OUT OF BOUNDS

Aram Bartholl (b. 1972, Bremen, Germany) uses sculptural interventions, installations, and performative workshops to question our engagement with media and with public economies linked to social networks, online platforms, and digital dissemination strategies. He addresses socially relevant topics, including surveillance, data privacy and technology dependence, through his work by transferring the gaps, contradictions, and absurdities of our everyday digital lives to physical settings. The effect is twofold. The works create an at-times bizarre confrontation with our own ignorance of globally active platform capitalism, and they renegotiate network activities as political forms of participation on an analog level using the potential of public space. Bartholl thus initiates a performative process to catalyze a renewed understanding of individual action within a collective and self-determined network discourse. Conceptually and technically, he uses the same aesthetics, codes, and communication patterns that users are familiar with from YouTube, Instagram, and video games. A purposeful contextualization employs the logic of the Internet while at the same time undermining it with individual strategies.

Bartholl has exhibited at MoMA Museum of Modern Art NY, Skulptur Projekte Münster, Palais de Tokyo, Hamburger Bahnhof, Seoul Museum of Art and the Thailand Biennale among other as well as conducting countless workshops, talks and performances internationally. Aram Bartholl is a professor for art with digital media at HAW Hamburg, he lives and works in Berlin.

Bob Bicknell-Knight (b. 1996, Ipswich, UK) is a multidisciplinary artist and curator working with digital media producing films, paintings, sculptures and installations. His practice comes from a place of pessimism, exploring power structures that proliferate online and in new forms of technology, with a particular interest in the automation of work and new forms of hyper consumerism.

Recent projects have centered around gambling mechanics being inserted into video games, the revolving lives of non-player characters and how virtual worlds are being created, resulting in room sized installations, large scale sculptures, CGI films and hybrid paintings.

Bicknell-Knight runs the online curatorial platform isthisit?, and has previously curated exhibitions at The Art Station, Saxmundham, UK (2023); [Senne], Brussels, BE (2021); Harlesden High Street, London, UK (2019); Annka Kultys Gallery, London, UK (2018); arebyte Gallery, London, UK (2018); State of the Art, Berlin, DE (2017) and The Muse Gallery, London, UK (2017).

Selected solo exhibitions include Sunday School at Number 1 Main Road, Berlin, DE (2023); Insert Coin at CABLE DEPOT, London, UK (2023); Non-Player Character at Klaipėda Exhibition Hall, Klaipėda, LT (2023); Digging History at INDUSTRA, Brno, CZ (2021); Eat The Rich at Galerie Sono, Paris, FR (2021); It's Always Day One at Office Impart, Berlin, DE (2021) and Bit Rot at Broadway Gallery, Letchworth, UK (2020).

Alice Bucknell (b. 1993, Sarasota, FL, USA) is an artist and writer whose work explores interconnections of architecture, ecology, magic, technology, and nonhuman and machine intelligence. Working primarily through game engines and speculative fiction strategies, their work explores interconnections of architecture, ecology, magic, and non-human and machine intelligence. Recent projects have focused on the tensions between sustainability, eco-tourism, and the precarious environment of the Florida Everglades (Swamp City, 2021) and questions around outer space exploration, the politics of language, the agency of artificial intelligence, and alien life (The Martian Word for World is Mother, 2022).

In 2021, they founded New Mystics, a digital platform merging magic and technology. In 2022, they organized New Worlds, an experimental event series expanding on emergent worlding practices, held at Somerset House Studios in London. Their work has appeared at Ars Electronica with transmediale, Arcade Seoul, the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles, Gray Area in San Francisco, Basement Roma in Rome, Singapore Art Museum, The Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, Texas, Fiber Festival in the Netherlands, and Serpentine in London.

Their writing appears in ArtReview, Flash Art, Frieze, e-flux Architecture, and the Harvard Design Magazine. Bucknell is currently faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, Associate Lecturer in MA Narrative Environments at UAL, and a Somerset House Studios resident in London. They studied Anthropology at the University of Chicago and Critical Practice at the Royal College of Art in London.

