in this is tomorrow: “‘Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship’ could never have been a unique exhibition; it was calling out to be stolen.”

Brand innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship, the (stolen) group show we just curated at Carroll/Fletcher, now has a tumblr, enjoy!

Photo by Tod Seelie

One day of talks and screenings investigating nuclear culture, they’re also projecting the short Let Them Believe, directed by Todd Chandler & Jeff Stark, which tells the story of our project Plan C:

Sunday 28 April 2013, 11am – 5.30pm, at The Arts Catalyst, London

BTW, they tell me the event is sold out, but you can still join the waiting list for cancellations.

We’re exhibiting our latest work Emily’s Video for the first time in London!

Opening: April 22, 6:30-8:30 pm (through May 11)
Carroll/Fletcher gallery

From Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others: “It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that shows bodies naked. For many centuries, in Christian art, depictions of hell offered both of these elemental satisfactions. [...] There was also the repertoire of hard-to-look-at cruelties from classical antiquity – the pagan myths, even more than the Christian stories, offer something for every taste. No moral charge attaches to the representation of these cruelties. Just the provocation: can you look at this? There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching”.

btw, the same night opens the group show we’re curating there, Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship.

What would be greater than watching Emily’s Video projected in a real cinema? Seeing it together with Orson Welles’ F for Fake! It’s happening at Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, NY, April 20 & 21. Ours may well be the lowest resolution video ever projected in a proper cinema, the image is going to look super poor…

You can get tickets here, we’ll be there on Sunday, hope to see you!

We’re curating an exhibition! Or, better said, we stole the concept of a show that artist Artie Vierkant curated in New York, and we’re re-doing it at Carroll/Fletcher gallery in London. Same title, same concept, slightly different artists.

Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship
Opening: April 22, 6:30 – 9pm, through May 11, 2013
Carroll/Fletcher, London

For this exhibition each artist was asked to produce an object using an online custom printing or fabrication service. The works were sent directly to the gallery, so neither the artists nor the curators have seen them yet. We expect this backwards approach to be filled with highs, lows, and hopefully more than a few transcendent successes. The result will be a gallery of art, artifact and artifice.

Featuring: Annabelle Arlie, Andreas Banderas, Aram Bartholl, Body by Body, Chris Coy, Christofer Degrér, Nick DeMarco, Constant Dullaart, Andreas Ervik, Matt Goerzen, Aaron Graham, Toby Huddlestone, Parker Ito, Justin Kemp, Brian Khek, Martin Kohout, Bryan Krueger, Lindsay Lawson, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Jon Rafman, Sean Raspet, Rafaël Rozendaal, Borna Sammak, Oliver Sutherland, Daniel Temkin, Brad Troemel, Artie Vierkant, Andrew Norman Wilson.

All info here

A while ago we discovered by chance a way to enter random people’s computers without their knowledge. Out of curiosity we started collecting their photos. We ended up with 10.000, which we arranged in a slideshow we called The Others.

The final 137 min. long version of the work is now on view in three group exhibitions:

The Public Private, Kellen Gallery at The New School, New York
Version Control, Arnolfini, Bristol, UK
Analogital, UMOCA, Salt Lake City, Utah

Hey there, we’re looking for a New York based intern to work on our next project. Someone who’s very familiar with social networks, has basic video editing skills and is ready for some weirdness (highly sensitive persons may not apply).

You’ll work on something like this, and, hopefully, learn something in the process. It should also be fun, but that’s subjective.

We’d meet a few times but most of the work can be done remotely. If you’re interested pls drop us a short email by mid April, about yourself, what you’re good at, your future plans etc. Thanks!

I’m reading the More Real? exhibition catalogue right now and love the essay Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility, by Carrie Lambert-Beatty. You can read an older version of the essay on October magazine, though I’d totally recommend the whole More Real? catalogue:

“Fiction or fictiveness has emerged as an important category in recent art. But like a paramedic as opposed to a medical doctor, a parafiction is related to but not quite a member of the category of fiction as established in literary and dramatic art. It remains a bit outside. It does not perform its procedures in the hygienic clinics of literature but has one foot in the field of the real. Unlike historical fiction’s fact-based but imagined worlds, in parafictional real and/or imaginary personages and stories intersect with the world as it is being lived. Post-simulacral, paraficitonal strategies are oriented less toward the disappearance of the real than toward the pragmatics of trust. Simply put, with various degrees of success, for various durations, and for various purposes, these fictions are experienced as fact. They achieve truth status – for some of the people some of the time.”

