Rhizome News
By
on
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at
1:59 pm
The term "globalization" has cemented itself as the preeminent adjective to describe our current socio-economic situation. However, the free trade of goods and currencies to which this term refers is rarely echoed in the movement of the world's human population. In fact, it seems quite the opposite as xenophobia, terrorism, and political tactics have seemingly fortified national borders throughout the globe. Often viewed as a way to transcend national borders, the internet has often been situated as a "post-border" utopia connecting cultures despite geography. Unfortunately, this way of thinking too often overlooks the fact that large portions of the "global village" have little or no access to this liberating technology. There has been an outpouring of art that looks at the dystopian side of globalization; and recently, a few compelling works have dealt specifically with the internet's role in globalization. The Citizen Exchange Program proposes a resolution to the highly bureaucratized and political systems of immigration. The Peer-to-Peer immigration network makes the alienating and bureaucratized systems of human migration personal, and expands P2P file sharing platforms beyond music and movies to life. The set up for the program is simple: find a person who wants to live where you live (and vice versa), and then simply broker a "person-to-person agreement. A trade, an exchange, for a temporary time span." Serbian artist Tanja Ostojic's work also takes a deeply personal approach to issues of borders and immigration, but her commentary is less optimistic than the Citizen Exchange Program. In the ongoing interactive web based project Looking for a Husband with an EU Passport, the artists reveals her shaved naked body with an overlay of the simple text "Looking for a husband with an EU passport" on the Web. Her figure represents the female body as a contested space and alludes to the trafficking of women and international prostitution, but it also reflects the challenges facing Eastern countries who were originally excluded from the EU. After a long series of emails (over 500) from potential husbands, Ostojic officially married (and later divorced) German media artist Klemens Golf, and immigrated to Germany. These projects point to, among other things, the potential for the web to enable cross border communication, while also exposing the personal and physical restrictions of immigration. - Caitlin Jones
By
on
Monday, January 28th, 2008 at
8:00 am
In an institutional context the term "curated" often implies a clear division between the curator, the artist and the audience. Historically, internet art and online exhibitions have radically altered this traditional dynamic and now, with the widespread emergence of blogs and mass media-sharing platforms, the blurring of these roles is commonplace. Recently, a number of artists have employed the playlist feature, a function through which viewers can curate their own collections of uploaded materials, not as a curatorial platform per se but as discrete works of art. (See, for example, Guthrie Lonergan's Myspace Intro Playlist, 2006). The French weekly Ecrans (a supplement of the Paris newspaper Liberation) has, for the past year, been publishing playlists by a selection of French artists, animators, critics, musicians and game designers. French net artist Agnes de Cayeux uses her playlist to reframe the travails of video blogger justagurl23–a young woman who "struggles with anxiety/trauma, depression, and the long recovery process from anorexia, self-injury, and more." Through her selections, de Cayeux actively curates the emotionally fraught life of justagurl123, creating a narrative that is both touching and deeply intrusive. For his playlist, artist and activist Benjamin Gaulon tackles the concepts of "planned obsolescence" and "detournement" (a Situationist term that refers to the subversion of dominant media images) in the context of global waste. His selection of Apple's iconic 1984 commercial transforms it from an image of home computing liberation into a condemnation of the company's constant hardware and software upgrades. The most recent playlist , created by Matthieu Clainchard of Bad Beuys Entertainment,
focuses on the vibrant genre known as the "demo", in which a director instructively showcases his or her expertise. Clainchard's selection illuminates talent in such areas as dangerous scooter tricks, sensational dance routines, and elaborate homemade Transformer costumes. The unique approach to each playlist on Ecrans speaks to the potential for traditional art world boundaries to be worried through a simple online tool. - Caitlin Jones
By
on
Friday, January 25th, 2008 at
1:31 pm
"Power is no longer measured in land, labor, or capital, but by access to information and the means to disseminate it. As long as the most powerful tools (not weapons) are in the hands of those who would hoard them, no alternative cultural vision can succeed." So ends the first issue of the historic magazine Radical Software, which is available as a free resource online.
