Erin Mitchell

b. 1989, United States
Based in Berlin, Germany
(she/her)

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Erin Mitchell

b. 1989, US
Based in Berlin, Germany
(she/her)

Email
Instagram
About
Trust Is The Ultimate Currency

Trust Is The Ultimate Currency,  presented at Harlesden High Street in conjunction with isthisit?, is a group exhibition featuring new and previous work from 11 UK and international artists.

The exhibition is an accompaniment to the sixth issue of the isthisit? which looks critically at the rise of fake news, alternative facts and clickbait.

Featuring Bob Bicknell-Knight, Ami Clarke, Débora Delmar, Ollie Dook, Tom Galle, Eloise Hawser, Botond Keresztesi, Erin Mitchell, Charlie Godet Thomas, Frank Wasser and Thomas Yeomans.

Curated by Bob Bicknell-Knight

Press Release︎︎︎

Description

Trust Is The Ultimate Currency seeks to consider the importance of the news, questioning why fake news and alternative facts have become throwaway catchphrases, overwhelming and frightening to the mainstream media whilst enabling small groups and organisations to spark outrage and anger by manipulating imagery and falsifying realities. The exhibition bring together works critiquing, commenting and reflecting upon the rise of the media circus, documenting the decline in the relevance and reliability of the news and wondering whether citizen journalism is a worthy replacement.

Trust Is The Ultimate Currency is an accompaniment to the sixth issue of the isthisit? book, which launched at SPACE’s Art+Technology programme on the 31st January, looking at fake news, alternative facts and the rise of clickbait.

isthisit? is a platform for contemporary art, exhibiting over 700 artists since its creation in May 2016, founded by it current director, artist and curator Bob Bicknell-Knight. Online, it operates as a gallery producing monthly exhibitions showcasing emerging to mid-career artists, hosting a roster of guest curators experimenting with the medium of the internet to interrogate a variety of concepts. The website also hosts monthly residencies, where artists are given a web page to create new work that exists on the internet as a piece of net art. Offline, it has held exhibitions nationally andinternationally and is the publisher of isthisit?, a book series released on a triannual basis.

Bob Bicknell-Knight‘s sculptural work Unattended Bag (2018) takes the form of a custom made handbag featuring slogan from a recent Facebook advertising campaign launched in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, whereby it was revealed that illegal data harvesting on the platform had occurred on a world-wide scale during the 2015/2016 United States presidential election campaign and the 2016 Brexit vote. The unattended bag, referencing the continued threat represented by unattended luggage in public and private spaces, contains a number of shredded newspapers accompanied by a 3D print of Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg’s head. The attached USB contains all of Bicknell-Knight’s Faceboo data since joining the social media platform over 10 years ago. Also included in the show is Dinner with Mark (2019),  recent painting that depicts Zuckerberg holding a severed goats head on a wooden spike whilst giving a speech at a conference. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stated that there was a year when Zuckerberg was only eating what he was killing, and had six goats on his property at any one time. Supposedly he would stun goats with a taser, cut their throat with a knife and have their bodies sent to a butcher to prepare. Being served goal for dinner whilst attending a dinner party at Zuckerberg’s house was Dorsey’s most memorable encounter with Zuckerberg.

Ami Clarke’s Low Animal Spirits (2014) is a piece of software made in collaboration with Richard Cochrane, ex-vice president of Goldman Sachs, and takes its cue from the oft-mentioned loss of the referent in both language and the economy speculated about wildly after the economic collapse of 2008. It deploys an HFT algorithm that ‘deals’ in words sourced from global news feeds for virtual ‘profit’, whilst speculating on their usage. The analysis produces new phenomena in the form of speculative headlines tweeted from the twitterbot: @LowAnimalSpirit. The work considers what happens when news is produced and distributed through highly volatile environments driven by statistical analysis. Also included in the show is Breaking News Flash Crash (2014), a steel sculpture that depicts the drop in the market after the Associated Press twitter hack of 2013, pointing to how inter-dependent social media and the calculus of the financial markets had become, through a process of analysis and prediction of past and future behaviours.

