31 October 2013 – 5 January 2014, Watermans Gallery FREE

Exhibition opening event: Friday 1 November, 19.00-21.00

Watermans’ annual exhibition showcasing the emerging talent in the field of digital art, design and media production.  This year’s exhibition includes innovative work ranging from interactive installation, film, architecture and environments, photography and sculpture.

Participating artists:

Aisyah Ajib

The Institute of Shifting Columns
Carl Jung defined synchronicity as ‘meaningful coincidence, significantly related patterns of chance’. To discover how synchronicity can play a role in our objective, physical universe is one of the major challenges of the institute. The institute’s research lies within the discourse on present-century ‘colonisation’ and the related industrial histories of British and the Far East that has catalysed the global circuits of metal production.

Focusing on tin, a metal central to contemporary technology, and its extended ecologies, the proposal takes cue from Marcel Duchamp’s tradition of ‘readymades’ by taking a piece of existing infrastructure (in this case a past-century bucket line dredger used to unearth alluvial tin deposits in Malaysia) and bringing it back to a trading location in the City that governs the global metals pricing: the London Metal Exchange (founded in 1877 and bought over by Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing in December 2012).

The existing building then becomes a pedestal, monumentalising the infrastructure that becomes a physical representation of these invisible global networks and issues on tin. In the need to re-engage with the cycles of processes involved, the institute brings together various participants in the metals industry through a series of extensions and interventions that propound the future of metals trading, ethical mining and the cutting edge of laboratory research on e-waste recycling into one interface.

Pradeep Balasubramanian

The Prototype
The Prototype is a series of video simulations using motion graphics with a focus on conceptual data visualizations for the finance sector. In the ever growing acceptance that data plays a vital role in the efficiency of the delivery of products, user engagement, and profit, the method in which data is visualized provides a unique opportunity for comprehension. Taking a much more elaborate conceptual approach to data visualization with respect to the financial sector, The Prototype provides three unique visualizations of data; The Global View Point, Comparison Graphs & Historical Trends.

Biography:
Pradeep explores methods of incorporating data into the creative work he produces, to increase user engagement. His expertise within motion graphics and developing programs for the Microsoft Kinect has positioned him to advance the creative visual narrative.

Kabir Kanabar

The Blue Mirari – Running time: 5:29s

Using the language of cinema The Blue Mirari explores the phenomena of mirage and myth into a film which plays on perspective and its potential to seduce. The film affiliates elements in sci-fi poetry drawing on such phenomena that appears differently to our eyes as it actually is where fiction and myth override fact.

Biography
Kabir was born in Glasgow and graduated in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in 2013. www.kabirkanabar.co.uk

Mitra Saboury

Domesticated Dust, 2013
Space is what arrests us, what our eyes glance over, obstacles, walls, vanishing points. Perimeters of architecture steer people to move and behave… walls and the size of a building and its materiality and distance from the street. Domesticated Dust focuses on the delicate destruction that happens within space, and the impact of deterioration on the individual.

Biography:
Mitra Saboury grew up on a grid in middle America. She holds her Bachelors of Science in neuroscience and has just completed her Masters of Fine Art at Goldsmiths. She is currently based in London. http://www.mitrasaboury.com/

Radha Mistry

Apocalypse Now?
Addressing the designer’s role as mediator of our future environment, a series of micro-interventions woven into the fabric of Florence, Venice and New Orleans provide a commentary on the implications of possible future scenarios. This project uses tangible artefacts to tell stories about the future. The project is built on the notion that innovation can be cultivated through direct action. By taking global drivers, applying future narratives within local contexts, and shaping personal experiences through the designing and making of future artefacts, the project presents an alternate approach to addressing the many uncertainties of our future by placing people at the centre of the futurology argument. www.noherd.com

Biography:
Radha Mistry has a background in Architecture, and graduated with an M.Arch from Tulane University. Radha is currently based in London, and has recently completed a second Master’s from Central Saint Martins; which focuses on narrative environments utilizing elements of interactive media and communication design to enhance user experience.www.radhamistry.com

Ayesha Singh

Appropriated and Distorted
Ayesha Singh’s works stem from her research into post-colonial theory and architecture. They move between the virtual and the object and explore the work’s transformation through various media platforms. The structure is a colonial totem located in New Delhi. Its lower half mimics Indian architectural curves while its upper half houses a map, which generally Indians barely use, the colour and intention of which has long since faded. The notion of abandonment has constantly been projected onto this structure, firstly as it fails to carry out the purpose for which it was made, secondly by the mat seller who adorned the structure with hand woven mats which have not been touched or moved since the artist started visiting it. And lastly, by the civil society as it now leans on one side, its plaster cracking and its paint fading.

