Dragging The Archive Virtual Tour from Franklin Furnace on Vimeo.
DRAGGING THE ARCHIVE: A PERSONAL RE:ENCOUNTER WITH FRANKLIN FURNACE'S CYBER BEGINNINGS BY ELLY CLARKE opens Thursday 19th January at 5pm ET and simultaneously online. See more HERE. And visit the website online HERE.
Dragging the Archive: a personal re:encounter with the early cyber years of Franklin Furnace by Elly Clarke
The 8th Annual Live at the Library Exhibition
Opening reception, Thursday, January 19, 2023, 5-7 pm
Onsite at Pratt Institute,
Brooklyn Campus Library,
200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205
& Online at https://franklinfurnace.org/dragging-the-archive
Dragging the Archive is an online/onsite exhibition of materials from the early cyber years of Franklin Furnace Archive, 1996-2002, taking place across three floors of the landmarked Library at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Founded in 1976 in artist Martha Wilson’s living loft in Tribeca, Franklin Furnace Archive continues to this day to support the production, presentation, and preservation of what was once known as ‘ephemeral art’ - which included artists’ books and live performance. In the mid 1990s, Franklin Furnace transferred its collection of artists’ books to MoMA, NY, sold its physical space, and Wilson made the decision to ‘go cyber’. This major shift ushered in a series of live ‘Netcast’ performances which were presented via Real Player over buffering, dial up networks, and broadcast out of Pseudo Studios in lower Manhattan. Franklin Furnace thus became one of the first arts organizations (anywhere) to support live art on the world wide web. In 1998, 22-year-old Elly Clarke arrived as a student intern at Franklin Furnace, and began to bear witness to, and provide youthful critique of, these new modes and methods of performance. Twenty-five years later, Clarke returns to the Archive to display fragments of what she (re)encountered during a research trip in 2019, and again just now in 2022-23. Clarke’s selections are exhibited alongside extracts from her personal diaries and letters from the 1990s.
Installed in museum vitrines across three levels of Pratt Library, Dragging the Archive: re:encounters with the early cyber years of Franklin Furnace, is an exhibition designed to be encountered in any order - (pro)posing a starting point for interactions with faxes, slides, videos and the heavy boxes in which these materials have been p/reserved. The ex:position is an invitation: to discuss, respond, and reflect. And to be involved: by zooming in via QR codes, that give greater clarity to fading faxes, the detail of the slides, the YES / NO / YES notes scribbled on the edges of a rejected proposal dug out of deep storage. Visitors are invited to share their reactions to these objects: online via the specially built website, and on site via the old-fashioned visitor’s book you’ll find on the second floor.
In physics, drag is a force that pulls in two directions at once: forwards, and back; up, and down. It is also both a performance - with the possibility of transformation - and a burden, or resistance. Within the context of this archive, how to hold this tension? How to re:present evidence of a time, an event, a happening, a performance - as well as the major institutional shift taken by Franklin Furnace at this time - out of the physical and digital matter that remains? How best to present an entire storage box of phone messages received for the Founding Director over lunch? Clarke’s response is to present the logbooks as found in storage, as a readymade sculpture titled ‘Missed Calls, 1984-1988.’
Live at the Library, now in its 8th year, is an annual art exhibition and programming series collaboration between Pratt Institute Library and Franklin Furnace Archive. Curated by Elly Clarke with design by Yunjia Yuan, Live at the Library VIII is presented with the support of Michael Asher Foundation; Hollinger Metal Edge Archival Storage Materials, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs;The New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; Pratt Institute; The Silicon Valley Community Foundation; and the Board of Directors, members, and friends of Franklin Furnace Archive. And Elly Clarke’s PhD funders CHASE Doctoral Training Programme.
Dragging the Archive Accompanying Events:
Thursday, January 19, 2023 -
Onsite Opening Reception of Dragging the Archive
5:00-7:00pm ET in the Library at Pratt Brooklyn - with simultaneous Dragging the Archive website launch. Elly Clarke’s short introduction will be live broadcast via Franklin Furnace’s Instagram account. Free to attend. Registration taken at entry.
Wednesday, January 25, 2023 at 6pm-7:30pm ET
Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez’s Dragging the Workshop: How to Read Archive Materials
In the Pratt Brooklyn Library, Alumni Reading Room,
Free, open to the public.
