4eva Connected
A 2-Week chat room styled performance. Each day the chat room would be open to the public to discuss a topic of Vicker's picking, usually related to the political and psychological impacts of immersed technology in popular culture. At the end of each day vickers would build upon a net sculpture that would represent the day's discussions and conclusions. Randomly Vickers would act out small scripts within the chat room. The project was also home to a few lecture series given by Vickers to a private audience.
4eva connected is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) site featuring daily events, performances, lectures and massive chill sessions. The front page presents a calendar, with each day passing a new sculpture will appear and the chat will take a different direction. Each sculpture will be an evolved version of the previous, constructed by the direction of conversation and aura of the chat room from the previous day. The sculpture will be displayed each day in its altered state alongside a form of documentation of the occurrence that most greatly impacted it's formation. The chat room will be closed occasionally for private events.
Vickers encourages individuals and groups to use the chat room as a performative space, as he himself and other artists (including Ito & Denny) will be every day. Through the use of triggered word simulations, loosely scripted narratives and reenactments of seminal performative artworks, being aware of the chat rooms intentions and realities will be a challenging experience of groundlessness.
Ben Vickers is a British artist residing in London, concerned with an ideal form physically and through the web. Consumer marketing campaigns become vigils of hope, counter cultures dependent on dead media and outdated technologies acquire cult icon status, new age imperialism has run amok; luxury and romanticism become pillars of logic in Ben Vicker's digital collages, sculptures and web based works.
Part of JstChillin's "Serial Chillers In Paradise" exhibition.
www.jstchillin.org
www.ben-vickers.net