BLINK, 2003 - 2012BLINK, started around 2003 and ran for about ten years until end 2012.
I'd initially made a piece called One Second to Midnight and sent it to Robert Cahen and then Robert surprisingly responded by saying can I answer this? And I said by all means and later he came to my house and brought some footage and we edited it together in quite a zen like space (I say that because in fact the combination of the two of us meant only about two edits in 3 minutes with no effects at all which was somehow a combination of our aesthetic energies) - and this piece was called Blind Song. Then, somehow, it came to mind that there could be a set of artists responses… like an artists chain letter where the 'meaning' was our assembled thinking. Plus l became aware of a children’s refuge in Lima - so our joint project could become a collectible Blu Ray with a limited edition and a charity gesture for El Refugio by donating all profits to the Refuge (in Lima at the time the refuge was set up, if children were found on the streets - terrible things would happen to them). Also the Blue Ray could have a set of curatorial algorithms around the artworks such that they could be presented in a set of pre-defined orders depending on 'taste' - or simply a random scrambling of the order as I’d learned to programme Blue Rays for a project where I’d discovered all sorts of tricks to enable defeating the tree logic you had to employ to navigate a Blu-ray. The proposition was that the sales would go direct to the refuge, there was to be no profit, as it was a gift from the artists. |
|
By about 2012 about 25 artists had made a piece for blink and those that agreed to provide a piece were the following (and I hope they don't mind being mentioned) Robert Cahen (France), Andrea Faciu (Romania), Zineb Sedira (France/Algeria/UK), Marie Ange Bordas, Brasil, Berry Bickle (Zimbabwe, Mozambique), Jeremy Welsh (Norway/UK), Petra Lindholm (Sweden, Finland), Ruelo Lozendo (Phillippines), Ana Marten (Costa Rica), Roberto Shaefer (US), Paolo Rosa of Studio Azzurro (Italy), Maree Mills (New Zealand), Pipilotti Rist (Switzerland), Gary Hill (US), Steina and Woody Vasulka (Iceland, Czechoslovakia), Theo Eshetu (Ethiopia/Italy), Chris Meigh-Andrews, (Canada/UK), Bill Seaman (US), Francisco Ruiz de Infante (Spain/France), Vince Briffa (Malta), Grahame Weinbren (US), Rik Lander, Uk, and myself.
At the moment I’m doing an archeological dig to find all the existent works and encode them and maybe put them up on line to evidence what was effectively 'research' for the strategies that in the past artists could employ to change our relationship to the market). In fact we exhibited quite a few pieces from Blink at InVideo in Milan with Romano Fattorossi and Sandra Lischi circa 2009 and also the Rome FiIm Festival in the same year - and so the work had various outings… but truthfully it was the long, long waits whilst some artists took much longer than others that took the project down.
At the moment I’m doing an archeological dig to find all the existent works and encode them and maybe put them up on line to evidence what was effectively 'research' for the strategies that in the past artists could employ to change our relationship to the market). In fact we exhibited quite a few pieces from Blink at InVideo in Milan with Romano Fattorossi and Sandra Lischi circa 2009 and also the Rome FiIm Festival in the same year - and so the work had various outings… but truthfully it was the long, long waits whilst some artists took much longer than others that took the project down.