Auto Italia South East: Viewing Copy
Contemporary Image Collective, 20 Safeya Zaghloul St. MOUNIRA, Cairo Governorate, Egypt
10 November - 3 December 2013
From the Press Release
Viewing Copy was an exhibition, which showed the work of Auto Italia for the first time in Cairo. It presented the collective practice of the organisation through the re-consideration of two past projects: Auto Italia LIVE: Double Dip Concession and My Skin Is At War With A World Of Data.
Exploring the potential that the exchange of ‘viewing copies’ allows for sharing and reproducing work and images, the exhibition took work that have previously been shown online, in print, and in gallery shows and re-interpreted the material within the physical possibilities of the CIC space.
In adapting and re-activating two projects, which engaged directly with the possibilities and limitations of digital networks, Viewing Copy was able to focus on the creation and dissemination of images, exploring alternative formats for the distribution of artwork both on and offline.
Auto Italia LIVE was an artist-run TV series, performed before a studio audience and broadcast live over the internet. Viewing Copy focused on the most recent episode of the series, Double Dip Concession, translating the entire one-hour episode into Arabic for the first time. Produced with a full technical crew, artists responded to the familiar tropes and formulas of television programming, working on all aspects of production and opening a space for criticality and intervention within the medium of TV.
My Skin Is At War With A World Of Data was a collective enterprise conceived by Kate Cooper, Marianne Forrest, Andrew Kerton and Jess Wiesner. Comprising of moving image work, image production and performance, it explored the possibility for images to induce paranoia in our digital networked society. Using the visual language of motion capture, beauty campaigns and stock imagery, the collaboration investigated the relationship of images to the production of our own bodies.
Exploring the internet as a key platform for the circulation of images and artwork, the work presented in Viewing Copy comes back to the performance of the self; to the physical, bodily impact our image-saturated society inflicts and how we can work and produce within this. Through the translation and re-interpretation of material viewing copy layered language, time, and geography creating a critical insight into the work and practice of Auto Italia.
Auto Italia LIVE: Double Dip Concession, 2012
Double Dip Concession uses the techniques, characters and editing of live television to explore our interaction with the flow of images that invade our lives. Exploring the individual relationship that the audience has with broadcast, Auto Italia consider the possibility for a personal and autobiographical tone to be delivered within a context which alienates those present on the screen from accurate self-representation. The manufactured space created by the set became the backdrop for actions, statements and performances which are commonplace in live TV production but are rarely broadcast to the viewers.
This project engaged directly with contemporary broadcast culture as a space for new work and discussed how physical communities use the Internet to distribute ideas. It aimed to be a proposal for how artists can produce live broadcast work in collaboration and acted as a unique place for artists to create their collective context and distribute their work.
Conceived and directed by: Nathan Budzinski, Kate Cooper, Richard John Jones, Marianne Forrest, Jess Wiesner. Working in collaboration with: Paul Becker, Nathan Budzinski, Theo Cook, Benedict Drew, Robert Carter, Andrew Kerton, Leslie Kulesh, Huw Lemmey, o F F Love, George Moustakas, Francesco Pedraglio, Lorenzo Tebano. Cast: Anna Brecon, Roderick Burrows, Nat Cary, Julia Innocenti, Tim McFarland, Rebecca Root. Original music by O F F Love Wardrobe, styling + makeup by: Nikki Bevan, Fran Hitchcock, Francesca Pinna, Marta Poznanski/PANOPTICUM London. Crew: Giorgio Bosisio, Luke Collins, Cristen Crague-Reading, Mette Juhl, McDeath, Kate Molins, Celia Moodie, Elly Nakajima, Radiance Audio, Sonia Rodriguez Serrano, Bernard Thompson. With special thanks to: Lauren Barnes, Marleen Boschen, Paul Crompton, Aoife Flynn, Henry Petrides, Laurence Price.
My Skin Is At War With A World Of Data, 2012
As part of Artissima LIDO, Auto Italia South East will present a new commission in the Museum of Antiquities, Turin. My Skin is at War With a World of Data is a film, which explores the paranoiac function of images in our hyperreal networked-society and was conceived as a collective enterprise by artists Kate Cooper, Marianne Forrest, Andrew Kerton and Jess Wiesner.
Today we re-produce and inhabit new images through the speed of our relations. In the fully connected syndrome in which we exist, such a speed becomes inherent in the presentation of our contemporary bodies. The film explores the inescapable short-circuit produced by the consumption, post-production and distribution that mediate the image in the mechanisms of our everyday experience economy.
‘To produce yourself, you need to know about your own value. My own interiority is the new factory floor. Industrial strength hormones ensure I am still visibly productive - all day, every day. Welcome to the She Factory.’
Thanks to: Marleen Boschen, Nathan Budzinski, Nat Carey, Luke Collins, Theo Cook, Mette Juhl, Connor Linskey, Lucy Mills, Pablo Navarro MacLochlainn, Rachel Pimm, Thee Tosayanond