Booking link here: https://franklinfurnace.org/dragging-the-workshop/
Thursday, January 26, 2023
Goldsmiths/Pratt collaboration with Elly Clarke’s MFA curating students and Professor Kim Bobier’s BA Art Since the Nineties class, resulting in new interpretations of the materials on show that will be added to the exhibition website
Wednesday, February 1, 2023, 3pm ET
Virtual Tour with Elly Clarke and Martha Wilson - showing video walk though and Q&A - with curator Elly Clarke and Franklin Furnace Archive’s Founding Director Emerita Martha Wilson. Online at Franklin Furnace LOFT. Booking link here: https://franklinfurnace.org/dragging-the-archive-virtual-tour/
Monday, February 6, 2023 at 3-4:30pm ET -
Dragging up the Performance: Halona Hilbertz: Pseudo Studio Walk 25 Years Later
Live broadcast from the Alumni Reading Room at the Library at Pratt, Brooklyn Campus to Franklin Furnace online LOFT performance space
Reconstruction of the very first Future of the Present Franklin Furnace / Pseudo Studios Netcast performance, by artist Halona Hilbertz, 25 years later to the day. Link to follow.
Tuesday, March 28, 2023 at 3-4 pm ET
Dragging the Archive Closing Panel with Elly Clarke, Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez, Halona Hilbertz and Martha Wilson. Online at the LOFT. Booking link to follow.
See this (updateable!) press release online HERE.
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#Sergina's Desperately Delicious Data Delivery
Spill Think Tank, Ipswich, 14th July 2022
Meet #Sergina, a border-straddling, multi-bodied drag queen who uses data gathered from her audiences to create performances about love, lust and loneliness.
Created by artist Elly Clarke and performed by several different people (of all genders), #Sergina and her Handsome “Boys” have performed in venues across the UK, Europe and North America, collecting data from members of the public about their mental wellbeing to use as the basis for this new work
Come prepared for pop songs, participatory activities and Google Forms…
Elly Clarke is an artist based in Felixstowe and London. Their work explores the role of the body in a digital world using video, photography, music, writing, community-based projects and their drag character #Sergina. Elly is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Booking & more info here: https://www.spillfestival.com/elly-clarke
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21ST APRIL - 21ST JUNE 2022: Artists’ Books from Franklin Furnace Archive, 1976-2022
The Library, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NYC.
My book is 'Alternative Funding Strategy (ebay)' from 2005/6.
Franklin Furnace actively collects, preserves, and presents art in book form published internationally since 1976. The Franklin Furnace Artists’ Books Collection reflects contemporary artist’s experiments with the book form as a provocative medium, as well as their inquiries into the role of books in our culture and the digital age.
Artists’ books have challenged centuries of artistic tradition and have finally begun to be acknowledged as valuable to art history. ??The revolutionary concept of the artists’ book lies in granting artistic status to a commonplace, non-precious, and widely-distributed object through the choices and designations of the artist. Franklin Furnace accepts it at face value when an artist calls their work an artists’ book. The mission of Franklin Furnace’s collection is to promote boundary-breaking bookworks that challenge the entrenched assumptions of what constitutes art.
Curatorial Statement
As a celebration of FF’s 46th Anniversary, this exhibition highlights one artists’ book per year from 1976 to 2022, representing 60 international artists in total. Alongside the work of more traditional artists’ book-makers, and that of interdisciplinary artists whose experiences in performance or mail art influence their publications, “46” also features three new videos demonstrating the interactivity of specific artists’ books, as well as selections from The Anamorphosis Prize, 2015-17, an open competition celebrating the creativity and independent efforts of artists who self publish photo-based books. “46” explores the visual experience of books and “bookness” by highlighting innovations in physical formatting and raising questions about the relationships between the verbal and the visual, between creators and their audiences, mainstream or otherwise. With a desire to democratize and engage the public through inexpensive, wide-reaching formats, artists have made the printed book form into an “alternative space” outside the traditional gallery and museum structure.
