Public Sphere
Toby Tobias Kidd
Think of the ‘echo’ as a metaphor for what you see here: bouncing around histories of ideas, while standing waves create nodes of overload, and reflections rebound into new territories. And, now, these echoes reverberate out of your screens into your bedrooms, kitchens, and imaginations. Presented here are four artworks:
1) An abstracted video of a conversation between two people from vastly different times discussing the meaning of a house, of a home.
2) A text-score investigating commodities, land, and labour, singing along with an old friend.
3) A taste of an audio narrative with broken pop-song productions, imagining memories of the spectres of capital.
4) A printed journal where I take the role of editor and instigator for a cooperative investigation into collective thinking and spheres of communicative action.
The first three are fictions that interconnect as part of a whole: they are discrete segments of future multiplicities, of speculative possibilities of capital in crises. The final artwork shown is an experiment in praxis in relation to the theories of Jürgen Habermas.
The work here is a selection from a wider investigation and has been chosen, and in some cases remade and reconsidered, for the digitally-distance encounter. Unlike a physical show, you can come and go as you please, situating your material body anywhere you want yet still be able to 'visit' this digital pixelated platform: with a coffee in the kitchen and the morning sun; alone in bed in the dark, as the rain gently taps on the window; with friends surrounded by smells of your favourite hot food. Or, indeed, lonely and alienated as you struggle to pay the rent. I offer the text-score for you to participate in reconnecting with the physical artwork, I offer memories as glimpses of possible resistance, as well as argument to enquire into the art of dialectical histories.
To participate in these echoes of communication send your performance of the score to me on the email toby.tobias@network.rca.ac.uk or post on social media with the #thegridatlas tagging @t0bytobiaskidd.
Medium:
Video with audioSize:
8.28
FIENDS issue 3
FIENDS themes detail
of the Public Sphere pathway on the RCA Contemporary Art Practice programme. It has expanded
to include artists across all CAP pathways. At this moment, that is how it exists; as a non-hierarchical,
non-authored mix of loose theory and art practice. FIENDS is usually presented as a physical, riso-printed theory object, folded and printed in 2 colours; however now also exists digitally at: http://fiends.gq/
The journal operates within a relatively tight, common public, yet simultaneously has the scope to go
beyond. It is a fleeting object of intense, cooperative musings. The monthly issues explore divergent
themes; from senses of futures and fictions, to the complexities of economies, to our collective understanding of nationhood and democracy. In this way, FIENDS becomes a material space of
collective thoughts and common concern within CAP, and subsequently catalyses discussions in
the pressing matters of publics, politics, identity and engagement that the group naturally share.
This was a collective endeavor within Public Sphere and Contemporary Arts Practice that was organised and instigated by a democratic team of Toby Tobias Kidd, Paola Estrella, Mayssa Kanaan, and Jamie Steedman.
Contemporary Art Practice: Toby Tobias Kidd, Songs of Futures