or-bits.com Blog

OUTSOURCED is a two-part exhibition project organised for Banner Repeater’s serial publication UN-PUBLISH*.

Through presenting two consecutive solo projects by graphic designer/artist Tara Kelton and co-director of Museum of Vestigial Desire, Prayas Abhinav, UN-PUBLISH: OUTSOURCED explores the notion of outsourcing in its relationship with the users’ cultures and logics emerging from communicating through web-based services and online platforms. Contributing to Banner Repeater’s UN-PUBLISH serial publication, and in conjunction with the multiple modes of dissemination of artworks that Banner Repeater offers, such as free distribution of artists publications from the reading room and public space of Platform 1 at Hackney Downs rail station in London, Kelton and Abhinav have developed two new bodies of work to be experienced from different locations: Banner Repeater, the UN-PUBLISH publication and or-bits.com.

The Reading Laboratory, 2013; installation shot

Clockwise: Rise of the reader, Prototype of the Museum of Vestigial Desire shop (background) and The Reading Laboratory, 2013; installation shot

The Reading Laboratory (self and missed opportunities books), 2013

Rise of the Reader, 2013; installation shot

The World Belongs to Us and Ability to Swim, 2013; installation shot

Prototype of the Museum of Vestigial Desire shop, 2013

Prototype of the Museum of Vestigial Desire shop (detail), 2013

The Reading Laboratory, 2013; opening night

The Reading Laboratory, 2013; opening night

Prayas Abhinav 5-minute conversational sessions; opening night

Prayas Abhinav 5-minute conversational sessions; opening night

UN-PUBLISH source, 2013; Platform 1 Hackney Downs Rail Station

The Museum of Vestigial Desire is an online platform funded and co-directed by Prayas Abhinav in collaboration with Alishan Shahibaug. The Museum is a textual presence, a publishing entity which seeks to enable access to residual particles of human desire which have been cached at remote sites and are made available locally via software on a web browser. Its function is that of a portal which enshrines these fragments of desire in language, thereby confronting the contemporary culture of the visual which continuously shapes our forms of communication, and thus our drives and the manifestations of our selves.

In a time when the ever-changing aggregations of images created by corporations are incessantly distributed and mediated by technological devices, the Museum of Vestigial Desire asks its audience to take a step back and replace the act of envisioning through images with that of seeing through reading; questioning our assumptions about the faculty of vision. For UN-PUBLISHED: OUTSOURCED, the Museum of Vestigial Desire, maintaining its original essence as a feed of text, will invite the viewer to break with the current ever-morphing flux of cultural material and instead to sit and read, to stop and listen.

As a guest presence inhabiting different contexts of display – the project space at Banner Repeater, the UN-PUBLISH 2.05 publication and or-bits.com – the Museum will speculate upon a future age in which there might be “nothing to show, nothing to see and nothing to disclose”. It will perform itself by enacting a new episode of browsing activity, offering a reading experience of its published books, journals and videos. This new episode of browsing, as a whole,
will propose reflections upon the ways in which “reading without seeing” might materialise and potential modes of being without being seen; it will disclose a system constructed by the museum’s directors by performing a process of cultural analyses upon human desires. This system, as an interconnected display, might then reveal how human desires are often formed around the false emotions generated by the visually-driven and automated interactions which are so common in our technologically-driven society. Desires and drives will be stripped down to their essence through language, which is employed here as a possible vehicle to awaken real emotions.

Download Press Release and list of works.

UN-PUBLISHED: OUTSOURCED

Part one:
Karizma by Tara Kelton
14 Sept – 13 Oct 2013; PV Friday 13 September 2013, 6 – 8:30pm

Part two:
Museum of Vestigial Desire by Prayas Abhinav
19 Oct – 17 Nov 2013; PV Friday 18 October 2013, 6 – 8:30pm

at Banner Repeater project space, UN-PUBLISHED paper 2.04 and 2.05 respectively (distributed on Platform 1 at Hackney Downs rail station) and or-bits.com

 This project was supported by Banner Repeater with funding by Arts Council England and Chelsea Arts Club Trust.

OUTSOURCED is a two-part exhibition project organised for Banner Repeater’s serial publication UN-PUBLISH*.

Through presenting two consecutive solo projects by graphic designer/artist Tara Kelton and co-director of Museum of Vestigial Desire, Prayas Abhinav, UN-PUBLISH: OUTSOURCED explores the notion of outsourcing in its relationship with the users’ cultures and logics emerging from communicating through web-based services and online platforms.

