Artificial Stupidity. The artist critically intervenes in everyday technologies. With careful reprogramming he abstracts and mutates machines, causing them to malfunction, thereby creating new possibilities, new creative purposes and genealogies for past and present technologies.
Meals & SUVs Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by
Tom Richards.
Richards playfully and critically intervenes in everyday technologies. With
careful reprogramming he abstracts and mutates machines, causing them to
malfunction, thereby creating new possibilities, new creative purposes and
genealogies for past and present technologies. His artworks get working by
breaking down, he experiments with errors. Extracting alternative or
nonsensical electronic functions from familiar objects as diverse as TVs,
radios, cine-projectors, lights, turntables, toys and microchips he creates
multi-sensorial installations. His objects borrow from the visual language
of both domestic and industrial appliances, while random and repetitive
rhythms and refrains operate between music and cacophony.
Patterns and
pulses – digital bits, bytes and beats – all reflect on the internal
functioning of the technologies of modernity. These electronic devices are,
literally, left to their own devices as self-orchestrating, lobotomised
mutants of the Mechanosphere. These technologies of the machine may be read
alongside technologies of the self, which ask what are the limits, the
interdictions, imposed on experience by the sciences: how can existence be
engineered differently?
Tom Richards was born in Cambridge in 1978. He received a Masters degree in
Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2004. Since 2004 he has
been co-curating a series of exhibitions at Reception Space, which he
co-founded, as part of ACAVA studios programme of events. In 2006 he founded
Foldback, an annual exhibition and symposium on sonic arts and aural
culture. His work has been seen and heard at: Sightsonic: York International
Festival of Digital Arts, Resonance FM, Sounding Out: Festival of Sound at
UEL, Interlace at Goldsmiths, and Factio at Emerson Studios. He lives and
works in London.
Private View 27th June 6.30 – 9 pm
Meals & SUVs
295- 297 Haggerston Road - London
Opening hours: 28 June – 6 August, Saturday and Sunday 12am to 6pm or by appointment
Free admission