SPAM
Posted by Tom Estes on Saturday, May 4, 2013
For his Live Art Performance SPAM at The London Art Fair artist Tom Estes fell asleep while wearing the mask of a protocol droid.
In Estes' work, audience members are asked to interact with the performance by taking pictures on what the artist calls a "communal camera". The pictures are then posted on social networking sites for another, wider on-line audience. This is what Estes refers to as 'Harnessing The Hive' - as the view of the central performance is mediated and digitally recorded through machines.
Much of Estes work anticipates the on-line reduction of life to a single image. So the interaction of the audience, and their digital recording of the performance becomes more than mere documentation and can be seen as central to the work. The audience, rather than being some kind of privileged, passive witness becomes an active part of the performance and the creative process. This role reversal invites the audience to re-examine easy assumptions, received opinion and current social and critical trends as well as question the ways in which we see and understand our world and culture.
Estes' principle concern is how our view of life is increasingly mediated by machines and the digital as a shaping condition and structuring paradox. While machines enable us to do things they also do things to us and do things at us. We are being completely enveloped by abstract systems and inundated with information that we are struggling to come to terms with. The internet favours private, unconditional, sovereign freedom over scientific, conditional and institutional freedom. And yet at the same time cyberspace is becoming an increasingly efficient tool of surveillance with which people have a voluntary relationship. But whatever may be said about the internet one thing remains certain- as a primary means of global communication the internet is resulting in a massive social transformation.
The Performance SPAM, supported by A.L.I.S.N-
took place on January 15th 2013 at the opening night of The London Art Fair.
http://www.alisn.org/
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As an artist I have always leaned toward making Live Art performance work that is participatory or immersive in some way. In my Live Art performance I stage an 'action' and then ask members of the audience to take pictures on a communal camera. In this way, the audience becomes part of the performance, and the pictures are then posted on on-line social networking sites and web sites for another, wider on-line audience.
For me, fantasy and illusion are not contradictions of reality, but instead an integral part of our everyday lives. There is a real Peter Pan Syndrome at play in my work and I suppose I would consider myself to be a carnival sideshow conceptualist, combining a bare-bones formal conceptualism with an eternally adolescent, prank DIY comic-approach.
At the core of this work is an attention to the flickering, fading definition of our lives as dictated by the computer monitor and the rapid reply of instant messaging. I strive, not to break down these introverted, often self-imposed boundaries, but to look at how dataflow from the virtual realm impacts on the significance and symbolism of real-world human senses. But in doing so, I have begun to generate unexpected questions about how art might be able to inscribe itself on the surface of reality- not to represent itself on the surface of reality –not to represent reality, nor to duplicate it, but to replace it.