Begun in 1970 by alternative media think tank the Raindance Collective along with video artists Beryl Korot, Phylis Gershuny and Ira Schneider, Radical Software focused on video's potential as a tool for grassroots mobilization. Its four-year run included theoretical writings by many luminaries in the field of experimental art practice, such as Buckminster Fuller, Nam June Paik, Ira Schneider, Jud Yalkut, and Gene Youngblood. In addition, Radical Software also provided practical information such as product reviews, tips for shooting and editing, and even instructions on how to build a guerilla television station in the back of your VW bus. The aim of Radical Software was to provide a broad population access to the revolutionary power of video, and although it may appear slightly dated, Radical Software is a remarkable document. It captures the zeal and passion of the early video practitioners in their endeavor to wrestle the television airwaves from the grips of corporate control – a revolutionary message that resounds loudly in the rhetoric of the early Web, and one that warrants revisiting in the face of growing corporate control over Internet bandwidth and content. As David Ross concludes in his impassioned introduction to the online collection, "as we continue to explore the distinctive qualities and capacities of today's technology and the radical hardware it spawns, we recognize that the consideration of Radical Software is more important than ever." Although obviously not made for the web, the seminal journal was archived online in 2002 through the cooperation of Harvestworks and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, providing a level of access and dissemination only previously dreamed of by its original creators. - Caitlin Jones
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at
12:26 pm
Michael Bell-Smith, Bouncing Lights Forever (Installation Shot), 2008Philadelphia-based artist Michael Bell-Smith creates digital animations comprised of repurposed images from the internet and video games. Presented as meditative scenes shown on flat screens and the web, his practice engages the history of perspective and painting in light of a larger visual culture informed by digital technology. For his new show "Bouncing Lights Forever", which opened at New York gallery
Foxy Production January 10th, Bell-Smith continued this exploration by increasing the size and scale of his works. Bell-Smith will give a
talk on the exhibition at
Electronic Arts Intermix February 6th at 6:30pm.
Interview conducted by Ceci Moss The title of the show is "Bouncing Lights Forever". In your work, the viewer feels suspended in infinite motion, a quality aptly captured by the title for your exhibition. I think your work proposes a meditative loop in relationship to historiographer Hayden White's idea of a "modernist event", a term which refers to the contemporary convergence of the event, its representation, and the dissemination of that representation into one moment. I would like to know what your thoughts are on the acceleration of these kind of events in time, and if you feel this is represented in your aesthetic. I think of this "meditative loop" more in terms of moments frozen in time, excerpts of a larger narrative or system that we can focus in on and break apart. It's hard for me to tie that into the idea of a modernist event, as I see this work as pretty far removed from a real-world referent, from an original event. I think what's more at play for me, is not the acceleration of this representation and dissemination, but the displacement - that these various references are floating around, bouncing off each other and multiplying.
Is there a larger narrative or system at play in the work? You describe displacement, and I wonder if this is a result of an overflow of multiple representations, rather than the dismantling of one larger narrative. That's what I was getting at when I asked about the "modernist event". Why do you think your work is removed from a real-world referent? How do you make that distinction? You're right - it's not a singular thing, it's the various systems and narratives of visual culture: movies, the Internet, television, advertising, video games, art history, etc. But there's also a way in which all these separate things are blurred together - I think this is what you're getting at. Works like
"Starfields 1" and
"Starfields 2," there's different entry points: is it Star Trek, a screensaver, a video game, an advertisement, the act of flying through space itself, or just a bunch of white squares moving out from a center point? This is what I meant by being removed from a real world referent - that for me these pieces fit more in this realm of messy references, than one where you can trace things back to an original event.
Michael Bell-Smith, Self Portrait NYC, 2006 There's a pictorial completeness in
Self Portrait, NYC and
Continue: 2000 - a foreground and a background which add up to a picture, suggest a situation, etc. With the work in this show, I wasn't interested in complete pictures as much as the elements we use to construct them. The lack of figures is my way of focusing on the backgrounds, making it more about these pieces and how we use them, than about full compositions.
There's an aspect of the larger scale of the works- as far as physical size is concerned- which is simply about putting the works on an experiential par with paintings and other large scale pictures. I didn't want the digital-ness of the pieces so tied to the experience of a personal computer, because ultimately the ways in which technology affects the way we view and process images- my main interest- extend way beyond the computer screen. So the scale is partially a gesture towards saying this is about more than personal computers, the internet, or video games.
