We have a show opening later this month at Motorcade/FlashParade in Bristol…

Trawler is the first MadeScapes show to feature a performance within the installation. One of our number will play the part of the Trawler:

From an electro-tropical internet basecamp, the lone user trawls the webs of reference, collecting and filtering vast tracts of data into some semblance of self.

MadeScapes invites you to witness the trawler in all his glory as we make our first foray into combining our installation work with performance. From a broadband-enabled mock-desert island, a solitary blogger will navigate through our collective online sketchbook.

Multiple screens and projections will reveal the trawler’s behaviour in a most public fashion, establishing and eradicating myriad mini-narratives along the way. As he makes his selections, themes will inevitably be repeated and images and video clips revisited, revealing his personal preferences as he creates his online identity.

‘You can’t make anything new,’ they told us, ‘originality is dead.’

“everything has been done.”

So the handful of kids on foundation that worked from their own imagination ended up on graphics or illustration degrees. Or creative arts, whatever that is/they are. In fact, isn’t calling a non-fine art course ‘Creative arts’ tantamount to telling the fine art students that if they want to be creative, this isn’t the place for them!

So we either bought the ‘originality is over-rated’ line, or accepted it at least while we were students because to exhibit work that didn’t directly reference the middle of the twentieth century was to fall short of the marking criteria. Failure to fulfil the school’s brief would be unthinkable, after all…’we didn’t pay to fail!’

Trevor H Smith

Thoughts expressed here prompted by experience and this Hyperallergic article.

My attempts at avoiding all of that, and keeping it about the ideas, led me to make a series of text pieces which were printed or drawn onto the gallery wall; they were temporary, and were always destroyed at the end of an exhibition. I felt that, having seen the piece, and hopefully remembered what it said, each visitor to the show now owned my work.

To take that idea further I came up with the Cards series - letterpress prints on high quality paper - this time providing the viewer with free ownership of a physical artwork, however small and un-precious that work was.

Part of the joy of this series was seeing people pick up the work and handle it, placing it in their wallets and purses, their pockets and bags. It didn’t matter whether that was for later perusal or never to be seen again, I would never know.

Until yesterday when I came across this by Julietmaria

Of this English upper-middle class speech we may note (a) that it is not localised in any one place, (b) that though the people who use this speech are not all acquainted with one another, they can easily recognise each other’s status by this index alone, (c) that this elite speech form tends to be imitated by those who are not of the elite, so that other dialect forms are gradually eliminated, (d) that the elite, recognising this imitation, is constantly creating new linguistic elaborations to mark itself off from the common herd.

—E. R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure, 1954

This text could be used to describe any accent of power, influence, and authority. I have taken it directly fromTRIPLE CANOPY, a website dedicated to investigations into ‘the Internet’s specific characteristics as a public forum and as a medium, one with its own evolving practices of reading and viewing, economies of attention, and modes of interaction.’

Two of their contributors (ALIX RULE and DAVID LEVINE) are conducting research into International Art English, elsewise known as Artspeak.

THIS IS A LINK TO THEIR WORK