I was chuffed that old time friend and collaborator Alex Wreckage asked me to put some work into their Brighton Open house show to coincide with the May festival. Old School studios is an the old Steiner school (john Howard house off WhiteHawk road, Brighton.
I’m a bit late in posting this but THIS bank holiday is the last chance to see the show and this new multi media interactive. come down, call 07723300988 and leave your message
Both him and Charlie (the driving force) have worked for months to turn this dilapidated school into a thriving venue for art culminating in a hell of a show to showcase the artists who have studio space and a selection of their wider circle of friends.
I Have put a few works into the show but wanted to make something new for the show that would be site specific. So myself and team C6 put together a little interactive exhibit titled FU2
25 years ago the, now defunct, C6 art collective produced an interactive project in Shoreditch. The principle was simple; create a large quantity of stickers with the message “FUCK YOU” accompanied by a phone number and email address, spread them around and archive the responses.
The audio messages and email replies were collated into a web page, loading each response in turn to present the reactions to the provocation. Remember, this was the time of dial-up. Low-res, low-fi, cumbersome and slow.
The results were eventually exhibited at the 291 Gallery on Hackney Road, as part of a multi-media show entitled AMS (Anger Management System), curated by Hydra Live Arts.
See the reactions to our sticker campaign here
In these media-saturated times, tactics of outrage engineered to drive online reactions surround us.
These methodologies, first seen in the shock headlines pushed by yesteryears’ tabloids, have been co-opted by advertisers and the web at large, to drive attention and traffic. Clickbait provokes outrage, which drives interaction, which generates profit, filling the pockets of those who prod us, while polarising and enraging society.
It’s impossible to avoid these tactics, they’re so deeply woven into the very fabric of an internet engineered to leverage our attention for profit.
FU2 is our reaction. Mysterious and provocative stickers have appeared in the streets of Brighton, inviting the public to engage with our AMS (Anger Management System) Using strap-lines of discontent and offering a pure channel for expression, FU2 is a cathartic not-for-profit -vent in a commercialised world. A principle of “better out than in” fuels this interactive endeavour.
Rescuing feelings from the echo-chamber of commercialisation, we collate reactions in a haphazard audio-visual collage , blurring the lines between triggering reactions to an artistic invitation.
We do not condone or take responsibility for the content that results – like the tech platforms, we’re not publishers. We do, however, expect that view points on various proactive subjects may be offensive and/or humorous.
We believe that your individual view point is a personal thing and shouldn’t be shouted at those around us; unfortunately this is not a widely held belief. If you can’t say something nice. probably best to stay silent.
