A very appropriate title for a show that explores how much the animal and mechanical worlds are trapped in an endless process of consumption, digestion and waste.

Herbert List, Favignana, 1951. The nets are raised slowly, while the men are singing an old song. The large boat has reached the many smaller boat in manner that a square is formed in which the fish are trapped

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ITALIEN. Favignana. 1951. 19 – The big head of the tuna is being cut off..
T-IT-FAV-034

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Herbert List, Favignana, 1951. The big head of the tuna is being cut off

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ITALY. Favignana. 1951. 27 – The big tuna steaks are trimmed by hand and placed into big tins.
ITALIEN. Favignana. 1951. 27 – The big tuna steaks are trimmed by hand and placed into big tins.
T-IT-FAV-006

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Herbert List, Favignana, 1951. The big tuna steaks are trimmed by hand and placed into big tins

Herbert List, Favignana. Exhibition view at Palazzo Fava. Photo: Foto/industria

In 1951, Herbert List photographed the typical tuna fishing, slaughtering and processing on the Sicilian island of Favignana. In a calibrated sequence, List documents every step of the traditional tonnara practice.

There’s something almost viscous in List’s images. They recall the smell of blood and suggest the cruelty of the fishing industry but they also pay homage to the work of local communities and depict them as the last custodians of archaic knowledge.

Takashi Homma, Trails

Takashi Homma, Washington D.C. 2009/2010 © Takashi Homma

Takashi Homma is showing two projects inside the Padiglione dell’Esprit Nouveau, a small pavilion designed by Le Corbusier but built by local architects at the outskirt of Bologna in the 1970s.

Both works suggest attitudes to meat consumption that are antithetical to each other. The first one is a series of shots of McDonald’s architecture around the world. The McDonald’s aesthetics is garish, a bit crappy, instantly recognisable but never fails to bring comfort to the amateurs of fast and cheap meals.

In contrast, The Trails follows the traces of blood left by deer wounded by hunters in the mountains on the island of Hokkaido. The cruel elegance and abstract lightness of the patterns in the snow recall traditional calligraphy.

Homma’s exhibition in Bologna opposes thus the speed of consumption with the patience of hunters who confront the source of their meals head-on.

More images from the Foto/Industria biennial:

Lorenzo Venturi, Money Must Be Made

Lorenzo Venturi, Money Must Be Made

Ando Gilardi, Fototeca. Exhibition view at MAST. Photo: Foto/Industry

Hans Finsler, Schokoladenfabrik. Exhibition view at Genus Bononiae – San Giorgio in Poggiale. Photo: Foto/Industry

Foto/Industria was organised by the MAST Foundation and curated by Francesco Zanot. The exhibitions remain open until 28.11.2021 in historic locations thoughout the city center. Fototeca, at MAST and Laboratory of Forms at MAMbo are up until 2.01.2022. Entrance to all exhibitions is free.

Previous stories about Foto/Industria exhibitions: Prospecting Ocean. The extractivist Wild West and H+. We are all transhumanists now.

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Far from being the sole appanage of religious narratives, the concept of the Apocalypse has been adopted by mainstream culture. In 1995 already, philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco said: «Everyone plays with the ghost of the Apocalypse and at the same time exorcises it. The thought of the end of time is today more common in the secular world than in the Christian one.” The Apocalypse has thus become a concept through which we conceptualise our anxieties about existential threats and about the future in general.

Andy Gracie, MICROPALYPSE_V1

Andy Gracie, MICROPALYPSE_V1

The Haunting, by Andy Gracie, confronts head-on the inevitable end of the world. His series of installations talks about premonitions of disaster. It speaks of apocalypse fetishism and deep rooted fears. It speaks of deep time, impermanence and the liberation of losing control.

The Haunting series is articulated around several “chapters”. Catastrophe Jangled Hideously Out of Process presents an AI-vision of disaster based on images of disasters from the recent years – tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, plane crashes, wildfires and war. The result is horrific, strangely alluring but also ironic when you remember that some see in AI a possible agent of humanity’s impending doom.

