Antonio R. Montesinos opens #nyap

Antonio R. Montesinos opens #nyap on April 19 at 6:30 p.m. in Scan Project Room, (London).

This project is part of The Society as a Show, a program commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Guy Debord’s book and which seeks to examine the situationalist legacy from the perspective of a post-Internet society.

#nyap intends to review the so-called tips or hacks that circulate in the form of a video tutorial and that pretend, using objects in a different way to their original function, to solve different everyday situations.

Marisa Olson, in her book Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture, talks about artistic practices based on appropriation and change of meaning from images found on the net. This way of proceeding also occurs at an user level, since much of what is produced online follows the dynamics of “recycling” of the sign. If we use situationalist terminology, it is obvious that we are witnessing a massive practice of détournement. And if we return to the distinction between tactics and strategy that Certeau had enunciated, these “deviations” function as tactical operations inside the preset space of the network.

The #nyap project tries to perform an exercise similar to that proposed by Olson, compiling and reviewing some of these video-tutorials or hacks, but also paying attention to “changes of use” on the objects that these tricks teach us. These audio-visual self-productions, heirs to the spirit of DIY and hacker from the magazine Whole Earth Catalog or Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione (1974) manual show how to alter the traditional function of objects to solve everyday problems, to avoid rules or to satisfy desires. All this without having to resort to experts, or even without leaving home. #nyap pretends to misrepresent the concept of tutorial beyond problem solving. Begining from a neo-materialistic and speculative perspective, it questions the way in which we relate to objects, focusing on that relationship as a symmetrical encounter. These tricks will be the beginning of a work that analyzes how these “tactical knowledges” cross the relations between the objects, change their ontological sense and allow them to reach other possible meanings, assuming that “the effects generated by an assembly have emergent properties” (Jane Bennett)

 

Opening: April 19th at 18:30.

From April 19th to May 6th, 2017.

SCAN Project Room. 13-19 Herald Street. London E2 6JT

Http://www.scan-arte.com/scan-project-room