To read an artists’ book is to experiment with notions of sequence, repetition, juxtaposition, and duration while allowing for new possibilities within the narratives, mediums, and meanings specific to each book. The works on display in “46” stretch the concept of materiality with their movable parts, specially-constructed containers, and easily-distributed formats including newspapers and pamphlets. Some artists even use forms which preclude turning pages, encouraging the reader to interact with their works in unfamiliar ways, such as flipping, turning, scratching, scrolling, and unfolding.
“46: Artists’ Books from Franklin Furnace Archive, 1976-2022,” the 7th Annual Live at the Library exhibition, is curated by Fang-Yu Liu and Nicole Rosengurt and presented in honor of Michael Katchen, Senior Archivist, Franklin Furnace, in partnership with Pratt Institute Library and support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
MORE INFO: http://franklinfurnace.org/46-artists-books-exhibition/
On June 7th I am participating in a Panel along with two other aritsts from this exhibition.
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Material data from my first collaboration with Andrea Khora is on show in the PhD building at Goldsmiths, University of London 23-27th May 2022. Do come by if you’re in town! An installation by Susuana Amoah is running alongside it. More info follows:
Yeah, I was in this costume a few times! [spoilers.] Do you remember when we met?
A collaboration between Goldsmiths PhD art candidates Elly Clarke and Andrea Khora involving method swapping, (consensual) handing over of agency and (financial) investment in the process.
Words:
Drag
Love
Communication
Machines
Fluttering darkness
Intravenous injection
Undulating flesh
Hospital corridor
Blue blanket
+/- 60 more
Machines:
WhatsApp
VQGAN + Clip
GPT-2
DJ Pro
Epson Projector
Material:
Habotai Silk
A4 paper
A2 posters
Magnets
Wire
Method:
Artist A hands over agency + three images + four key words to Artist B who hands over partial agency to VQGAN + Clip which exports 4000 .png images + one .mp4 moving image file which Artist B hands back to Artist A along with their own .png image folder + .mov + .mp4 files and agency, which Artist A inputs to DJ Pro. There, all media is mixed together over a period of approximately 15 mins to the sounds of Laurie Anderson, Wolfram, Stefflon Don, HVOB, Kraftwerk and others. This is exported as a .mov file from which Artist A takes a series of screenshots that are shared with Artist B. From these, three images are selected for print. Meanwhile Artist B hands over some of the same words given to VQGAN + Clip and more agency to GPT-2 out which the title Yeah, I was in this costume a few times! [spoilers.] Do you remember when we met? was generated.
This installation of images and silks is part of the PhD Art Programme’s Installation series, which artist researchers at Goldsmiths use as an experimental space to test new things out and as a catalyst for conversations around art as research, research as art and materiality / things in real space. This is our first collaboration.
Opening Times:
Tuesday 24th-Friday 27th May, 11-5pm or by request. Dm for info on pv.
Location:
43 Lewisham Way, SE14 6QD.
A phone number will be on the door to call for entry.
Links:
Installation Photos
Collaboratively made video from which the 3 collaborative prints were made:
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PROXY BODIES goes to Chicago!
Chicago Art Department presents
Proxy Bodies 2.0 8th - 30th April 2022
Opening reception: Friday April 8th, 6-10pm.
Artists Talk in person and Virtually Saturday 30th April, at 12:00 noon Chicago time/ 6pm UK. See HERE for more info & Zoom link.
Proxy Bodies is an ongoing collaborative exhibition initiated by UK-based artist and performer Elly Clarke in 2021. Through photography, performance, embroidery, drawing, painting, video and QR codes, Proxy Bodies explores ideas and lived realities of having and keeping a body going in an uber-connected, politically & ecologically unstable world. Since the first iteration of this exhibition in Felixstowe, UK last September, the notion - and reality - of proxy bodies has shifted yet again, due to the Ukraine war and ongoing ecological & humanitarian crises in Europe and beyond…
In Clareese Hill’s photo series Conjuring from the Rhizome, ancestral and critical diasporic knowledges are activated through a ceremony to create spaces of rest, in what Hill calls a ‘post identity portal’. In these ceremonies, the artist conjures up The GUIDE, who is a triadic collaboration of Black knowledges, autoethnographic mining and ambivalence of participation within the academic conventions of research.
