Christina Hansen
Synopsis. God dammit Mr. Higginbottom.
Far out at sea s/s mongolia chugs away with it's 4 degree lopsidedness and tarnished ship side and past. A very multicultural crew lives it's daily life, consisting of small and large self-made joys and conflicts, with the greatest of ease. The Ship's captain is Albert Dawson (European mix with a strong feature of the Borreby type), with an unerring will he manages the ship around all kinds of hard work and similar problems. But still he runs in to one problem, when a shareholder in the company Dawson Line dies, and as revenge has bequeathed his share to Miss Mary Hooper (a typically English type). The not exactly bustling shipping company is meant as an irritation element and bankruptcy cause of Mary Hooper, but the heiress is a robust lady, and she sends her pale, pear-shaped London lawyer Mr. Higginbottom out to inspect the heritage. And thus we meet the books real protagonist. Mr. Higginbottom is a delicate, detail conscious little man whose only "deviation" is that he has a great love for nursing automobiles. But this desire he prefer to keep hidden. Now he sets with anxiety out on his first trip outside London, and it will be the start of the utmost reluctance ever to return. He becomes acquainted with both arrack and hangovers, a well hidden craving for new inventions, negotiating skills and diplomatic sense, potency and love.
Bi-binoculars: Two binoculars, a black and a red, are cut in half. One half of the black binoculars is fitted together with one half of the red binoculars. The straps from the two binoculars are also cut in half, they are glued together to form one whole strap. The strap from each of the binoculars are both black. The lenses in the the small, red binoculars are made of plastic, they are not curved as lenses should be to to enlarge the view of objects at a distance. I found them in the toy section of a second-hand store. The lenses on the black binoculars are curved and put together so that they enlarge your vision 20 times. I bought them by a woman who had two big dogs in her kitchen. When looking through it you see a big circle of the things that are far away, with a small circle inside that show things that are closer to you.
Crop: I found these objects in a cut-down shrub in the corner of a parking lot on the top of a hill next to some apartment blocks. Make-up articles; Pink nail polish in a transparent cylinder with a silver lid, eye-liner in a dark blue pen, a lipstick in an orange cover, eyeshadow in a grey pen, light brown glitter-foundation in a transparent container, pink rouge in a flat transparent box, a green and whit toothbrush, a pen with blue ink, a bottle of purple fruit shampoo, lying on the ground like this on the ground in the corner of a remote parking lot. I took the objects, the leafs, twigs and the soil underneath and put it in a frame on a floor, arranged it exactly like I found it.
Horizontal Breakfast Drill Core: Objects cut in a circle shape to fit in to a transparent plastic tube: a 20 cm long piece of a branch, a circle of dark blue /white flower-printed wallpaper mounted on cardboard, a circle of plywood painted white on one side, oatmeal glued together leading to a circle-cut-through of an upright-standing cylinder-shaped oatmeal box, a cylinder cut through a cornflakes box where the cornflakes are glued together and to the sides. The concept continues with a box of raisins, a pack of bread, a bag of coffee beans, a box of coffee filters and by the end of the tube is a circle-cut of a cupboard door. The objects presented in the drill core comes from my own kitchen cupboard.
The work of art in the age of digital recombination
In this text the term media is used to describe tool for presenting any kind of information. The text is written around an essay written by Walter Benjamin, (with the same title) about mechanical reproduction of art works, in 1936. Before human inventions made it possible to reproduce art works in any way, a work of art had the value of being unique in this world and in it's own context and history, including a string of ownerships. Benjamin is introducing the concepts 'aura' and 'cult value' in connection with the physical, original artwork, to give an indication of how they can exist at a far historical distance, but still be close with their physical presence and symbolic value. These concepts also apply to natural objects like mountains or a fossil in a museum. By being mass produced a work of art will loose it's 'aura' of uniqueness, but at the same time it can become accessible to a larger audience because it will be distributed across country borders and social borders. Mechanical reproduction is not the same as digital recombination, a computer is not only a tool for reproduction. The computer is really a variety of media, consisting of the combinations of operations Add, Browse, Change and Destroy. As a database the computer connected to millions of other computers can be extremely flexible, but a database can also include organic, genetic material and in that way become more than a database; a robot or a new form of life. Artworks including genetic manipulated animals have created hefty debates through the past 10-15 years. The Dutch new media artist, Geert Mul, created an interactive database on the Dutch Photo Museum, by, in an installation, making the museums database available for searches, based on 4 keywords, to the museums visitors. By creating new shapes and purposes for databases, artists can shape and communicate otherwise incompatible and inaccessible material in to new works for an unlimited crowd, on a museum or home with their laptop and wi-fi.
Remixing and Remixability
The internet has come to define the way we share and publish information, the faster we are able to share, the more information we share and the more information we use to create new information. In the 70's/80's music-remixes, the same kind of recycling of audio media was happening, the multi-track recordings were an open invitation to modulations. And long before that we can see evidence of humans borrowing concepts from previous culture and neighboring countries. On the internet today designers can easily access online libraries of stock photography to use as backgrounds in visual design, but it's not a tool they tell costumers about. In music it's the other way around, they see samples as an instrument, just like a guitar, and they are happy to share this information.
Since Ford we have been used to modular assembly line designs within all categories of consumer items, and on the internet the same codes with information cycle around on blogs and social fora, but what if we imagined an unlimited diversity in form of tiny readymade blocks of micro content. Content that is designed to get remixed.
Modularity is not something that only exist in the digital world, almost everything we consume is manufactured in a modular way. Within modern computer game design we start to see productions that are designed of modules that again comes from many different sources designed by various teams of programmers, professionals or amateurs. The border between being a creator or being a consumer seems to disappear in our modern media landscape, but we are still as modular minded as we have been for the past 80 years.