Micropalypse are models that propels the viewer into a post-apocalytic landscape. Conceived as sets for a proposed live cinema performance, the dioramas portray the aftermath of an unknown catastrophe that seem to have wiped out all life on Earth. Even more eerie and sinister, the scenes from Micropalypse Modular allow us to contemplate in detail the ‘world made strange’ that gives some of us a kind of “dark thrill.” A kind of new Sublime that has obliterated its human spectator.

Andy Gracie, The Ends of Everythings

The chapter in The Haunting series that affected me the most is The Ends of Everythings. The trilogy project develops narratives around the heat death of the universe. First, the Solar System. In some 500,000,000 years the Sun expands and consumes the Earth, spitting its atoms back out into space. Then comes the End of the Galaxy when the gravitational forces between the members of the Local Group cause them to merge and form a giant elliptical galaxy where star formation is no longer possible. Finally, the End of the Universe when even energy has disappeared.

The unavoidability of an end coming from outer space might seem like a consolatory distant prospect and it might even be refreshing to know that it won’t be our fault, for a change. The idea of the ultimate end of the universe puts our own existence into a stimulating perspective: we’ve been part of Earth history for a fleeting moment and Earth itself occupied just one tiny section in the history of the universe. Still, contemplating the “ends of everythings” gave me vertigo.

Andy Gracie, Micropalypse Modular

Andy Gracie, Micropalypse Modular

I wondered what would make an artist want to contemplate the idea of a world devoid of any hope and human breath:

Hi Andy! Of all the works in The Haunting series, the one that moves me and disturbs me the most is The Ends of Everythings. The project develops narratives around what is generally agreed to be the end of the Universe – the phenomena known as ‘heat death’. The first time i heard about the end of the solar system, my first reaction was “Who cares? It will take place in some 500,000,000 years. We won’t be there” but then I felt uneasy. I still am. Why do you think we care so much about an event none of us, none of our children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren will ever experience? 

I’m not sure if ‘care’ is the right word. I think there is a common feeling of horror and an incredulity towards the idea that a time will come that the human race does not exist. The human brain seems to be hardwired into the notion of permanence – the idea that things will remain the same – and we find it incredibly difficult to imagine all that surrounds us not being there. However, when we attempt to adjust our thinking towards deep future timescales then we are forced to realise that this illusion of permanence that makes our daily lives possible is actually just a very brief moment within a very fluid system.

This of course, applies mostly to those of us in the ‘developed’ world. For the first time those of us in the privileged world are having to consider a process of rapid change and the stark possibility of losing many of the comforts and stabilities which are are accustomed to. So in many ways the contrasting experiences between those who already assume disaster as an inevitability and those who are in denial that it can happen to them is a thread that is present in my thinking.

One of the overriding rhetorics is that of survivability, of looking for strategies to ride out the apocalypse, of looking to techno-utopian solutions, or to the science fiction fantasies and billionaire vanity projects of colonising other planets. I wanted to begin to look beyond that, to future scenarios that are in no way survivable, and to find out what mental strategies are necessary to deal with that.

I want to find out where the survivalist, prepper, escapologist, colonialist mindset begins to break down. We can imagine many ways in which the human race will survive disasters of increasing scales and therefore feel comfortable with some form of continuity. But there will come an inevitable moment when a line is crossed and there is no coming back. At some point in the future a generation of humans will understand that they are the last.

You are collaborating with the Institute of Cosmic Sciences in Barcelona about the end of the Universe itself. Can you tell us what the collaboration is about? And what your role as an artist is in this context? Is it purely about visualising the science behind a rather abstract (to most people) future? 

In 2019 I approached the ICCUB with just an interest in finding out more about the research they do, and they suggested I make them some kind of proposal. As this was about the time I was beginning to think about this project that would deal with the end of the Universe I decided that this is what I would propose. And they were totally cool with it. There are no researchers there who work specifically on eschatological cosmology, but there are some who work on the mechanics of the Universe that help us to understand its future evolution and states. They are also at ease thinking about and discussing the vast scales of time and distance that are involved. And they also have a deeply philosophical form of thinking about the science they do and the way in which it helps us to understand the Universe, so we get into some very interesting conversations.