I often aim to make work that while immersive, also foregrounds the simplicity of it's structure, offering a counterpoint to that seduction. With
Glitter Bend and
Building Across from Glitter Bend, especially, I think the larger scale helps to serve that duality- blown up, they're simultaneously more immersive, and easier to pick apart.
Michael Bell-Smith, Glitter Bend, 2008 The structure of the work itself, the way it's been constructed - the pixels, the different elements, the layers, the composition, etc. I want people to be able to look at a work like
Glitter Bend, and on one hand say "wow," but on the other, be able to say "it's just a bunch of shapes; I can see the individual pixels; I can see how each piece loops; I can see how he constructs perspective; I can see how he suggests scale; etc." They may have no sense of the technology behind it - the software I use, etc. - but on that certain level, they know how I made it. It's the opposite of the way these things usually work: while most digital images are designed to hide their construction, I want it up front.
Michael Bell Smith, Moving, Endless (Samples), 2008 I had certainly thought about James Turrell with those pieces (as well as Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt and Mark Rothko, etc.), but his work is so much about experiencing these controlled environments, while to me, those panels are mostly pictures, or things. Bringing in the experience of sitting at a computer isn't intentional. I was more interested in creating a setting where these digital images could employ the forms of minimalism, or the physical presence of framed pictures. Again, it's a tactic to have the work read in relationship to concerns broader than the computer itself. For me, one aspect of the piece is computer-centric: the idea of quantization, that in order to represent something digitally, one needs to chop it into pieces. The reduced palette and pixilated dithering are gestures towards this idea. Again, it's emphasizing that which is normally hidden. But that idea is coupled with something broader- the color gradient and the connotations it carries in visual culture. While gradients are simple systems, they're also used as shorthand for big sophisticated things like skys and sunsets, a starting point in the creation of this piece. In one sense the work is a series of quantized sunsets- a gesture that is as much about representation, language and the sublime as it is about technology.
By
on
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at
8:00 am
In a small gallery in San Francisco, founded by programmer Christopher Abad, a fun slice of computer art history is being served in the form of an ANSI Art Show. Back in the late-1980s, artists using computers running pre-Windows MS-DOS began making images in standardized codes called ANSI. Through this work, the artists embraced what we would now call limitations, but what were then new opportunities for visual expression. ANSI images were composed of a small group of symbols that could be generated through a combination of keyboard strokes, and a limited palette consisting of sixteen foreground colors and eight background colors. Only thirty lines of text could be seen at any one time, on a monitor, so viewing larger images meant scrolling or using a special ANSI viewer. A unique culture grew among the ranks of ANSI enthusiasts who would continue posting their work to BBSes and distributing them in periodic art packs, into the early-1990s. Talented crews emerged from this scene, and foremost among them was ACiD (Art Creators in Demand). "The ANSI Art Show" on view at 20 goto 10 Gallery, through February 3rd, features classic works by ACiD members Chris Lewis (a.k.a. Lord Jazz) and Jeff Lindsey (a.k.a. Somms), and is co-organized by Abad and Kevin Olson (a.k.a. acidjazz). Lord Jazz's ANSIs flex his muscles as one of the artists able to excel at both picture- and font-creation, while Somms's are compelling for their singularly emotive style. The pieces convey the influence of early computer games and anime comics, but are given a new shape after being printed as large-format transparencies to be shown on lightboxes--thus evoking the computer monitor while minimizing the need to scroll. While it may be true that ANSI culture withered a bit with the general demise of BBSes, the internet continues to connect ANSI fans worldwide. A quick glance through one online ANSI archive, Sixteen Colors , reminds us of the need to look back on this important era and genre. - Marisa Olson
By
on
Monday, January 21st, 2008 at
8:00 am