After being at SITE Santa Fe the exhibition More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness opens tomorrow at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. We’re showing Catt and No Fun, and it’s one of the best shows we’ve ever been part of, all info here

“Over the past century, a period of unprecedented technological change and global social upheaval, once agreed-upon beliefs, or “truths,” have been cast into doubt, changing and shaping our understanding and experience of reality. More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness features work by 28 of today’s most accomplished and promising international artists, including Ai Weiwei, Vik Muniz and Thomas Demand, who explore our shifting experience of reality.”

BTW, about truthiness…

We’re giving a short talk about our new work The Others at the New School tomorrow March 13, 6:00 – 7:30 pm with Luke DuBois, as part of the show Public Private curated by Christiane Paul.

More info here. Hope you can make it!

Emily’s Video compiles the reactions of random volunteers who replied to the call we posted here to watch “the worst video ever”. The original video has been destroyed, only these second hand experiences are proof of its existence.

You can see some excerpts of Emily’s Video here

Camping in the Art World is a compelling essay on our work recently written by Melissa Gronlund, for a publication called Anonymous, untitled, dimensions variable, you can now read the essay here

Should have sent this one way back, here are the videos of the last edition of The Influencers, the festival we co-curate in Barcelona: Evan Roth, JR, Jill Magid, Voina, Constant Dullaart, Biotic Baking Brigade, Reverend Billy & The Church of Stop Shopping

…bonus track: here‘s the action Reverend Billy and Savitri D carried out for the festival, if you were there, THANKS! If you were not, then don’t miss the next Influencers!

U in NYC? Next Thursday join us for the latest version of Collect the WWWorld, group show curated by Domenico Quaranta at the amazing artist-run space 319 Scholes, all info here

U not in NYC? Check the exhib’s ongoing Tumblr

We’re working on a secret project and we need you.

1: You must live in New York (sorry non-NYkers)

2: Emily will come to your apartment bringing a mysterious video

3: She will film you watching the video. You can be alone or with friends

4: Emily may contact you again

NOTE: Emily’s Video is extremely graphic and extremely violent. EXTREMELY. We don’t recommend it to anybody.

This said, if you want to do this email Emily <XXXXX@XXXXX.XXX> or txt her XXX XXX XXXX

Thanks.

Extremely.

A while ago we made a rather adventurous trip to one of the most polluted places on planet earth: Chernobyl, in Ukraine. The whole project – a collaboration with artists Ryan C Doyle, Todd Chandler, Tod Seelie, Jeff Stark and Steve Valdez – was probably inspired by Tarkovsky’s movie Stalker, and resulted in a big public installation in Manchester, UK, assembled with scrap metal scavenged from the Zone.
At last, here is a short film by Todd Chandler and Jeff Stark about what happened in those intense days: Let Them Believe.

Along with the exhibition we just opened in London they published a small book: “ANONYMO UNTITLE DIMENSIO” (?!). It looks like a wrongly designed programming manual, featuring a great essay by Melissa Gronlund, “Eva and Franco Mattes: Camping in the Art World”, and all our recent works. It’s for sale for the unmatchable price of 5 GBP (yes, FIVE QUIDS) and you can get it here

Our current show at Carroll/Fletcher gallery in London was first titled Anonymous, untitled, dimensions variable, than became Building stories, than Blink and you miss it and so on. The title changes every day, and if you’re interested in the process of naming (or want to suggest titles) you can follow the daily change here: exhibitiontitlechange.tumblr.com

The photo above shows how the title change appears in the gallery space. Eventually it will take over the whole wall…

Anonymous, untitled, dimensions variable. Exhibition opening at Carroll / Fletcher gallery, London. Video by Kerri Meehan

Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London
April 13 – May 18
Opening: April 12, 6:30-8:30, see you there!