There are absolutely no expectations from them and my role is definitely not to visualise the science. Which is good. Due to the hiatus caused by the pandemic, the project has also taken on a kind of almost glacially slow pace of its own as well. Its a project that can not and will not be rushed.

What has been a great honour is that they have made me the official artist in residence and the Institute’s first ever official collaborative member from the arts world.

Andy Gracie, The Ends of Everythings

What is the impact of working for so long on the topic of the apocalypse? Does this research assuage your fears, amplify your anxieties or act as a catharsis? 

I had this same excellent question when I did a talk about this work for the University of Santa Barbara. So yes… I do find myself bogged down from time to time and I do think that on occasion it has affected my mental state. That’s due as much to the reading I’ve been doing as the nature of the subjects themselves. I’ve learned that I need to intersperse my reading and research and practice with something lighter from time to time. However, there is also something weirdly liberating and empowering about facing up to the realities of what is happening in the world and what could happen.

I think it’s very important that we are more aware of our fragility and impermanence and that we strive to allow that humility to lead us to a more positive society. Carrying on in denial is going to bring disasters sooner, whereas by facing up to what is happening and could happen can bring us the strength to have honest and open discussion about it.

It is important to be able to disconnect from the work, but I think that is true for all kinds of creative work. As artistic types we can become very obsessive, and that is equally unhealthy whether you are making work about the destruction of humanity or practising the art of Japanese flower arranging. Fortunately, I’ve always been pretty good at disconnecting.

One of the fascinating psychological phenomena that I’ve come across is ‘compassion fatigue‘ which forms part of our coping and desensitizing mechanisms. It seems that a common reaction is that people will react to constant exposure to scenes of suffering and disaster by caring less.

And in general, is the series concerned with fleshing out current anxieties or giving shapes to your own? 

I think what I’m trying to do, and I don’t claim to be sure about this, is to find out what my anxieties actually are. I have a constant desire to contextualise things, to see everything in the light of everything else. In this case, I wanted to take a step back from immediate climate anxiety rhetoric and to see if it still matters when everything ends anyway. So then a new anxiety begins to take shape about what, if any, meaning or purpose the very brief existence of humanity might have and whether we have time to realise it.

More fundamentally though, I guess, is that the anxiety I am giving shape to is my own in a pretty literal sense. The symbol of the Haunting itself is from a recurring childhood vision that suggested a fragile membrane between order and devastating chaos. I have to thank Kira O’Reilly for helping me to realise that the distant echoes of that sensation are behind my need to look more closely at external and internal anxieties related to existential threats.

Simultaneously I’m also trying to make some sense of anxieties on a more global scale, and what exactly those anxieties are a reaction to. Humans have been constantly exposed to suffering and disaster, and we’re probably the generations that have been least affected in that way. However, we are now beginning to face up to something much bigger and more final for the first time, so I’m interested in what shifts in consciousness and awareness might be happening because of that.

Andy Gracie, MICROPALYPSE_V1

Andy Gracie, MICROPALYPSE_V1

At first, I wanted to see parallels between MICROPALYPSE_V1 and Jake and Dinos Chapman‘s Fucking Hell but I was wrong. As far as I could see, humans never appear in the works in The Haunting. Neither do other animals. Plants can be detected here and there but they are generally charred or decaying. Why this absence of anything we can identify as life? Why do your apocalypses appear so final? 

I absolutely love the Chapman brothers’ dioramas and I would be lying if I said that they didn’t have some influence in some of these works. But you are right, the fundamental difference is that their work directly seeks to provoke discomfort and horror at human suffering and the human capacity for cruelty. In my works there is no human. As I’m sure you remember I have also sought to remove the human factor from the work that I make, being interested in how things work outside of human influence or in the absence of human presence. So the diorama scenes I have been making are definitely post human, or at least provoke an inquietude about where the humans and other life might be. They suggest that they are shortly after the humans have gone, and I was looking for that near future jolt of recognition that we get from films and books like Children of Men or The Road. Everything is familiar enough for us to place ourselves in it, we can relate, and therefore feel the anxiety of the dystopianism more keenly.

