piece touchee (1989) is a brief exegesis of a woman reading and a man coming to visit her. This footage comes from an unidentified movie from the 1940s, and opens innocently enough with the woman sitting in a chair enjoying her book. There’s no movement at first, but this is deceptive; an almost imperceptible motion starts to happen with her hand moving slightly up and down, a sign of the slight agitation that eventually explodes as something attempts to open the door. Suddenly this homely scene takes on the feel of a horror film, with what may be a monster repeatedly, terrifyingly straining at the door. Arnold builds on this arid atmosphere of entrapment and incipient chaos to the point where a kind of vertigo sets in. In a literally dizzying sequence, Arnold introduces maniacal flash-cuts and repeatedly replays and interrupts a scene in which the camera pans across the woman rising and the man walking; this will have some viewers holding their chairs.
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Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, USA The work consists of four free-standing walls, which form an interior space made entirely of upside down mass-produced, sentimental landscape paintings. Inside sits a construction made of cardboard, reflective insulation and aluminum foil with a flickering amateur film sequence showing on a household monitor. Material: Metal studs, found oil paintings, poles from tent canopy, cardboard, insulation, furniture and objects, aluminium foil, video monitor. Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, USA
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A radio broadcast over Reykjavik during the Sequences festival 2006. The piece delivers 24hour silence, the only guaranty silence you can get in modern society on FM 106,5.
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Untitled, (Still Life with fruits) is about the fetishism of commodities. It is an illusion to overrate the product, to enchant people to buy it. Here, the artist focuses on the power of brand to represent the commodity fetishism. In our everyday life, we can find a bike from Hermes which cost £2300, and a tennis-racket from CHANEL cost £450, what’s the difference between these products and the others? Fruits, as natural products, without artificiality, do people believe that the fruits here are better than others? This happens in our everyday life, with or without our awareness of it.
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Murmur Study from Christopher Baker on Vimeo. Murmur Study is an installation that examines the rise of micro-messaging technologies such as Twitter and Facebook’s status update. One might describe these messages as a kind of digital small talk. But unlike water-cooler conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated, archived and digitally-indexed by corporations. While the future of these archives remains to be seen, the sheer volume of publicly accessible personal — often emotional — expression should give us pause. This installation consists of 30 thermal printers that continuously monitor Twitter for new messages containing variations on common emotional utterances. Messages containing hundreds of variations on words such as argh, meh, grrrr, oooo, ewww, and hmph, are printed as an endless waterfall of text accumulating in tangled piles below. The printed thermal receipt paper is then reused in future projects and exhibitions or recycled. http://christopherbaker.net/
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