Hey! We’re about to open our fist solo show in London with some recent works: videogame performances, a simulated webcam suicide, a couple of fake sculptures attributed to revered artists and a potentially toxic hacked arcade game. Most of them are shown in Europe for the first time, including Stolen Pieces, dozens of stolen fragments of precious artworks. We’ll also preview the second part of The Others, a slideshow video of 10.000 images appropriated from random personal computers.

Some pics and press release here

Yeah! Time has come for The Influencers 2012, a tiny, very intense festival we curate every year with our friend Bani in Barcelona, Spain. “Abandon all certainties and join us for a weekend with the authors of visionary projects that cross over the arts, experimental forms of activism and personal explorations into collective imagination.”

This year’s guests will be Evan Roth, JR, Jill Magid, Voina, Constant Dullaart, Biotic Baking Brigade and Reverend Billy. See you there!

The Influencers, February 9-10-11 2012
CCCB, Barcelona, and various locations around the city

Real time updates here

What happened is ARTPULSE magazine asked art critic Domenico Quaranta to interview us. He thought it would have been interesting to interview some of the victims of our thefts instead, coming to an interesting conclusion: this is not Appropriation Art, this is Attribution Art!

He spoke with, among others, Jodi, Maurizio Cattelan, Nike’s CEO, Dieter Roth, Edward Kienholz and the Holy See. Or did he? Well, if you read it till the end you’ll find out.

We’ll be at Sundance Film Festival the whole week for the New Frontier exhibition. The show opens in two venues, The Yard in Park City and UMOCA in Salt Lake City on Friday 20th, and we have works in both places.

ah we’re also part of the Is This Thing On? panel on Sunday 22nd, if you happen to be at Sundance please drop by!

If you were living in Dusseldorf, Germany, you may have noticed some rather hermetic posters around the city with the Pentagon website saying:

The requested resource, (/justice), is not available.

like the ones you can see here. They were put up for a project called TransPrivacy, where Net Art and Street Art meet.

You can also see our piece directly on the Pentagon website:

http://pentagon.osd.mil/justice

Just wrote a short intro for Brad Troemel’s book Peer Pressure. It’s the first time we do it so we are very excited. Brad is one of our favorite art writers and the book is totally worth reading!

Get it here

This summer White Flag Projects in Saint Louis held an interesting exhibition called Another Kind of Vapor. Taking inspiration from Dieter Roth’s work the show presented artists who use non-traditional and decaying materials, such as Paul McCarthy, Ed Ruscha and Dieter Roth himself.

Roth’s piece in the show was a glass jar containing flies collected by the artist from his legendary work Staple Cheese (A Race), 1970. This work has disappeared long ago, thrown away in the desert by the gallery owner, nothing else remains beside this 40-year-old jar full of dead flies.

Unfortunately Dieter Roth never made this work, it’s a fake. We invented it one evening in a bar with our friend Corazon Del Sol, and put it together the next day. We bought all the stuff on the internet: an old glass jar, a vintage cork and lots of flies (yes, you can buy flies online), and sent the work to the unaware curators.

The piece has been shown for over a month, and nobody questioned its authenticity or worthiness. The image of the jar with flies started circulating on the Internet and it’s also mentioned in Roth’s biography in Wikipedia.

Maybe one day the jar would have been included in other Dieter Roth shows, and, who knows, even sold for a lot of money.

Sometimes we tend to prefer facts we wish to be true, rather than facts we know to be true. Maybe the little jar fulfilled our desire that the Dieter Roth legendary work wasn’t completely lost. Believing is seeing.

More info here

and the exhibition is here

Our piece My Generation (a collage of amateur clips of kids freaking out when their computers break down) is in a great exhibition called Collect the WWWorld, curated by Domenico Quaranta at Link Center in Italy. The exhibition features some of our favorite artists and comes with an impressive research work, that you can check here.

Catalogue is worth reading, and it’s free!