They appear so final because I am morbidly fascinated by that inevitable moment in time. There will come a time when there are no more humans living on planet Earth and there is absolutely nothing we can do to change that. I am less interested in the ideas behind those documentaries that show how ‘nature’ will begin to take over again than I am in ideas of loss and memory. I get the same feeling when I visit ruins of ancient civilizations. The feeling that things both important and mundane happened there and that the psycho-geography of the place has secrets that can be revealed. That the stories are still present, despite the absence of anything that created them. And then digging deeper down, to wonder whether what happened there had any significance or purpose.

I love the meticulous attention and craft behind MICROPALYPSE_V1. What was the inspiration behind it? Did you think about sci-fi movies? Newspaper images that describe real disasters and post-war landscapes? 

I have always enjoyed making models and have thought for years about a way to incorporate it into my actual practice. I actually started making the first ones while I was stuck on another project, being a firm believer in the idea that thinking works better while your hands and brain are active. I quickly realised that the small dioramas I was making could form a series strong enough to stand on its own.

I wanted to portray images that were a mash up things we see in sci-fi and near future dystopian film with the kinds of images we see increasingly often in the news and on social media. They could have been drawings, or paintings, or digital collage, but they became dioramas and I think they are much stronger for that. I’m also much better at making realistic models than realistic drawings and it was important to me that they were as believable as possible.

The fact that they are made in the common hobby scale of 1:72, common in model making and model railways, gives them a certain recognisability while simultaneously generating a friction through the unusual subject matter and treatment.

The huge stock of reference images I amassed then became the material on which I trained the machine learning algorithm to make Catastrophe Jangled Hideously Out of Process.

Andy Gracie, Catastrophe Jangled Hideously Out of Process

Andy Gracie, Catastrophe Jangled Hideously Out of Process

How big are the dioramas of MICROPALYPSE_V1?

Each one has a more or less A4 footprint, though dimensions vary a little, and as I mentioned above the scale is 1:72.
The Micropalypse Modular series is made in the next scale down 1:144 and features 9 modules of 60cm x 30cm… so far.

Thanks Andy!

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In 1993, a management professor and sociologist called Peter Drucker published Post-Capitalist Society. The book predicted that the impact of information technology on the labour market would be so great that it would ultimately lead to the fall of capitalism by 2020. His prediction didn’t come true but he was right when, writing at a time when the internet was still in its infancy, he anticipated that knowledge, rather than capital, labour or land ownership, would one day become the basis for wealth. He called “post-capitalist society” the world that would emerge as a consequence of this shift.

Roger Hiorns, The retrospective view of the pathway, 2017-ongoing. © Photo : Rémi Villaggi | Mudam Luxembourg

View of the exhibition Post-Capital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age, 02.10.2021 — 16.01.2022, Mudam Luxembourg. © Photo: Rémi Villaggi | Mudam Luxembourg

The exhibition Post-Capital. Art and the Economics of the Digital Age at MUDAM in Luxembourg draws on Drucker’s insight to address the inherent paradox within a capitalist system that is both dependent upon technological progress and menaced by it.

As the show demonstrates, digital technology has left (almost) no aspect of human experience untouched: our data have been commodified, our individual sovereignty challenged, our labour monitored and “gamified”, our attention monetized, our consumption turbo-charged, etc. Even our language had to adapt to the speed and small size of smartphones.

The artworks selected for the Post-Capital show explore the aesthetics, paradoxes, absurdities and ethical questions posed by the economics of technologies we all criticise but find ourselves unable to ban from our lives.

Quick overview of some of the works I particularly enjoyed during my visit:

Cao Fei, Asia One, 2018

Cao Fei, Asia One, 2018

Cao Fei, Asia One (trailer), 2018

Cao Fei’s Asia One made it worth the time spent on the suuuuuuper slow train to Luxembourg Ville. The film was shot inside a gigantic automated warehouse inhabited by robots, conveyor belts and only 2 human employees. At first, they mostly ignore each other to focus on the constantly flowing stock and alienating atmosphere. Soon the film changes tempo: the protagonists stop being hypnotised by the rhythm of the sorting facility, they finally notice each other and express a kind of rebellion against the cold efficiency and frigidity of their surroundings. The scenes are interspersed with choreographies in which workers, dressed to evoke the Cultural Revolution–era, dance around the never-stopping machines and give life to the grey space. Asia One should feel futuristic. It is painfully and poetically contemporary.

