IKLECTIK presents,
Un-Dating the Obvious – Wired love, desire and care
Performance Art Curatorial Fellowship
Friday 21 April 2023 | Doors: 7:30pm | Start: 7.45pm
Our Kiosk opens 1 hour before doors.
Tickets: £10 General Admission / £6 Students and Unwaged https://link.dice.fm/N4da0238ce3b
Programme
7.30 pm – Doors Open
7.45 pm – Magali Desbazeille, Live performance
8.15 pm – Conversation on ‘Data Dating’ with Valentina Peri and Benjamin Sebastian
9 pm – Break – Video and printed contributions available from Lordess Foudre, Noam Youngrak Son with ‘The Gendered Cable Manifesto’, Fantasia Malware (Jira Duguid, Chloê Langford and Gabriel Helfenstein)
9.15 pm – Day Eve Komet, Live performance
9.45 pm – Lois Soleil & Cecilie Fang Jensen (30 min)
* timeline might vary depending on the flow of the performance and the co-creation with the audience. However, we are aiming for a 7.45pm sharp start.
IKLECTIK is thrilled to present the third onsite event as part of the new Performance art curatorial fellowship curated by Dyana Gravina.
The last of these first 3 stages of research, (2022-2023), hosts guest researcher and curator Valentina Peri, an independent curator, cultural critic, and author based in Paris. For the programme she will examine the role of technologies and computer dating in contemporary culture.
Extending the reflection and critical perspective of the exhibition “The Museum of Dating” curated by Valentina Peri at Watermans London, the objective of the intervention at IKLECTIK is to give space to queer positions on computing, intimacy, love, and desire which interrogate the infrastructure of heteronormativity, and to contribute to the large and growing set of conversations about diversity in technology, in the past, present and speculative futures.
The programme wants to shed new light on key categories of historical understanding of gender, bodies, class, race, age, and social status, through analysis of the power dynamics at play in partners selection within the context of the couple, the community, and the self. The programme also offers an exploration of the interrelation with digital entities to re-imagine new narratives around relationships and care models, through an intersectional lens.
Participating artists:
Magali Desbazeille, Day Eve Komet, Lordess Foundre, Loïs Soleil and Cecilie Fang Jensen, Noam Youngrak Son, Fantasia Malware (Jira Duguid, Chloê Langford and Gabriel Helfenstein), Benjamin Sebastian.
Magali Desbazeille (Paris, live performance)
45 Quick & Easy Everyday AI Recipes
The performance is part of a documented dramaturgy and endeavour to provide an offbeat view of the technologies that shape our daily lives, relationships with others, governance. All of which we often know very little. Based on bibliographical research and interviews with researchers and professionals alike, they produce a four-handed stage script drawing from the visual shapes conceived by Magali for each creation. Neither fascinated nor frightened, they simply try to ensure our digital future is not left in the sole hands and brains of engineers..
“This performance, without fear or wonder, but with humour and reflection, deals with artificial intelligences that have infiltrated our daily lives, and in particular, in dating sites, via images recognition and collaborative filtering. Mag-51, the performer, explains how the dating application is going to present her, such and such a partner profile rather than another, and how she is going to meet “match 448″. Mag-51, is a single mother of 2, in her fifties. One of the most invisibilised profiles in the art world. The app makes arbitrary and secret decisions, driven by private stakeholders based on my personal data… Nobody makes sure that the algorithms in all these apps respect our dignity and treat us fairly…”
Magali Desbazeille is a visual artist and performer. She is a full professor at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges. She is secretary of the CA du Fresnoy, national studio of contemporary arts. She is an expert at Hceres, High Council for Higher Education and Research. Her digital installations and performances are exhibited in France and abroad (Fondation Ricard, Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Kunstverien Tiergarten in Berlin, Saatchi gallery in London, Motorenhalle in Dresden, La Panacea in Montpellier, etc.). Mixing documentary and fiction, visual and performing arts, new technologies and DIY Magali questions the impact of technology on languages, the quantification of the unquantifiable in our great institutions… the invasive phenomenon of the evaluation of everything, by everyone, at all times: “We are all experts on everything, we rate everything”!
Lordess Foudre (LA, Digital Screening)
Lordess Foudre is a LA based artist active on Instagram. The digital collage and drawings of artist Lordess Foudre interrogate the technological infrastructure of normativity, the social derives of the misuse of social networks, and contribute to a growing body of conversations about transhumanism in the past, present and speculative futures.