Hit an Internet-cafe, rent all computers they have and run a show on them for one night: It’s the SPEED SHOW exhibition format. The show is public and takes place during normal opening hours of the Internet cafe. All visitors are welcome to join the opening, enjoy the art (and to check their email.)
We’re showing the video of our performance Freedom at tomorrow night speed show in Berlin:

Please speak softly!
curated by Aram Bartholl

Opening September 16, 7-9pm, Berlin, all info here

Photo by Tod Seelie

If you’re in New York this Saturday July 16th Let The Believe premieres at Rooftop Films festival. It’s a short movie on Plan C, directed by Todd Chandler and Jeff Stark. Shot on location in Chernobyl and Manchester, it follows Ryan C. Doyle, Steve Valdez, Eva and I plotting to steal a carnival ride from the radioactive zone.

Screening details here

Please join us for a fear and loathing week in Sheffield, UK. On June 9th our first solo show in the UK opens at Site Gallery. The exhibition is called “Lies Inc.” and includes recent online performances such as No Fun (an intervention into an online video chatroom), Freedom (where we enter a multi-user online war game and beg not to be shot), Catt (an online meme turned into an art prank) and many surprises…

After the opening we’ll all go experiment the mysteries of nuclear energy in an abandoned factory with Plan C’s amusement ride, developed out of an undercover research trip to Chernobyl and the beta-preview of “Let Them Believe”, the short film Todd Chandler and Jeff Stark shot during the trip.

On June 8th we’ll be in conversation with some of our favorite artists & companions: legendary performer Bill Drummond, pranksters IOCOSE and Paolo Cirio, net artist Rafael Rozendaal and Plan C co-conspirator Ryan Doyle.

Details here

God Save the Queen!

YES, we refused the invitation to participate in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, due to its ludicrous organization.

Last week we locked ourselves up in a huge warehouse in Oakland, CA, together with machine artists Steve Valdez and Ryan C. Doyle. We’re working on a new thing: a videogame that kills people (?!?!?). We’re fit an old Pole Position arcade game with a car engine. It spews carbon monoxide into the room when in operation, letting the players control how much of the potentially toxic gas fills the air. If you want to know the outcome of this experiment please come by tonight, we’ve an exhibition opening at Cain Schulte Gallery in San Francisco, with several recent works and this new one. Don’t forget to bring your quarters.

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG
Colorless, odorless and tasteless

February 25 – April 2 2011
Opening Friday 25, 5:30-7:30pm
Cain Schulte Gallery251 Post Street, Suite 210, San Francisco

More info on the show here

There’s a small kind-of-cult festival that we organize together with our friend Bani every year in Barcelona, it’s called The Influencers. It’s a gathering of artists, impostors, conceptual hackers, deviant geographers and crazy characters, those people you can get inspiration from.

The next festival is taking place April 14-15-16, 2011

And the videos of last year are here

Sadly, visionary nuclear sculptor James Acord just left this planet. One of the few, if not the only one, of his filmed appearances was last year at The Influencers festival, you can see the video here.

His mind-blowing theories kept us awake for nights. Our recent project Plan C was in fact cooked up in Barcelona with Ryan Doyle after meeting James.

“The base man who desired only for wealth would always fail. The higher adepts, the true alchemists, knew that what they were really transforming was themselves” James Acord

Just posted a brief text on Rhizome about the fake Cattelan sculpture, telling how the whole thing started (from an online meme) and where it’s at.

You can read it here

We wanted to make a work about Internet’s overflowing creativity vs. high art fixation with originality. We found a cat meme collage circulating online, and we ended up making this fake sculpture by art-star Maurizio Cattelan with it. It’s a small yellow taxidermy bird perched atop a birdcage that imprisons an angry-looking taxidermy cat.

The piece has been exhibited at Inman Gallery Annex, in Houston, TX, for a month now as a work by Cattelan, and will be there through January 15, 2011. We thought, let’s wear the mask of a famous artist and see what happens: Will people realize it immediately? Will they say ‘this is his worst work ever?’ Or will they love it?

The reception by the art world has been enthusiastic so far. Who knows what’s going to happen when they find out it’s a prank.

You can see some photos here

and read the press release here

My Generation is a video collage of kids freaking out while playing videogames. It runs on an old broken computer (that still works).

You can see the video here

Freedom (2010) is a performance we did in the game Counter-Strike, where Eva tries to convince the other players to save her because she is trying to make an artwork. The result is her being endlessly killed and abused.

You can watch the video here (turn HD on to read the chat).