Simon Denny, Amazon worker cage patent drawing as virtual Aquatic Warbler cage, 2020. View of the exhibition Post-Capital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age, 02.10.2021 — 16.01.2022, Mudam Luxembourg. © Photo: Rémi Villaggi | Mudam Luxembourg

In 2016, Amazon filed a patent for a device described as a “system and method for transporting personnel within an active workplace”. It looked essentially like a cage large enough to fit a worker.

Simon Denny followed the sketches in the patent and turned them into a sculpture that painfully materialises the horrors of the ever-shifting hierarchy between humans and machines in a data-fuelled economy. In this vision, the robots are not “stealing our jobs”, they use humans as biological extensions of algorithms.

The cage is exhibited alongside excerpts from the patent and a pair of “document-reliefs” made using a 3D printer to render shapes from the cage in cut and layered paper copies of the document. Visitors are invited to scan a QR code, download an app and view the endangered Aquatic Warbler bird trapped inside the cage. The AR component alludes to an ongoing ecological disaster caused by the invisible extractivist and energy-intensive dimensions of digital technology.

Hito Steyerl, FreePlots, 2019-ongoing. © Photo : Rémi Villaggi | Mudam Luxembourg

Hito Steyerl, FreePlots, 2019-ongoing. © Photo : Rémi Villaggi | Mudam Luxembourg

The inspiration for FreePlots came from Hito Steyerl’s discovery that an artwork she had sold was stored in the Geneva Freeport, a duty-free warehouse that enables super-rich clients to avoid paying taxes on luxury goods like art pieces. In order to redress the economic imbalance caused by the presence of her work in a free port, Steyerl invested the money she made from the sale in manure for a community garden in Berlin. After this first foray into communal land use, Freeplots became a traveling project. The artist installs free port-shaped wooden planters in different locations, collaborating each time with local community gardens. Excerpts of the artist’s interview with the gardeners are stenciled on the crates and relayed as a recording forming the soundtrack to the installation.

FreePlots can be seen as a model to counter capitalist frameworks by highlighting alternatives to private ownership. For the artist, community gardens (often maintained by women and migrant communities) are also an important symbol of opposition to nationalism and xenophobia.

Oliver Laric, Hermanubis, 2021. © Photo : Rémi Villaggi | Mudam Luxembourg

Oliver Laric, Ram with Human, 2020. © Photo : Rémi Villaggi | Mudam Luxembourg

Oliver Laric, Reclining Pan, 2021. © Photo : Rémi Villaggi | Mudam Luxembourg

Oliver Laric selected four sculptures from his public catalogue of 3D models of antiquities. Each of them explores relationships between humans and other animals. Hermanubis is a copy of a c. 100 CE sculpture that combines the Greek god Hermes with the canine Egyptian deity Anubis. The half-man and half-goat Greek God Reclining Pan is the copy of a 16th-century sculpture which, in turn, was sculpted from the remnants of a Roman relief.

While the majority of the 3D scans are made with the consent of the museums that own the original works, others employ a technique called photogrammetry (producing a 3D model from hundreds of photographs) as a legal workaround.

By replicating the artworks using 3D technology, Laric is complicating our perception of the past and the present. By making the files available for download, artworks that you would normally need to pay a museum entrance fee to enjoy become accessible to a different audience of individuals who can directly engage with the work.

Sondra Perry, IT’S IN THE GAME ‘18, 2018. © Photo : Rémi Villaggi | Mudam Luxembourg

Sondra Perry‘s installation is inspired by a personal story: the physical likeness and biometric data of her twin brother and college basketball player Sandy Perry were used to create a videogame avatar for which neither he nor the other athletes featured in the game were consulted or paid. Perry’s installation pairs this real-life story with views of African artefacts held in institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The British Museum. Perry’s juxtaposition between personal experience and museum collections unravels a long history of appropriation of the imagery and cultural heritage of Black people in historical painting, news media and social media.