Every January the streets of Park City, Utah become clogged with actors, producers, directors and studio executives in town for the country's most visible showcase for independent film, the Sundance Film Festival. Sundance has long been known for its independent spirit, and this year's featured exhibition demonstrates its ongoing interest in experimental forms of moving image and electronic art. Entitled "New Frontier on Main", the program presents a line-up of installations, screenings and performances by a diverse group of filmmakers and media artists. Chinese video artist Yang Fudong's sublime work, Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest Parts 1-5 (2007) employs traditional Chinese aesthetic and narrative forms to examine the role of the intellectual in China's contemporary ideological landscape. Computer animations by Jennifer Steinkamp and Marina Zurkow present an open-ended meditation on our ever-changing natural landscape. For Mike Kelly (2007), Steinkamp employs her signature wall-to-wall projections to render trees seemingly blown by a multi-directional wind. In Zurkow's works The Poster Children (2007) and Children of the Revolution (2007), pre-pubescent girls wander through a rapidly melting arctic landscape with polar bears and floating piles of discarded electronics. Performance also plays a large role in New Frontiers' offerings. Highlights include a screening of animator Brent Green's signature dark, eerily playful stop-motion animations alongside a live score provided by his band Calitone, as well as a screening of Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad’s Super Mario Movie (2005) accompanied by a live performance. (Unable to attend, Arcangel performed from his home in Brooklyn, live-broadcast from his bed.) The exhibition's impressive roster also includes Doug Aiken, Robert Boyd, Jim Campbell, Cause Collective, Hasan Elahi, Braden King and Shahzad Ismaily, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid and Stephanie Rothenburg & Jeff Crouse- all artists selected by the festival because their work heralds new directions in art and independent cinema. - Caitlin Jones
Image: Jennifer Steinkamp, Mike Kelley, 2007
By
on
Friday, January 18th, 2008 at
8:00 am
Recognizing an environmental crisis, Eyebeam recently launched an "Eco-Vis Challenge" to address not only the ecological problems at stake, but also what they refer to as an "environmental data crisis." The organizers of the program, who include Eyebeam Fellows Michael Mandiberg, Brooke Singer, and Ben Engebreth, felt that many people are often overwhelmed by dense statistics related to the situation and their call was for artists and technologists to collaborate on two design challenges. The first was to create "Eco Icons" that "make visible environmental or ecological concerns" by engaging "the politics of information and the persuasion of graphics" and the second was to create an "eco-visualizer" that relies on one set of geological impact data and suggests alternative frameworks for viewing the information. Eyebeam has recently announced the finalists of these challenges and their projects are compelling. On view through January 26 in their exhibition, Feedback, are the top entrants in the Eco-Icons category. Here, visitors will see works like Oz Etzioni's symbol for unrecyclable material, which borrows from the visual language of its inverse, or Forays' "Edible Excess" decal, intended to help "urban foragers" locate free food among your disposals. The playfully informative Eco-Visualizers will be on view in March. This is all part of Eyebeam's "Beyond Light Bulbs" series, which suggests that we can all do more to help the world. - Marisa Olson
Image: Oz Etzioni, Unrecyclable icon, 2007
By
on
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at
8:00 am
Rhizome, as a leading organization in the field of contemporary art and technology, will continue to forge new ground with our 2009 Commissions cycle. This year, Rhizome will expand our scope beyond a strict focus on Internet-based art to encompass the broad range of practices that fall under new media art. This includes projects that creatively engage new and networked technologies, as well as works that reflect on the impact of these tools and media in a variety of forms. With this expanded format, commissioned works can take the final form of online works, performance, video, installation or sound art. Projects can be made for the context of the gallery, the public, the web or networked devices. Seven new art works will be selected, and awards range from $3000-$5000. The deadline for proposals is midnight on Monday, March 31, 2008. Rhizome members are eligible to survey the entries and participate in our community vote, which will determine two of the seven commissions. The first phase of voting begins on April 1.
