Lafayette Anticipation associate curator Anna Colin talks to artist Tyler Coburn about Ergonomic Futures, a speculative project engaged with art, design, science, anthropology and writing. In this interview, Coburn discusses the research, production process and network of collaborators of a multilayered project ultimately concerned with the futures of humankind. Anna Colin: When one comes across your museum seats Ergonomic Futures (2016—) in contemporary art exhibitions—and soon in natural history, fine art, and anthropology museums—they look… [read more »]
Jemsheed Powerpoint for Global Art Forum 6 (Version 1)
Translation Format #1: Powerpoint for Global Art Forum 6 at Art Dubai 2012, by Kari Altmann, at the request of Victoria Camblin
PowerPoint is omnipresent. From bored boardrooms and continuing education seminars to military briefings at the Pentagon and in Kabul, with art fairs in between. Editor/art historian Victoria Camblin has curated a special series of PowerPoints, created collaboratively by contemporary artists, writers, creative entities and duos, that celebrate, critique and creatively exploit the medium’s strange, story-telling familiarity. Featuring Douglas Coupland (Keynote), Ayshay + Kari Altmann, Goldin & Senneby, LuckyPDF and Alexander Provan (Triple Canopy). Available to browse in the Forum-Forum.
Through the abstracted framework of a promotional corporate slideshow, the product of “Jemsheed,” a devotional love song by Ayshay (Fatima Al Qadiri), is revealed. The nonsensical glyphs created by human response to touchscreen interfaces are presented as a new, hybrid, and alien language—unearthed from beneath the system of screens and images that technology uses to demonstrate and sell itself.
The repetition of the name Jemsheed in the song, like the repetition of hand movements onscreen, is an expression of devotional desire. The Powerpoint, made as a response to the music by Kari Altmann for Global Art Forum, posits this devotional yearning toward a technological system that aims for bodily control. The result of this new interaction creates a new language, whose glyphs appear like remnants from an unknown civilization, and suggest a relationship that is both distant and intimate.
Text source: http://karialtmann.com/work/2012/jemsheed/