Loïs Soleil and Cecilie Fang Jensen (Brussels, live performance)
As technologies can seem neutral while sustaining power, they carry the same ability to resist power, when the purpose is inverted. Too often love and care is understood as only being rooted within romantic love. Our performance proposes an extension in the understanding of how love can be understood, putting care at the centre of a multiplicity of relationship(s). With inspiration from hydrofeminist thinking. all bodies are bodies of water – both material and immaterial ones. And in that sharing, a question of care, responsibility and interdependence arises.
An improvised sound composition emerging through the touch and movement, poems on love, sex, dating, breakups and toxic relationships. Relating them to the metaphor of water, a symbol of sexuality, fluidity, cleansing, mingling and regeneration. The sound becomes an ecosexual love poem of its own, taking care beyond the relationship of human dating. To extend care into another multiplicity of relationships, as we are all bodies of water.
Day Eve Komet (London, live performance)
Day Eve OM Komet is an multimedia artist, writer, poet, performer, filmmaker and designer. They are an experimental space maker from London that resides in liminal and unknown space. Their current energy consists in expanding their brainchild Audioslut.com. An intergalactic universe, which jumps and explores rabbit holes into other dimensions. Their background in philosophy and anthropology means that they have a distinctive style and mode of presenting their work and encouraging active participation with audience members. The main aim in all their artistic pursuits is to allow audiences and themselves to look at the world through infinite perspectives.
As a writer and filmmaker, they insist on engaging with the surrealism of life with fervor and color. Their visual work has been shown at Cambridge Film Festival and Berwick Film & Media and Arts Festival. Their interactive world making experiences had been exhibited and experienced as part of Wienoche Art festival (My Skin is…2020) and My Servantats master has been presented at SHIFT (2021) NAE Open (2022) MHAS Berlin(2023).They engage deeply with the understanding that collective healing and decolonial imaginative practices are necessary to continue and sustain life on planet Earth.
Fantasia Malware (Berlin, digital Game)
Fantasia Malware is an experimental video game label and collective based in Berlin.The collective (Jira Duguid, Chloê Langford and Gabriel Helfenstein) develop and publish video games, live performances and chaotic, corrupt software. In 2022 they produced the four part event series Fantasia Malware Presents: a tiny cross section of the fizzing underbelly of video games, a late capitalist medium wrenched free from the grasp of the marketing team to make boundless alien dream worlds.
Noam Youngrak Son – The Gendered Cable Manifesto (digital screen + publication)
” Gender as a concept is not only applicable to humans. When the idea of gender is applied to the cables, its meaning is reduced into a relationship of insertion. As a non-binary individual and designer, Noam Youngrak Son finds it problematic that such a way of classifying gender violently erases the existence of everyone that doesn’t neatly fit into those categories. However, instead of insisting on abolishing those terms, they discovered that the idea of gender that we applied to the electric cables functioning in queer ways that we couldn’t expect.”
Noam Youngrak Son is a communication designer practising queer publishing. The main question of their practice is about revolutionary methods of disseminating deviant narratives. They attempt to convey the stories of marginalised bodies which often include that of themselves into designed forms that do not conform to the cis-hetero-normative and colonial power structure. They inscribe myths for the underrepresented in various mediums, from books to public workshops to 3D printed sex toys.
Benjamin Sebastian (London, a live conversation with curator Valentina Peri)
Benjamin Sebastian (b. Cairns*, Queensland, Australia 1980) is a trans-disciplinary artist-curator based in London, whose practice spans curating, installation, writing, image making, sculpture, moving image, new media and performance. They received their BA (Hons) Fine Art (1st Class) from the University of Lincoln (UK). Continued research interests include; Artificial Intelligence, Occult Practices, Queer Ecologies, Decolonialism, Transhumanism and Contemporary Performance & Visual Art.
Their practice might be imagined as a constellation of mirrors; reflecting aspects of the body, time & space they inhabit – or – as world-making experiments; manifested through processes of bricolage and queerness – navigated by emotive, erotic and esoteric methodologies. Sebastian understands their artistic work as an anarcho-queer technology in the aid of queer, decolonial & transhumanist endeavour – driven by their neuro-divergent and non-binary embodiment.
They are a frequent collaborator of entities, individuals and institutions – as well as a founding director of both ]performance s p a c e [ and VSSL Studio.