Yuri Pattison, the ideal (v/0.3.2), 2015-ongoing

Yuri Pattison, the ideal (v/0.3.2), 2015-ongoing

Yuri Pattison’s the ideal (v/0.3.2) explores the ecological impact of the industrial practice of Bitcoin mining in China. The installation was made in collaboration with Eric Mu, the former Chief Marketing Officer of a Beijing-based startup involved in crypto-mining. Mu filmed a Bitcoin mine located in a remote location on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau in Sichuan, China. The video mixes scenes of warehouses full of Bitcoin mining rigs and the neighbouring hydroelectric dam with views of the surrounding area.

Although Bitcoin is a digital currency, the mining process itself is very energy-intensive. In order to save on energy costs, many companies have to move their operations to places where hydroelectric power is cheap and plentiful. The video plays alongside an active water-cooled Bitcoin mining machine. Both the video and the machine are contained within industrial racking that resembles the shelving used in Bitcoin warehouses. The title of the work refers to Ideal Money, a theoretical notion put forward by mathematician John Nash to stabilise international currencies.

Mohamed Bourouissa, All-in (film still), 2012

Mohamed Bourouissa, All-in (film still), 2012

Mohamed Bourouissa‘s All-in video was filmed in the Pessac factory in Paris where euro coins are minted. Edited in the style of a music video, All-In retraces the process of minting a medallion featuring the profile of French rapper Booba. The video is set to the beats of Foetus which chronicles the musician’s rise from early childhood to drug dealing to the successful rap entrepreneur he is today. The video refers to what Mohamed Bourouissa calls the ‘liberal anarchism’ of western societies, where individual success is measured by money.

Nick Relph (via)

Nick Relph scanning the . Image via @ preechopress / Instagram (via)

Nick Relph has made hundreds of scans of computer-generated architectural drawings which are often printed at a large scale and wrapped around New York construction sites to illustrate the designs of the buildings being erected. The artist makes a copy of the rendering posters using a hand-held scanner. He then stitches the digital images together and develops them in analog format. The symbols of rampant gentrification loose their glamour and prestige in the process. Fragments are missing, layers of dirt and graffiti reveal the visual and social misery that most of these constructions often generate.

More images from the exhibition:

Roger Hiorns, The retrospective view of the pathway, 2017-ongoing. © Photo : Rémi Villaggi | Mudam Luxembourg

Nora Turato, eeeexactlyyy my point., 2021. © Photo : Rémi Villaggi | Mudam Luxembourg

View of the exhibition Post-Capital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age, 02.10.2021 — 16.01.2022, Mudam Luxembourg. © Photo: Rémi Villaggi | Mudam Luxembourg

View of the exhibition Post-Capital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age, 02.10.2021 — 16.01.2022, Mudam Luxembourg. © Photo: Rémi Villaggi | Mudam Luxembourg

Post-Capital. Art and the Economics of the Digital Age was curated by Michelle Cotton. The exhibition remains open until 16 Jan 2022 at MUDAM in Luxembourg.

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Using traditional crafts to comment on digital phenomena is always going to get everyone’s attention. Combining the two in a meaningful and pertinent way is much harder though. Éva Ostrowska achieved the tricky balance with a series of tapestries that hold a facetious and slightly cruel mirror to our new dating habits. Her woolly compositions lay bare our insecurities, little infamies and anxieties.

Éva Ostrowska, Who said romance was dead ? 3 AM Classics, 2020

Who said romance was dead? 3 AM Classics explores the emergent dating code in which dick pics are the new (and perhaps slightly desperate) way to express sexual interest in someone.

Éva Ostrowska, I have been sending him a picture of the loading sign instead and he still hasn’t realized, 2021.