Image: Aaron Meyers and Corey Jackson, Torrent Raiders, 2007 (Rhizome 2007 Commission)
By
on
Monday, January 14th, 2008 at
8:00 am
Like it or not, the "blue chip" art world is far too often focused on events in New York City, Venice, or the locale of the art fair du jour. Enter New Art TV , an online "channel" that provides contemporary art content to the web. Creator Robert Knafo, who used to be a writer and editor of various art and culture magazines such as Slate, Art in America and GQ, was also the brains behind another online art project Studio Visit. Launched this past summer, New Art TV is host to numerous mini-documentaries (5 to 15 minutes) including interviews with artists, curators, and collectors, exhibition walk-throughs-- notably a few from the 2007 Venice Biennale-- and documentation of several performances. A wide range of artists are represented, including Bryan Zanisnik, William Anastasi, Richard Serra and Dana Schutz, to name a few. Media art is covered here somewhat proportionally to its presence within contemporary art: currently marginal but growing. For example, New Art TV conducted an extensive interview with multi-media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, who has mounted evocative works that combine light, video and surveillance technologies, during his installation at the Mexican Pavillion in Venice, as well as a profile of the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery at Scope Art Fair in Miami which focuses on new media art in the art fair context. Of course, this isn't the only online channel that seeks to capture contemporary art. Vernissage TV , for one, has provided coverage with a great degree of success for the past few years. Despite the slant towards the blue chip art work and the lack of contextual information which might aid those unfamiliar with the subject matter, New Art TV is a strong entrée into a group of online art vlogs that are connecting those without geographic or VIP access to contemporary art. Let's hope as the coverage and audience for contemporary art expand, so will its boundaries. -- Caitlin Jones
By
on
Friday, January 11th, 2008 at
12:23 pm
Oakland-based painter Chris Ashley makes beautiful digital drawings that both reaffirm and challenge notions of "internet art". His works are crafted in HTML and live primarily on the internet, the native environment of the HyperText Markup Language. In this context, the images constructed are not translated into single image files like JPGs or GIFs; they live as visualizations of the code that defines them. But these visualizations have also recently been celebrated offline, as prints, and it is in this scenario that Ashley is able to show what one might call post-internet net art. For his new online exhibition, I Made This For You, the artist has made a different image for every day in the month of December. It seems fitting that Ashley's images, which recall the visual language of modernity, architecture, optical illusions, and web-based tables, would present his work in the grid-like, nominally time-based structure of a calendar. His intention is that the prints of these images will be hung in such a fashion, adding an air of site-specificity to works that emerged from a largely ephemeral space. For now, the richly colorful drawings are on the web at Marjorie Wood Gallery, the online art space founded by Bay Area photographer and installation artist Chris Komater which regularly commissions new internet-based visual and literary art works. After perusing the month of December, as Ashley envisions it, net art fans might travel back in time through the gallery's excellent archive. - Marisa Olson
By
on
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at
12:48 pm
Hats, a new work by Dallas-based artist, hacker and musician Paul Slocum, is a take on "the artist in his studio"- a situation so frequently addressed that it is almost a rich art historical genre in its own right. In the minute long snapshot of his computer’s desktop, we see Slocum at work (via his own webcam), focused on on two photos of baseball caps on a chair and a YouTube confessional of a young man musing on his sexual experience. Albeit radically different than Rembrandt's or Johannes Vermeer's portraits of their studio practice, through its multiple layers Hats mines the same territory of process, source material, and artistic identity. In another new work, the Pi Music Generator, Slocum developed a mathematical algorithm that transcribes the infinite digits of Pi into an equally infinite house music track. Slocum assures that if the hardware is properly migrated in the coming years (and his mathematical calculations are correct), his composition will play forever. These works are only two in a group that will be seen in his upcoming solo show More House at Dunn and Brown Contemporary in Dallas. In addition to being an artist, Slocum, along with co-owner Lauren Gray, runs renowned Dallas gallery And/Or, which has continuously hosted strong and progressive media art programming over the past two years. Engaged with the vast terrains of pop and computer culture, Slocum consistently and successfully blends hardware, software and raw source materials to create and curate a distinct continuously expanding body of work. - Caitlin Jones
Image: Paul Slocum, Hats, 2007
By
on
Monday, January 7th, 2008 at
8:00 am
