Alembic lll: protocols for intimacy
Shu Lea Cheang & Annabelle Craven-Jones
Preview Thu 10 May 2018, 6-9pm
Exhibition continues 11 May – 16 June 2018
Open Wed-Sat 12-6pm or by appointment
Special events:
NEO ULTRA PUNK ICA 18 – 20 May
Alembic publication launch and closing event at Res. 16 June
Left-right: Shu Lea Cheang, CHANNELS OF DESIRES in Shu Lea Cheang, Those Fluttering Objects of Desire, 1992-93 remade 2018, multi- media installation, installed in Alembic III: protocols for intimacy, Res., 2018, courtesy of Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University. Annabelle Craven-Jones, Google Hangout Sessions [0xyt0cin States], 2018, networked installation: smartphones, online platforms (Google Hangouts + YouTube Live), LED light panels, manual (DSM5), furnishings (pads, mats, mirror), grey marl fabric, lightning port dead drop, commissioned for Alembic III: protocols for intimacy, Res. Photo: Tim Bowditch.
Robin Vachal and Suzi Silbar Brown Sugar Licks Snow White, part of CHANNELS OF DESIRES in Shu Lea Cheang, Those Fluttering Objects of Desire, 1992-93 remade 2018. Photo: Tim Bowditch.
Detail of Shu Lea Cheang, Those Fluttering Objects of Desire, 1992-93 remade 2018. Photo: Tim Bowditch.
Adriene Jenik & J. Evan What’s the difference between a yam and a sweet potato? part of CHANNELS OF DESIRES in Shu Lea Cheang, Those Fluttering Objects of Desire, 1992-93 remade 2018.
Annabelle Craven-Jones, Google Hangout Sessions [0xyt0cin States], 2018, networked installation: smartphones, online platforms (Google Hangouts + YouTube Live), LED light panels, manual (DSM5), furnishings (pads, mats, mirror), grey marl fabric, lightning port dead drop, commissioned for Alembic III: protocols for intimacy, Res. Photos (inclusive of details below): Tim Bowditch
Annabelle Craven-Jones, Google Hangout Sessions [0xyt0cin States], 2018 with reflection of Shu Lea Cheang, CHANNELS OF DESIRES in Shu Lea Cheang, Those Fluttering Objects of Desire, 1992-93 remade 2018. Photo: Tim Bowditch.
For the last exhibition in Alembic, a specially remade video installation by artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang will be presented alongside a newly commissioned networked installation by artist and practice-based researcher Annabelle Craven-Jones. Both works consider the self-broadcast body and its sensual representation and abstraction in digital media.
Last shown at the Whitney Biennial in 1993, Those Fluttering Objects of Desire (1992-3) by Shu Lea Cheang recreates coin-operated porno booths, showing short films collectively named Channels of Desires. By inserting 20p the viewer can watch works speaking about desire by contributors including Yong Soon Min, Gloria Miguel, Coca Fusco and Cheang that are unified by their stripped back format of polaroid stills. The intimacy of being shot and directed by the protagonists they feature, avoids the patriarchal gaze of the camera. The project references the rise of ‘pay per view’ on cable TV, a format that was in turn modelled on the peep show porn industry. In the case of Cheang’s work, the money earned through the exhibition was and will be divided and distributed back to the filmmakers. Recreating this economic infrastructure provides an opportunity for the community to be drawn back together for the first time in over 25 years.
A note found in Cheang’s archive at New York University, hand written in the corner of the typed artist statement reads “swings between media activist, artist, filmmaking”. This reflects the milieu Cheang was part of, collaborating with practitioners across these fields of visual, theatrical and media arts allied with activism. Cheang recalls she spent a lot of time out on the streets fighting the racism of congress and re-contextualising the Aids crisis. At the time bodies and sex were not openly discussed.
In North America 1-900 was used as a premium rate charge to the caller, part of which is returned to the owner of the number. In a pre-internet era the code held a similar use to our contemporary use of the web including current affairs news, and of course porn. The five 1-900-DESIRES recordings that include bell hooks, were originally programmed to play on alphanumeric telephones, accessed through the dial code as part of the installation Those Fluttering Objects of Desire. For the current exhibition the cassette tapes held within Cheangs archive have been digitized and made available online through the Res. website at http://beingres.org/1-900-desires/ and on a tablet within the exhibition.
Annabelle Craven-Jones’ practice engages with entangled co-presences and synthetic intimacy through the medium of domestic live-streaming technologies (FaceTime, Google Hangouts and Skype). In this context social bonding is considered as a symbiotic development of biological and digital networks. This new work Google Hangout Sessions [0xyt0cin States] brings together histories of early satellite streaming technologies for connecting remote locations such as Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s 1980 Hole in Space, with more contemporary research into the digital synthesis of oxytocin, through the browser-based domestic self-broadcast technology of Google Hangouts.
