Sleep Faster

Arcadia Missa Gallery, South East London, is pleased to announce its inaugural show Sleep Faster, which will coincide with The South London Art Map's launch of 'Last Fridays', on the 25th of February 2011.

Sleep Faster will explore the divide between what is perceived as reality, and what is described as virtual.

For Sleep Faster LuckyPDF will present a specially produced collection of highlights from LuckyPDF's TV projects. Shown alongside will be recent video collages by Warren Garland.

Viewing the two video works together allows us to recognise and place ourselves within questions of our own production, cultural translation, relationships to nostalgia, informational bewilderment, and contemporary communication.

Warren Garland appropriates video from cinema, re-hashing and re-mixing narrative into optical illusions that delve into the dense world of memory and re-mediation found on platforms such as youtube and other user-generated online media sites.

LuckyPDF, in contrast, use a visual language that is self-consciously 'lo-fi' and ad-hoc. Working collaboratively, and with methods of mass communication, they re-purpose and parody visual culture.

Sleep Faster addresses the spread of culture into an immaterial and unstable virtual environment. Objects between the videos, in the bleed between the material and immaterial, attempt to form an idea that, rather than a physical transposition or loss, the digital experience is in fact more an experience of shifting conceptual focus.

Recognisable, but uncanny, cultural forms create a situation where the divide between abstractions and existing scenarios breakdown and open up for conversation.

One of the slogans of the Soviet era was “Time, forward!” Ilf and Petrov, two Soviet novelists of the 1920s, aptly parodied this modern feeling with the slogan “Comrades, sleep faster!”1

The ‘kitchen table’ installation attempts to gesture towards this feeling. The objects, their form and their associations are all supplements to a lifestyle.

Sleep faster highlights that this fictional/near future is our awkward present. The LuckyPDF Access Point on the table functions as an ornamental design feature and changing video archive accessible via wi-fi. The table evolved from function to form, the LuckyPDF piece pertains to be a next step in design for the household router.

The LuckyPDF Access Point brings physical form to ideas that usually exist only in their video and online practice. The sculpture acts as a broadcast station, transmitting to the immediate area. Anyone who has a wireless device has access to a specially programmed LuckyPDF TV broadcast.

The division this creates between those that have (the 'latest technology') and those that do not, exposes routes to contemporary culture and how much we can or can’t access these.

The Access Point takes the act of viewing, in a manufactured situation, where the participation of the ‘viewer’ can either create a scenario of sharing, or, can accelerate the private experience of artwork and the act of viewing it.

The station will broadcast an exclusive selection of LuckyPDF TV's archive with new work added remotely with each new LuckyPDF project.

INSTRUCTION MANUAL:

GO TO YOUR PHONE OR COMPUTER’S WIFI SETTINGS

CONNECT TO ‘LUCKYPDF ACCESS POINT’

OPEN YOUR DEVICES INTERNET BROWSER.

EXPERIENCE YOUR PRIVATE LUCKY PDF TV FOOTAGE

1 From Comrades of Time, Boris Groys, E-Flux