For the last ten years New York City's Art in General has been host to an annual Video Marathon – a weekend-long intensive look at the state of video art. The next in a line of guest curators to produce the event, Norwegian independent curator Hanne Mugaas has been chosen to organize this year's 10th Year Anniversary edition. Mugaas' inclusive approach to video, which extends beyond the confines of tape and dvd, is indicative of a new generation of curators identified by artist Olia Lialina in her essay "Flat Against the Wall" (2007) as those who "studied JODI at University". (JODI being the seminal computer art collective who emerged in the mid-90s.) As such, the Marathon frames video as an ideology and process that cover a selection of practices, including work on the web. Over the weekend, Art In General's galleries will host ongoing exhibitions, as well as screenings and lectures. The first exhibition, Artist Looking at the Camera, curated by Mugaas and Fabienne Stephan, is an examination of video as a conceptual forum for the production and distribution of facts and history. The second exhibition, Transitional Objects, curated by Thomas Beard, considers the fluidity of electronic art within political, aesthetic, and technological realms over the last decade. Critic Ed Halter's lecture Regarding Jeff's People takes Jeff Krulik's cult documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986) as an entry point into a discussion of public access television, underground VHS bootlegging, and the formation of subjectivity within fan culture. Mugaas and artist Cory Arcangel will present their performance/lecture Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet), which pieces together the past 48 years of art history through its fragmented representation on the web. And in a performance entitled Flipped Chips, artist collective Lovid, whose live shows involve manipulating audio and video, will frame their own work within that of video art pioneers, such as Dan Sandin, Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, who created image processors long before Apple made solarizing easy for the rest of us to do. The Marathon begins January 10th--see the website for details. – Caitlin Jones
Ida Ekblad, National Treasure, 2007
By
on
Friday, January 4th, 2008 at
8:00 am
For Italian born artist Carlo Zanni, code is a paintbrush. He strategically uses it as a tool to construct autonomous systems that direct and continuously output ever-changing cinematic pictorial representations. Zanni refers to his craft as "data cinema", a practice proposing, "a new way to approach filmmaking and narrative forms at large based on the use of live data feedback gathered from the Net, to create time based social consciousness experiences." The ongoing project eBay Landscape is one of Zanni's most well-known works. Using the Western visual tradition as a frame for understanding global economics, Zanni creates a landscape in which forms--for example, bamboo trees in the foreground and the mountains in the background--are generated through an algorithm tied to CNN's front page and stock market charts. As he explains, "while the shape of the mountains changes everyday (when the NASDAQ closes), the content of the bamboo trees changes as many times as CNN updates its website." Zanni's latest project is the website My Temporary Visiting Position From The Sunset Terrace Bar, in which he combines a pre-recorded video of the city strip of Ahlen, Germany with the real time sunset sky of Naples, Italy. Depending on the time of day, the user may view sunsets through a live feed or peruse an archive, updated daily. In pairing two geographical areas into one ever-changing scene, Zanni’s films poetically capture the tension surrounding international borders. The archived films end with a silhouetted flock of birds rapidly diving across the entire frame, a clear symbolic reference to migration. Given the unprecedented degree of movement within our time, Zanni’s data cinema seems an ideal medium in which to present a meditative portrait of the instantaneous horizon before us. – Miguel Amado
By
on
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at
8:00 am
Open source is a term we most often hear applied to software and intellectual property in the digital realm. The Danish artists SUPERFLEX (Rasmus Nielsen, Jakob Fenger and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen) take open source philosophies and tactics offline and apply them to real world situations. Their work challenges corporate market practice through
large-scale DIY projects such as television stations and fuel production plans. One of the most compelling examples of their use of homebrew 'programming' is the project GUARANA POWER. Guarana is a caffeine rich berry farmed in South America, often a major ingredient in soft drinks. A large food and beverage conglomerate sought to monopolize the market in Brazil, and with the help of SUPERFLEX and the Power Foundation, one farmer's co-op stood in direct opposition by bottling their own locally grown and produced soft drink under the label GUARANA POWER. By making their recipe and process freely available, these farmers usurped the proprietary practices of a major corporation. Like their open source applications, another digital convention that SUPERFLEX employs for non-digital purposes is the practice of versioning. The FREE BEER project is an open source recipe for beer (which includes guarana), that can be and has been adapted and improved upon. FREE BEER 3.3 is available as part of their latest exhibition COPYSHOP, recently opened at the Knoxville Gallery of Art. Part exhibition, part workshop, and part, for lack of a better word, copy shop, COPYSHOP acknowledges the importance of open culture, and has made available FREE BEER, Star and Buck Coffee, Black Spot sneakers and other homebrewed alternatives to corporate products. Mindful of the increasingly globalized power structures they live in, SUPERFLEX are not anti-capitalist, but use tools of capitalism to actualize new and progressive ways of thinking about consumer culture. - Caitlin Jones