Traces of a Performance by Elly Clarke is a screenshot (with accompanying video extract) from a rediscovered recording of a rehearsal for a VJ performance Clarke did as her drag alter ego #Sergina in a former Nunnery in France in 2019. Printed on Habotai silk, the digital screenshot becomes a banner and/or a portable virtual (/real) background for Zoom calls. Meanwhile Airdrop (I want your data) is a seductive call for data for a wellbeing questionnaire, accessed via a QR code.
Galina Shevchenko’s Proxy Bodies/ Madonnas series, created for the 2nd iteration of Proxy Bodies, are an outcry of despair and hope, a visceral visual response to the dehumanising impact of war. Emerging as iPad drawings, the images evolve to become digital embroideries through custom-developed algorithms, channelling the processes of artificial cross-breeding. This work is inspired by Donna Haraway’s Cyborg manifesto, Ukrainian traditional embroidery patterns and Shevchenko’s ongoing research into Renaissance Grotesques.
Bryony Graham had to develop a new relationship to her body and society after becoming disabled through illness with a chronic pain condition. Album (1991/1999) spans the before and after the onset of this - from an album of photos in 1991 to an album with the photos taken out in 1999, leaving only the photo corners. Rub, is an ongoing series of rubbings of pain med blister packs, which for a while were the only thing Graham could do. In her work as an artist and founder of Felixstowe-based project space Hamilton MAS (where the first iteration of Proxy Bodies took place), Graham is interested in finding ways to make invisible support structures both visible and useful, with particular regard for people living with long term health conditions.
Performed in different places around the world over the past five years, Dominique Savitri Bonarjee’s Collapse is a ritual of resistance and surrender, a practice for listening to gravity, time, the weather, the climate, and the movements of an expanded field of aliveness. As part of Proxy Bodies In Felixstowe, Collapse #9 took place on the beach, surprising a Saturday afternoon crowd of families and beer drinkers with a 30 minute slow collapse of the artist,, from standing to lying down on the sand. www.dominiquebb.com
Brought in for this second episode of Proxy Bodies, Chicago based, Ukranian born artist Elena Pach’s paintings muse with subjective tension, employing multitude of fractured fragments of sight, sound, scent, and memories; appearing as deconstructed amalgamation of barely recognizable fairy tale, evoking a sense of timelessness.
And finally, the work of New York & Chicago based artist Maria Dimanshtein dives into intimate existential ponderings that will ring true to most. In her text-based drawings, Dimanshtein brings up for discussion the unwelcome and rejected aspects of the human experience: anxiety, loneliness, heartbreak, disconnectedness. Taken out of the confines of a traditional book and placed onto the gallery wall, poems explode with primeval immediacy.
Episode 2 of Proxy Bodies is curated by Galina Shevchenko, with hands on installation help from Clareese Hill. We are grateful to all who have helped Proxy Bodies (2) arrive at this place - including Elly Clarke’s PhD funders CHASE Doctoral Training Programme, for supporting the origins of this show.
Proxy Bodies 2.0 will also be a fundraising site, joining efforts with the Ukraine TrustChain organisation that helps fund aid and evacuations for Ukrainians in the active war zone. Our small teams go where big international orgs can’t, to provide urgent food, medical supplies, and rides to safety. Artworks featured in the show will become available for sale as wearable art items through the Ukraine TrustChain fundraising ArtMerch initiative, which will launch on April 8.
www.ukrainetrustchain.org
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MIXED BAG
Mixed Bag is a group exhibition by the PhD Art cohort at Goldsmiths College.
See email sent out about this on 18.2.22 HERE.
Open: Wed 23 - Sat 26 Feb, 12-8pm
Opening event: Wed 23 6-8pm
Location: St James Hatcham Building, 25 St James's, London SE14 6AD
Performance evening: Fri 25th, 6-8pm, no booking required.
Information here: https://padlet.com/mixedbag2022/mixedbagexhibition
Artists:
Dominique Savitri Bonarjee
Irina Botea Bucan
Elly Clarke with Kit Kuksenok
Morag Colquhoun
Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh
Rowena Harris
Clareese Hill
Marie-Alix Isdahl
Bridget Kennedy
Andrea Khôra
Sophie Sleigh-Johnson
Jessie McLaughlin
Kate Pickering
Katarina Rankovic with Nina Davies
Find our evolving exhibition text here: https://pad.riseup.net/p/mixtape-keep and more about the new work I am making for it in collaboration with artist/research Kit Kuksenokhere.