Craven-Jones’ networked installation co-exists across multiple distributed and entangled platforms: in the gallery, on the screens of four iPhones, through a live Google Hangout URL and as an online archive (YouTube channel), creating a dialogue across spacetime and between remote locations. At Res. viewers are invited to sit, lean or recline on the pads in order to engage with the mounted camera angles, and switch between the forward (selfie) and rear cameras. Light panels bathe the viewer in colours associated with the body’s circadian rhythm through the regulation of neurotransmitters and neurohormones produced in the pineal gland: a cool white/blue colour (akin to the blue light of digital display screens and associated with sleep disorders through its suppression of melatonin) illuminates the viewer in the seated position, whilst an amber light encourages melatonin and serotonin production in the reclining position. An audio work streamed through the Hangout session draws on a variety of sources, from the group dynamics work of neuro physicist David Bohm, to writer Chris Kraus on emotional technologies, to diagnostics from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM5), to consider the relationship of oxytocin and serotonin in the formulation and dynamics of intimacy and relationships.
Associated with the enhancement of prosocial behaviour, oxytocin affects levels of melatonin and serotonin that facilitates trust and attachment which modulates fear and anxiety. It is released in a multitude of social situations involving physical proximity between bodies including childbirth, physical touch between people and orgasm. It is claimed this promotes social bonding in order to produce biologically or evolutionary advantage (eg maternal care promotes survival, monogamous behaviour promotes genetic succession), whilst its anti-depressant effect makes it a desirable stimulus to be pursued.
If you would like to enter Google Hangout Sessions [0xyt0cin States] live from a remote location, or view the archive visit: http://beingres.org/0xyt0cin/
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List of works:
Shu Lea Cheang, Those Fluttering Objects of Desire, 1992-1993
CHANNELS OF DESIRES, video total duration 59:00, with in order of appearance: Helen Lee, Robbie McCauley, Coco Fusco, Gloria Miguel, Pamela Jennings, Adriene Jenik and J. Evan, Rea Tajiri, Valerie Soe, Mary Ann Toman, Victoria Maldonado, Tati Nguyen, Shu Lea Cheang, Lona Foote, Robin Vachal and Suzi Silbar, Yong Soon Min and Allan deSouza, Indu Krishnan, Cheryl Dunye
1-900-DESIRES, audio total duration 29:23, with in order of appearance: Lawrence Chua, bell hooks, Laurie Carlos, Renee Tajima, Jessica Hagedorn, Robbie McCauley, Jessica Hagedorn
Courtesy of Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University
Annabelle Craven-Jones, Google Hangout Sessions [0xyt0cin States].Commissioned by Res. for Alembic III: protocols for intimacy, 2018.Networked installation: smartphones, online platforms (Google Hangouts + YouTube Live), LED light panels, manual (DSM5), furnishings (pads, mats, mirror), grey marl fabric, USB drive and lightning port dead drop.
Artist bios:
Shu Lea Cheang (Taiwan/US/France) is an artist and filmmaker working with net-based installation, social interface and independent film production. Recent projects include Wonders Wander (2017), a mobi-web-series produced for Madrid Pride and the feature length, cypherpunk sci-fi film Fluidø (2017). Her seminal cyberfeminist web project BRANDON (1998-1999), concerning the rape and murder of a young transgender man in Nebraska, was recently restored as part of the Guggenheim’s permanent collection. www.mauvaiscontact.info
Annabelle Craven-Jones (b. Bristol, UK) researches a legacy of artistic activity utilising the materiality of self-broadcasting. For the past five years, she has primarily made artwork that explores consumer live streaming technology. Her ideas focus on a condition of disembodiment and non-location in relation to a desire for therapeutic intimacy. She is currently a practice-based researcher (MPhil/PhD) at the Royal College of Art looking at self-broadcasting through the medium of livestreaming. She completed her postgraduate Fine Art studies at Chelsea and Wimbledon and a Foundation in Art Psychotherapy, University of Roehampton London. She is represented by Cruise & Callas, Berlin. www.annabellecraven-jones.co.uk
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Alembic is a programme of three intergenerational duo exhibitions, a publication, events and online commission. It brings together new commissions by Annabelle Craven-Jones, Elizabeth Mputu, Ayesha Tan Jones and Maggie Roberts, developed in connection to cyberfeminist materials from the media art library of curator Kathy Rae Huffman. These new commissions are exhibited alongside significant historical works by artists Faith Wilding and Shu Lea Cheang brought to the UK for the first time, forming a scope of works spanning from 1969 to the contemporary. Alembic celebrates the shared affinity across these generations, where the continual critique and transformation of the political biases of networked communication is practiced through multiple feminisms and strategies of queering technology.
Unfolding how the materiality of the body (recognising agency and affect beyond the human) becomes a site for digital and alchemical transmutation, Alembic takes its name from a form of alchemical beaker[2]. The process of distilling chemicals between two beakers connected by a tube, mirrors the pipelines of digital communication technology, where transmission of data constitutes an abstraction. Considering the body as alchemical vessel, it contains the processes of mutation: virus, hacking, healing and encoding. Mythologies emerge through these processes of alterity, as part of a greater cosmological and ecological network of co-dependencies.
Alembic is co-curated by Sarah Jury, Helen Kaplinsky and Lucy A. Sames. For further information: contact@beingres.org www.beingres.org
Further information on Alembic can be found here, or email contact@beingres.org
Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England
