Virtual Closing Party: Mirror

How To Appear Invisible (2008) by Allora & Calzadilla

Based on an event that was prominently featured in the media, Allora & Calzadilla’s film How To Appear Invisible (22 minutes, 36 seconds) references the demolition of the last remains of Palast der Republic in Berlin, which served various cultural purposes while acting as the seat of parliament of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Volkskammer (People’s Chamber). The film depicts the location following the building’s destruction in 2008 and stars a German Shepherd. Shown wearing a ruff with the trademark of Kentucky Fried Chicken, one of America’s largest restaurant franchises, the dog prowls around the construction site seeking the remnants of a bygone utopia.

Ideas in Action (starbucks.com) (2014) by Cory Arcangel

Ideas in Action (starbucks.com) (32 minutes 41 seconds) by Cory Arcangel highlights a key facet in the artist’s practice: his use of out-dated technology in an attempt to preserve popular culture. This single real-time screen capture is also exemplary of Arcangel’s long-standing interest in working at the border of cinema. By inserting a typically mundane web surfing session into the container of film, Arcangel asks us to consider the nature of the discipline and whether a video of someone clicking around a website can be considered art. Arcangel’s practice is dedicated to illustrating the speed at which technology changes and its impact on culture, situated within high-and low-brow contexts to comment on taste, relevance and value. This work captures the artist’s use of the internet as an arena for art making and demonstrates his influence on the evolution of digital art.

Telematch Shelter (2008) by Wael Shawky

Telematch Shelter (12 minutes, 37 seconds) is from Wael Shawky’s on-going series of video installations referred to as ‘Telematch....’, where children re-enact narratives created by the artist. Borrowing its title from the popular German TV competition that broadcast in Egypt during the 1970s and 1980s, the film shows a stream of Bedouin children repeatedly entering and exiting a tall mud structure in an Egyptian desert. The recurring action illustrates the concept of migration in nomadic societies and an endless video loop suggests the constant state of social transition children endure as they move from one agricultural system, represented by the mud shelter, to another. The work also comments on relationships between gender and social class in Egypt in relation to cultural, economic and political models in place there from the 1970s to the present day.

Cloud Sediment (Gstaad) (2015-2016) by Sean Snyder

In 'Cloud Sediment (Gstaad)' (7 minutes 47 seconds), Sean Snyder further explores the visual paradoxes of (im)materiality of information this time focusing on the Swiss ‘Fort Knox,’ the data centre that is supposed to withstand natural disasters, terror and hacker attacks, and even atomic explosions. Shot in Gstaad, Switzerland, the images alternate between snowy Alpine land and air-scapes, the fragile apparatus that produces the images and the colour of achromatic post-Cold war bunkers that contain gold of the information age. Geometrically scanning the inorganic landscape, the video reflects digital deterritorialisation and its solid hardware basis, eliciting the opposition between the inside and outside.