Image credit: Rising Damp, Sophie-Sleigh Johnson, 2020”
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See quarterly newsletter sent 15th December 2021.
27TH JANUARY 2022 15-17 CET LIVE PRESENTATION OF MY & CLAREESE HILL'S ONGOING MIXTAPE COLLABORATION AS PART OF RENDERING RESEARCH AT TRANSMEDIALE
Excited to be involved (in collaboration with Clareese Hill) in Transmediale 2022 PhD workshop #RenderingResearch, organised by Aarhus University and the Centre for the Research of the Networked Image at Southbank University.
On 27th Jan from 15-17 Central European Time the group is presenting research extracts via zoom. This, and the whole transmediale symposium is both online & completely free to attend this year!
More info about the Rendering Research Sharing Event is here. Or click on the image.
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11th JANUARY 2022: HOW ARE YOU? DIGITAL PARTICIPATORY SOAP OPERA ABOUT WELLBEING IN THE DIGITAL AGE - ONLINE as part of Axisweb's Mental Health Week.
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WRITING THE ROOMS AT SEE U IN BRUSSELS 16-18 DECEMBER 2021
With live collaborative writing sessions on Thursday 16th December at 19:30 and 21:30 CST and open to write into until Saturday 18th December, coinciding with a physical installation.
Writing the Rooms was a collaborative writing session I lead as part of the Down Dwars Delà residency I took part in at Bidston Observatory near Liverpool in August. The idea for this writing together emerged during the course of the week, during which we imagined various hi/stories of the building and its uses over time - namely as a (massive) tool of measurement and observation. Built in 1866, the Observatory facilitated humans and machines to collaborate in meticulous analyses of time, latitude, the stars, and meteorological, tidal and marine data - much of which was used for [extractivist and colonial] methods of 'knowing' the world. We wrote [in] three rooms: The Weather Station at the top of the building; the Dorm Room and the Sub Basement (pictured above.)
From 16th-18th December, an unfolding of ideas generated during this week is being presented at See U in Brussels - and includes a presentation of extracts of these textual encounters in print form, as well as the opportunity to re-write these rooms. There is also an invitation to write new ones together - from See U and from wherever everybody physically finds themselves at this time.
Access and contribute to this writing the rooms heree.
Grateful to all at Constant for the week at Bidston, as well as for the chance to present this project in Brussels.
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MIXTAPE / SHUFFLE PLAY: a collaborative text written with Clareese Hill for Open Call - invited by melissandre varin. Click on the image to access the article.
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PROXY BODIES at HAMILTON MAS, FELIXSTOWE, September 2021)
Group exhibition I curated as part of my CHASE Doctoral Training Programme supported PhD Placement at Hamilton MAS in Felixstowe. With work by Bryony Graham, Clareese Hill, Dominique Savitri Bonarjee, Elly Clarke, Galina Shevchenko and Loula Yorke.
Opening Event 17th September 6-8pm //// Artist Talk Thursday 23rd September (on Zoom and in person), 6-8pm /// Live sonic response to the show by Loula Yorke: Friday 24th September, 7.30pm /// Live participatory performance of Collapse by Dominique Savitri on the beach closest to Hamilton MAS, Saturday 25th. /// Free entry /// More info to follow. Supported by CHASE DTP as part of my PhD Placement from Goldsmiths. Follow Hamilton MAS on Instagram for updates.
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OLD WORK AND NEW at HAMILTON MAS, FELIXSTOWE
Open evening Friday 27th August 6-8pm
FILM BY ROUX MALHERBE, AUGUST 2021
Detail of Birmingham / Berlin 8th May 2011 - Hand printed C-Print from 35mm negative from .png screengrab taken during Skype call with Linda Franke. From Conversational Traces, 2008-14.
See text about re visiting this work HERE.
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IS MY BODY OUT OF DATE? THE DRAG OF PHYSICALITY IN THE DIGTIAL AGE - EPISODE 4, AUGUST 2021 FOR IPAK'S SEXUALITY SUMMER SCHOOL.