Mario Mu is a visual artist and director living in Berlin, Germany. Mu works on various research projects which are often constructed as extended gaming platforms. Apart from frequently incorporating sound and drawing, his practice mainly shifts between game design, 3D animation and performance.

He received a BFA from Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia and an MFA from University of Arts in Berlin, Germany. During 2016. and 2017. Mu was an active member of the Research Center for Proxy Politics, and since 2017. he has been working on a series of events as an author and collaborator at the TAP-Théâtre auditorium de Poitiers, France; V2 Rotterdam, The Netherlands; MGLC Ljubljana, Slovenia; MAAT Lisbon, Portugal; Play Co London, UK; Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Ufer Studios, Galerie gr_und and Silent Green in Berlin, Germany; MSU, Pogon and GMK in Zagreb, Croatia among others.

Digital and online projects include collaborations with AVYSS, Mizuha, The Killscreen, The Carillon, BoCA Biennial, Milan Machinima Festival, Gamescenes, Itch.io, Gestalten Publishing, FACT Magazine, Wrong Biennale, The School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe, STYLY, Lima Sky, Pivilion, and Inquiry Inc.

Rosa-Maria Nuutinen (b. 1992, Hämeenlinna, Finland) is a multidisciplinary London based artist working in drawing, photography, creative writing and film. At the core of her work Nuutinen is concerned by the ideas of our current society’s impact on people and on the environment.

Nuutinen considers our society’s connection and disconnection towards ourselves, our bodies, other people and the alternative places to be and exist in response to those. Her work explores the notion of absence and the act of trying to preserve something, resulting in both fictional and dystopian narratives. These existential experiences come across as gooey biotechnological insides and savouring a sauna moment with your old wrinkly grandmother.

Concepts such as cyborg bodies and biotechnology are present within the work. Nuutinen is interested by the idea that humans, in order to maintain our excessive life style, have to rely heavily on technology and keep creating complex technological mechanisms. In the hopes of continuing to live and to conserve our environment.

Everest Pipkin is a game developer, writer, and artist from central Texas who lives and works on a sheep farm in southern New Mexico. Their work both in the studio and in the garden follows themes of ecology, tool making, and collective care during collapse. When not at the computer in the heat of the day, you can find them in the hills spending time with their neighbors— both human and non-human.

Amba Sayal-Bennett is a British-Indian artist working across drawing, projection, and sculptural installation. Her practice explores how methods of abstraction are exclusionary and performative, crafting boundaries between what is present, manifestly absent, and othered. Her recent work focuses on the migration of modernist forms and their role within fascist and brutalist architecture. Using translation as method, she explores the movement of bodies, knowledge and form across different sites, processes inherent to the diasporic experience.

Sayal-Bennett lives and works in London. She received her BFA from Oxford University and her MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art. She was awarded her PhD in Art Practice and Learning from Goldsmiths and has published her practice-based research with Tate Papers. She is currently an Associate Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts. Between January and March 2022, she was The Derek Hill Foundation scholar at the British School at Rome in Italy.

Recent exhibitions include Geometries of Difference, Somerset House, London (2022); Horror in the Modernist Block, IKON, Birmingham (2022); My Mother Was a Computer, indigo+madder, London (2022); and Tomorrow, White Cube, London (2021).

Mathew Zefeldt (b. 1987, California, USA) is Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Minnesota. He received his MFA in studio art from UC Davis in 2011 and received his BA in Art at UC Santa Cruz in 2009. He has had solo exhibitions at The Hole, NY; Celaya Brothers, Mexico City; Hair + Nails, Minneapolis; Big Pictures, Los Angeles; 5-50 Gallery, Long Island City; The Soap Factory, Minneapolis; Circuit 12, Dallas; Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis; Hap Gallery, Portland; and Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica.

Zefeldt's paintings are informed by the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V, which Zefeldt augments with a personalized avatar, wardrobe and cars. Scenes include exploding police cruisers, vehicles flying off cliffs and interactions with other players’ avatars, along with in-game interfaces like navigational insets and notifications about the health status of adversaries.