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Lucky Dragons, Live performance, Whintey Musuem, 2008
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Tom Richards, Sound artust, live 2009, courtesy the Kentish Town Photographer
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Are Blytt, Grey III, ink and shellac on paper, framed 2 011
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Are Blytt, Horse, 2011, dyed linen and bleach, 50 x 65 cm
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Code of Contingency, Gallery 2
Lucky Dragons, Tom Richards, Call & Response and Tomutonttu, curated by Sarah Jury and Lisa Baldini
Are Blytt , The Abstraction of Barry Lyndon,Gallery 1
3 June - 2 July 2011
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Code of Contingency
“If relational aesthetics and open source [software] were always commercial, can the musical score provide a way of thinking through different relationships between creativity and code?” This is the question framed in the introduction of Simon Yuill’s All Problems of Notation Will Be Solved by the Masses, in which Yuill shows how collaboration through improvisation might bring us to a new type of knowledge production. The live actions of coders and musicians create outcomes that cannot necessarily be anticipated, and error and failure become key educational tools in the entire ontology of code, notational devices, language, social contracts, and transduction. Code born from contingency.
Code of Contingency explores whether sound -- as a learning device – has the potential to open up new pedagogical frameworks. Taking its cue from the improvisational ethics of Cornelius Cardew, the dissipative systems theory of Isabelle Stengers, and the critical thinking pedagogy developed by Paul Freire, the show investigates process-oriented, anti-anticipatory learning through (and when) people engage with sound. Here, collaboration between object and viewer, teacher and student, performer and attendees are key for developing a pedagogical dialogue. As such, code does not play the role of a set of rules or parameters to guide the viewer’s interpretation, rather, it is a notational device used to make sense of knowledge production out of the show. Bearing this in mind, each artist has derived a workshop to enable this new form of knowledge production concerning: power relations, localized environmental impact, community and performance, public and private space, and sound verses signal.
Public Workshops ( please book in advance)
Lucky Dragons’ (US) Make a Baby project aims to build community simultaneously through human computer interaction and human to human interaction -- all enabled through energy exchanged through one object. Here, performance, community and coding inform the process of Luke Fischbeck’s workshop on June 3rd.
Call & Response (UK) are a sonic-arts collective who’s generative, 4-channel audio installation at Agency Gallery will use the SELCHP electricity plant as a data source. The workshop with Call & Response on June 14th will focus on strategies for exploring audio media ecologies, data sonification and basic environmental sound recording.
Tom Richards (UK) sculptures are antithetical to age of the convergent devices and programming updates. Richards work will reinterpret and sonify the spaces of the Agency Gallery and the other works presented. A maker of hardware rather than software, Richards’s workshop on June 18th will engage with the creative possibilities of digital electronics.
Tomutonttu (FI), better known as Jan Anderzen of Kemialliset Ystavat, is notorious for orchestrating complex collaborative musical projects making cohesion out of chaos. Seeing himself as primarily a musician, Anderzen will discuss the differences between approaching sound musically verses some other aim, creating a new sound performance based upon the other projects. Audience attendees are invited to participate on June 24th.
Please visit www.codeofcontingency.co.uk for updates on the projects, workshops and performances.
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The Agency is pleased to present the Abstraction of Barry Lyndon, a solo show of wallbased works engaging with minimalism by the Norwegian artist Are Blytt. The exhibtion is accompanied by a digital catalogue produced by NABROAD www.nabroad.org with an introduction by Hanne Beate Ueland, curator at Astrup Fearnley Musuem, Oslo, an essay by the artist/curator Charles Danby and an interview with Charlotte L Jansen of the Art Journal.
Online Catalogue click here
Erasure is as much the construction of a surface as it is the removal. The truth of this statement has never been made more apparent than in Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). It is one of few contemporary works that resonates with exacting authority and where material and concept are inextricably entwined. It was a moment that Rauschenberg referred to as ‘poetry’, and a moment that all other commentaries could only describe as gesture, protest, irreverence and vandalism. It marks time as material truth. In turn, the work of Are Blytt does not strive for the immaterial but instead to articulate the material, and it chooses objects and design as its means. Set against the fast moving speed of the present Blytt’s work revels in moments of pause and intermission, and in objects and articulations that are intimate, personal, close at hand and recurring. He takes pleasure in sustained ‘absorbing’ activities of reading, listening to music and watching film, and to the design and origin of these creative abstracts. He is drawn to objects that can be picked up and handled, books, manuscripts and till receipts, and to objects that implicitly contain, carry or suppose narrative. He is further drawn to the peripheries and exteriors of these objects, to their covers, cases, and acted upon surfaces, and to the graphics, images and hastily scrawled notes that mark and mar them. These superfluous scribblings are disclosures of fleeting thought, calculations or reminders, symbols that disconnect from the world as the moment of their manufacture or reiteration passes, and which in their displacement simply become numeric and typographic abstractions. […]’
Charles Danby, 2011, extract from his essay ‘Are Blytt, Fluctuations’ for the exhibition catalogue on www.nabroad.org
Are Blytt lives and works in Oslo.Recent Exhibitions include Galerie Perpetuel in Frankfurt, Kunstprojects in Berlin, The Norwegian Sculpture Biennale 08 in Oslo, Kunstcentret Silkeborg Bad in Denmark, Projekt 0047 in Oslo, HotchPotch London at MKII in London, curated by Magnus Vatvedt, Salong 2010 at Rod Bianco Showroom in Oslo, curated by Javier Barrios, Tara Rolfsen & Oda Broch and Telemark Art Centre in Skien, Norway, curated by Jan Christensen andthe Agency, Gallery 2, London in 2009 as well as works in the recent group show No Noise with DanMiller and Kevin Hunt. Future shows include a residency in Rome and his participation in the Kyoto Biennale in Japan.
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