I suspect that most of the dating apps users who’ve seen I have been sending him a picture of the loading sign instead and he still hasn’t realized might have been tempted to replicate the prank one night. The tapestry comments on how much our perception of time has been affected by the Internet’s capacity to provide us with instant gratification.

Éva Ostrowska, I am not the only one wondering…, 2019.

I am not the only one wondering… explores how the web has become the 21st Century mouthpiece of the oracles of the god Apollo. “Sometimes the black screen provides us with a good omen, but at other times, as it was for the ancient Greeks, it can confuse us with its magical vapors.”

I discovered Éva Ostrowska‘s work while visiting SWIPE RIGHT! Data, Dating, Desire, a show that attempts to?explore the many influences that digital technologies exert on contemporary romance.?

The exhibition includes works such as Dries Depoorter‘s Tinderin series that highlights the contrast between our dating persona and our professional one; Joana Moll‘s project that exposes the covert and dirty commercialisation of our dating data; a couple of Dani Ploeger‘s installations that confirm that he’s a master at witty and slightly disturbing works; !Mediengruppe Bitnik‘s visually arresting installation that uses the data from the Ashley Madison hack to give temporary physical embodiment to 5 of the 436 fembots that the dating site created in order to address the jarring unbalance between the few women subscribers and the many male subscribers to their services; and MANY MORE.

SWIPE RIGHT! Data, Dating, Desire was curated by Valentina Peri. The exhibition remains open until 9 January 2022 at iMAL in Brussels.

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Jatin is a Senior Copywriter at FCB Ulka. He is the kind of guy who drinks Frooti (or Maaza, never Slice) while everyone is chugging down beers. Bike riding, playing football, and reading true crime are his favourite hobbies. After herding some blue and brass elephants to his cabinet and a few Effies, he is hungry for some international stuff. When not working, he’s annoying his team by telling them bad jokes (and laughing at them). Also, super cute. 
 
Why are you into Advertising?
I love thinking up new things. Not just ads. Jokes, movie plots, products that I will never invent. And advertising is the only place that lets me do this, every day. Plus, you can work in pyjamas and sleep on the job (more often than I’d like to admit).  
 
Did you attend school for fine art or design or Communications?
Nope. 

Were there any particular role models for you when you grew up?
I did not get to decide my role models. My parents did that for me and was often a colleague’s son or daughter.

Who was the most influential personality on your career in Advertising?
Anshul Sharma. Best boss and made sure that the environment was always fun. 

Where do you get your inspiration from?
My own life. It’s what David Abbott wrote- if something moves me, chances are it will touch someone else too. And Thai ads. 
 
What do you think of the state of Print advertising right now. At least here in India, the released work is most often too sad?
Waste of paper. 

As a Copywriter, which are your own personal best ads, that you just loved writing…
There are a few. The first one is the Cyclone Amphan Fundraiser campaign (Raised 3lacs in 15 days. All organically.). 
The second is the Women’s Day campaign for OYO. If your competitors are messaging and praising your campaign, you’ve done something good.  
Lastly, a notification for OYO- “Na na patekar ko banade haan haan patekar.” So stupid, I love it.
 
If there is one thing you could change in your place of work, what would that be?
Add beds. Make headphones/earphones mandatory for everyone. 

Do you think brands who’s advertising wins awards, do well in the market?
Nope. It does not matter how good the campaign is if the product sucks, nothing will change. (But I might be wrong.)
 
What advice do you have for aspiring creative professionals?
Just Keep Swimming.
 
Which is your dream campaign?
The Superbowl It’s a Tide Ad campaign. Margaret by Moonlight by Google. And that Fevikwik ad by Piyush Pandey.

Who would you like to take out for dinner?
My grandfather. Proper Chatora. 

What’s on your iPod? Spotify?
Spotify. Iron Maiden, Oasis, Radiohead, Simon and Garfunkel, Eminem, Mohammed Rafi, Hindi Songs from my childhood, and many more.   

Mac or PC?
PC. 

What’s your Twitter Handle? Instagram?
Instagram: @jatinsangwan13

In Silicon Valley’s world of make-believe, the philosophy of “fake it until you make it” finally gets its comeuppance.