The Mimicked Colonial Structure with Mimicked Weave was the artist’s first response to a virtual representation of the structure and a play on the appropriation of colonial architecture this structure embodies. TheTorn Poster Divided shows a documentation of the physical structure wrapped by the artist in the mimic of the weave of the mat seller. It is presented as the vital remnants of a poster of the image that had been torn and slashed away. Appropriated and Distorted is a digital print on cloth of Ayesha’s physical recreation of the structure in London. The anachronistic structure as such is an appropriation of the original image; an appropriation of culture, of significance, of colour, indulgence and her intentional translation of the object whose mass, history and authority she has been fascinated by. The title hints at the process of its creation: that of the physical appropriation of the structure and the distortion of the original structure which has been decoded through different mediums, ideas and now hangs as an invitation into a space which no longer exists in physicality.

Biography:
Ayesha Singh completed her Bachelors in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art (2013) and has a Foundation Degree from the Chelsea College of Art and Design (2010). She currently resides in New Delhi.

Rebecca Vafiadis, Nadia Ahdout, Seulbi Lee and Krishnan Vijayaraghavan

Tweeting Piano
‘Tweeting Piano’ is an interactive musical installation. This is a 90 year-old piano that we found on Freecycle. From the outside, it still looks and plays as a normal acoustic piano. The only difference is: the keyboard has been fitted with sensors, so each key is now a digital input. Using a pentatonic scale, we’ve allocated the letters of the alphabet and some common characters to the keys. Users are invited to ‘type’ a message using the piano’s keyboard, and send it via the piano’s Twitter account @tweetingpiano. The Tweet is sent along with a sound file of how the Tweet ‘sounds’ when it is played. http://www.tpiano.co.uk/

Biographies:
Rebecca Vafiadis is a Strategist and Product Manager with over 5 years’ professional experience as a project manager with Condé Nast Digital (Vogue, Glamour, Wired, GQ, CN Traveller), Gyro and How Splendid. She studied BA French & Russian at Bristol for her first degree.

Nadia Ahdout is an art director with a background in magazine design and launch in both the USA and UK. Her expertise is in art direction of design, photography and illustration, across diverse environments for magazines, newspaper and online media. Titles include Cosmopolitan, Maxim, Prima, Stuff and Wall Street Journal.

Seulbi Lee is a UI/visual designer with over 4 years’ professional experience. Seulbi has worked as Web Advertising Designer and Web Designer with companies such as SK Telecom, HTC, Sony and MISSHA in South Korea, and ROLI in the UK.

Krishnan Vijayaraghavan is a UX Designer and designs products that are functional, beautiful and easy to use. He has 4 years of experience along with a rich academic background. He has worked for internationally renowned clients and also assisted several start-ups.

Bindi Vora

Lustre, 2013
Lustre is a series of twenty photographs exploring the surface of a single sheet of processed chromogenic colour paper. This project stems from the experience of seeing a photographic print rip hours before the opening of an exhibition. It reflects upon the value we assign to printed images, the way photographs are handled and preserved, as a memento and commodity. The material itself is mass-produced until an image is recorded onto the emulsion; only when this sheet is developed does it become a meaningful object.

Lustre explores our engagement with the photograph as an object, creasing and bending the paper support until an irreversible mark appears, and the flat plane of paper becomes a sculpture. In the absence of an image, the traces left by handling are the only meaningful signs.

Re-photographed in large format, the paper is returned to its original two-dimensional form. Its emphatic blankness heightens the ambiguity of photographic space. The white surface, takes on an ethereal quality, the illusion of marks held in tension with the flatness of the image. The expanse of white blurs the distinction between the edges of the paper and the edges of the image, playing with our perception of illusion and reality.

Biography
Bindi Vora (b. 1991) is a contemporary photographic artist. Bindi recently graduated from University of Westminster with a BA in Photographic Arts (First Class Honours). She has participated in several group exhibitions in London and Switzerland; has been published several times within edition magazine Balkon & Garten, Germany, as well as appearing on various websites including Troika Editions, Mull it Over and For Example. She lives and works in London http://www.bindivora.co.uk