SHORT CIRCUIT at STRYX, Birmingham and New Shelter Plan, Copenhagen
2.9 16 — June 17
About
SHORT CIRCUIT at STRYX, Birmingham and New Shelter Plan, Copenhagen
2.9 16 — June 17

www.shortcircuitproject.com

Artists: Emily Mulenga, Juneau Projects and Antonio Roberts, The Cool Couple, Kensuke Koike, Ryts Monet, Honey Beckerlee, Mads Damsbo and Johan Knattrup Jensen and David Stjernholm.

Short Circuit is an ambitious international touring group show devised by Independent Curator, Aly Grimes, and consisting of nine New Media artists and collectives in an attempt to re-assess the archetypal framework of a travelling exhibition. It proposes a new experimental model of display realised in three different locations across Europe to include Birmingham, Copenhagen and Venice. The project’s structure aims to investigate new ways that exhibition spaces can present touring shows in the Digital Age and will manifest as a highly experimental research project susceptible to failure. It might glitch, trip, malfunction or ‘short circuit’.

Referencing the notions of both electrical and touring ‘circuits’, the exhibition will travel in a geographical clock-wise loop beginning at Stryx (Birmingham), to A plus A Gallery (Venice) and completing at New Shelter Plan (Copenhagen). These venues or ‘terminals’ have been selected due to their physical commonalities providing neutral exhibition environments in which to best test this new exhibition model. In addition, they all comprise experimental project spaces that foster international collaborations and regularly exhibit emerging and mid-career New Media artists.

For this project, New Media artists living in, working in or from one of the three cities have been selected, as their interdisciplinary mode of practice produces work in a pre-digitised format and offers a wide variety of technological media to test out such as; digital art, computer graphics and animation, virtual and augmented reality, internet art, interactive art, video games and 3D printing.

 

Short Circuit allows for many thematic connections and visual parallels to be drawn between the artists who operate in the context of an ‘increasingly digital, immaterial and reproducible world. Traversing physical and virtual thresholds, selected works explore themes continually expounded by the Digital Age such as connectivity, online culture, communication, digital language, ownership, copyright and reproducibility. The project additionally raises the question of the survival of New Media art and how it will function in twenty years’ time making the need to investigate New Media works in multiple formats especially urgent.