Contributing to Banner Repeater’s: UN-PUBLISH serial publication, and in conjunction with the multiple modes of dissemination of artworks that Banner Repeater offers, such as free distribution of artists publications from the reading room and public space of Platform 1 at Hackney Downs rail station in London, Tara Kelton has developed a new body of work, KARIZMA, to be experienced from different locations: at Banner Repeater project space, in the UN-PUBLISH publication 2.04  and at or-bits.com (14 Sept – 13 Oct 2013).

Clockwise: Leonardo, 2011; Clown Fish.jpg, Horizon.jpg, Aurora.jpg, Redwoods.jpg, Rocks.jpg, 2013; Flowers (Arrangement), 2013

Clockwise: Clown Fish.jpg, Horizon.jpg, Aurora.jpg, Redwoods.jpg, Rocks.jpg, 2013; Flowers (Arrangement), 2013; Still Life 1, Still Life 2, Still Life 3, Still Life 7, Still Life 13, Still Life 16, 2013

Clockwise: Flowers (Arrangement), 2013; Still Life 1, Still Life 2, Still Life 3, Still Life 7, Still Life 13, Still Life 16, 2013; 28.psd (Suit stack), 2013

Still Life 1, Still Life 2, 2013

Clockwise: 28.psd (Suit stack), 2013; Drawing Ideas, 2013

Drawing Ideas, 2013 (Close-up)

UN-PUBLISH 2.04: Catalogue, 2013

UN-PUBLISH 2.04: Catalogue, 2013

“Tara Kelton, Fine Artist”, 2013

Impressionist Photoshop pattern brushes (Van Gogh, Monet, Pissarro) , 2013 on or-bits.com

Tara Kelton‘s new body of work KARIZMA** incorporates artworks produced by commissioning Bangalore-based digital service providers’ workers, who range from logo makers to photo manipulators, and outsourcing creative tasks to global crowd-sourcing services such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turks. In these artworks forms and formats have undergone processes of standardization typical of the procedures inherent to popular digital imaging services; these “third-party executed” artworks also embody what might get lost in translation when artistic intentionality is mediated and replaced by instructional language, a mode of communication typical of the relationship between the user and software interface.

For this exhibition Kelton has explored processes of collaborative labour by looking at the relationship between the human action and the software interface, between personal choices and set parameters, in an age characterised by the abundance of computational services and the increasing prominence of visual communication. The artist has carried out this exploration through relinquishing authorship in favour of collaborating with a team of workers who operate as “third-party executors”, as mediators between the inception of her artistic intentions and their formation through production. From the collection of images taken from the computers at Shalu’s Photos Digitals (Catalogue, 2013) with which Kelton worked in August 2013 in Bangalore, India, to the series of Still Lifes created by desktop publishing workers following her verbal instructions, the artist has tested modes in which the “human hand” might manifest itself within computational systems of production, treating human labour as a machine.

The artist, and thus the artworks’ executors, has worked with visual detritus. They have largely employed images endlessly circulating and mutating on the Internet; images which, while still in circulation and despite their degree of degradation, are commonly picked by the desktop publishing workers and used in their photographic compositions to become visual arrangement of objects. These images in fact often resemble mass manufactured objects easily available at wholesale markets around the world.

The subjects of Kelton’s digital portraits are arrangements and compositions, the hidden processes of practical and creative negotiation with software templates, digital interfaces, variables and parameters – as shown in the series of digital posters Clown Fish.jpg, Horizon.jpg, Aurora.jpg, Redwoods.jpg, Rocks.jpg. Through the focus on the compositional aspect of the artworks, Kelton exposes how artistic material might be refashioned, rearranged and replaced, basically ‘enhanced’.

** KARIZMA is the name of one of the software tools used by the desktop publishing workers Tara Kelton worked with for the production of her new body of work. The production of objects in India has traditionally been by hand, and each object is unique. The artworks and ideas the artists commissioned to “third-party executers and thinkers” lie in between the standardization of the digital image services and the uniqueness of hand-rendered objects.

Download Press Release and List of works.

UN-PUBLISHED: OUTSOURCED

Part one:
Karizma by Tara Kelton
14 Sept – 13 Oct 2013; PV Friday 13 September 2013, 6 – 8:30pm

Part two:
Museum of Vestigial Desire by Prayas Abhinav
19 Oct – 17 Nov 2013; PV Friday 18 October 2013, 6 – 8:30pm

at Banner Repeater project space, UN-PUBLISHED paper 2.04 and 2.05 respectively (distributed on Platform 1 at Hackney Downs rail station) and or-bits.com

 This project was supported by Banner Repeater with funding by Arts Council England and Chelsea Arts Club Trust.