Nonsense Lab

Department of Biological Flow
ICQ (Inverted Cubofuturist Query)
2011
performance
Toronto Nuit Blanche 2011
approx. 30mins

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“See and be seen. Interpolate and interpellate. In an explicit gesture to Duchamp and the Russian Futurists, the Department of Biological Flow offers ICQ (Inverted Cubofuturist Query), a performance that reconsiders the question of tempo in public space and interrogates opportunities for movement in the contemporary vision machine.”

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Program:

1. Plug kinoderm tail appendage into faux kino-gait transcribing device.
2. Begin walking staircase. Ensure a steady rhythm.
3. Using surgical devices at hand (scissors, small garden shears, Japanese band saw, large BBQ knife), cut away from kinoderm while walking up stairs.
4. If gait slows down too much, cease cutting and resume steady rhythm.
5. The performance ends once the artist has cut free from the kinoderm and fled the gaze.

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(The full video for a second performance of ICQ (Inverted Cubofuturist Query) in 2012 may be viewed on Youtube.)

Liu Bolin
from the series Hiding in the City
2010
performance and photography

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Hakim Bey: “Absolutely nothing but a futile martyrdom could possibly result now from a head-on collision with the terminal State, the megacorporate information State, the empire of Spectacle and Simulation.”

Nonsense Lab was dubbed the unofficial name of the studio space that hosted Sean Smith for the inaugural Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario's Department of Visual Arts during 2011-2012. The title is a tongue-in-cheek homage to the Sense Lab, a program space for research-creation founded by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi in Montreal.

This blog originally documented Sean's engagement with students in the elective Visual Arts course "Toward a Kinoderm Aesthetics," other activities and initiatives with the UWO and broader London communities while in residence during the fall 2011 semester, and progress on work for the exhibition D S NFORMAT ON: Threnody from the Vision Machine, held January 12-26, 2012 at the ArtLAB Gallery, John Labatt Visual Arts Centre.

Today it continues to share emergent processes with various networked communities, as well as offering a rough curatorial exercise of inspiring artworks that engage similar thematic trajectories.

Much of Sean's current work emerges from the Department of Biological Flow, his ongoing experimental dialogue of research-creation with Barbara Fornssler. Spanning performance, installation, text, image, poetry and motion capture, their consideration of biological flow develops processes to a state at which they have just ceased to be fragile enough for one's imagination to take over and build upon the framework.

While the focus of their practice often concerns the aesthetics and politics of surveillant optics in urban spaces, they also intend to bring a more multisensory approach to their processes of research-creation -- along with generous helpings of humour.

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