Georgina Rowlands (London, England, UK)
Administrator (duration 15 min)
Watch: 16th May 2017 at 4pm UTC
DESCRIPTION: Utilising news articles sourced from Facebook, deriving from personalised targeted advertising. The performer sits within a set of entirely white furniture, through the process of vocalising the content of the news media through spoken word, all text containing emotional language is written in the politically potent colours of red and blue onto the furniture and eventually onto the body of the performer. The process references the spiritual method of ‘automatic writing’ and displays the difficulty of political jargon, exposing the use of emotional language to create political influence. The performance attempts to explore issues surrounding data, news media and propaganda. The effect of the relayed information creates a destruction of context and meaning from the politically derived text. Responding to both a saturation of political discourse and structures of surveillance, the work references the ‘culture of fear’ -the media strategy of inciting fear in the general public to achieve political goals through emotional bias.
BIO: Born in Merseyside, England but currently based in London. My current practice sits between performance art and sculptural assemblage. I use the methods of online live-streaming and physical installation to explore issues surrounding data, news media and propaganda. In more recent work I have moved towards a focus on performing with technology, this use and dependency on technology within the work allows for the questioning of our relationship with the digital world and more notably; exploring how the internet informs our political discourse. I am drawn to the exploration of power structures within society and in negotiating the technological tools such facial recognition and surveillance, I reference the motives of privacy activists through physical acts of resistance such as physically obscuring my identity. I work individually and as part of a collaborative duo with the artist Emily Roderick. Due to the long distance between us, our current performance work takes place over Skype and Facebook Video Chat. This format allows the notions of physical and digital space to come into question, as we experience both our physical and digital selves whilst performing. Artist Website