Débora Delmar‘s Canto I (Mayfair Businessman) (2018) is part of a series of works whereby the artist has taken offcuts from bespoke business suits to create abstract corporate compositions, relics from a past that saw businessmen donning three piece suits for work, rather than the same grey t-shirt worn by social media companies’ CEOs. Ollie Dook‘s Animal Stories (2018) takes multiple strands of reoccurring and memetic ideas of the animal image that are primarily accessed and shared via the means of YouTube, and re-told in an episodic tale harking back to the traditions of Disney’s ‘Silly Symphony’ series, that would re-tell traditional fairy tales for a new generation. Via the surreal and plasmatic visions of his animators, the vivid shine of Technicolor and the freshness of multi-plane technology, these stories could be told as never before. Tom Galle‘s sculpture Revolting MacBook Air (2018) is a MacBook Air covered in graffiti in different styles copied from different corporate and monetary websites, depicting various slogans and aphorisms associated with data misuse, from “make data people again” to “my phone, my nudes!”. As with most forms of graffiti, the piece can be seen as a form of protest, against companies and large conglomerates that utilise and misuse their user’s data, a protest being made directly onto a device that’s been used to feed the internet with Galle’s data.

Eloise Hawser’s Sedentex CT IQ Phantom/Virtual Human Male Pelvis Phantom (2018) is a collage of source imagery from the CIRS Tissue Simulation & Phantom Technology. Phantoms are specially designed objects used to test medical imaging equipment such as X-Rays, MRI and CT scanners in place of a human. The purpose these machines is to better understand physical and natural phenomena. These devices, as well as showing how quickly technology is progressing, in turn expose how little is known about the human body. Medical phantom producers have created innovative physical objects to assess how accurately MRI and ultrasound are comprehending flow systems within human bodies. However, what these objects show is that, whilst we are inching toward more accurate readings, the technology still has considerable blind spots that reveal just how mysterious the human body’s patterns and movements remain, continuing to elude the grasp of machine technology, an antidote to the much-discussed idea of overwhelming machine intelligence and control.

Botond Keresztesi‘s The Satan’s Dog (2019) is a new drawing by the artist, depicting a Boston Dynamics robot dog body, with the head of an Anubis accompanied by raptor legs and bat wings, searching for the bones from a Fra Angelico mid age painting. The autonomous robot dog, Spot, is still in development by the company, creating media buzz around the dangers of AI whenever new footage surfaces. Keresztesi uses found material to create surreal compositions, dreamlike and sometimes eerie, his work connects digital images, internet surfaces, cybernated realties, infomercials and avant-garde culture in a stream of consciousness, floating across the paper’s surface.

Erin Mitchell’s video performance Erin Mitchell: The Future of Virtual Nature (2018) is a talk presented by the artist at a virtual location specified only by its geographic coordinates, loosely associated and hosted in conjunction with TEDx and the TED organization. Reflecting on the privileged origins of the TED organization and the compellingly presented, feel-good pop-science that has become a hallmark of the widely-recognized TED Talk, Mitchell turns the tables on TED by hosting her own satirical talk on the commodified natural virtual environments she examines in her work. Co-opting the presumed authority of a TED speaker, she uses confident assertions and persuasive language to inspire viewers to leave behind the limitations of the natural environments around them for a more enticing future product experience that will be “as easy as updating your current operating system and as affordable as the latest iPhone X.” Portraying an alternative version of herself, Mitchell makes intentionally bold claims and sweeping generalizations with conviction and gusto while providing little or no evidence to support her statements.

Charlie Godet Thomas’s wall based sculpture Go Configure (2019) is a continuation of the artists interest in fusing the stylistic qualities of both newspaper cartoon strips and the archaic form of the illuminated manuscript, old and new formal amalgamations of of combining writing and imagery. The text embedded within the work feels like a warning against being too enmeshed within a network of information, a network that will keep asking more of its user until it’s eventually too late, akin to our relationship with social media applications or our overdependence on our technological devices. Frank Wasser’s Detritus 1 (2019) is a sculpture comprised of newspapers fabricated by the artist and discarded on the top of bus stops in South London, alongside living Moss grown in South London that feeds on newspapers, string and water. Also included in the exhibition is Detritus and Errors (2019), a 32 page newspaper containing a selection of failed works, annotated research including errors on Wikipedia and a selection of images including the work 2.11.2020 (2018) previously exhibited at Jerwood Arts. 2.11.2020 (2018) is a fragment of a fictional future edition of the Metro newspaper, confronting the viewer with a series of questions and possible outcomes in response to the political instability of the current climate, which leads with the story of Donald Trump’s assassination in November 2020, accompanied by subtly edited photographs and adjusted advertisements. News tells of PM Jeremy Corbyn, the White Pube winning the Turner Prize and calls for a referendum on a United Ireland as a result of fallout from a NO DEAL Brexit.

Thomas Yeomans’ Flat Earth (2018) and Crisis Actor (2018) are digital images fabricated as light boxes, adding a commercial language to the propagandist aesthetics of fictionalised flags. Both Flat Earth and Crisis Actor utilise contemporary issues surrounding misinformation and alternative facts to imagine a world where those that hold these ideologies have formed their own country or institution.
isthisit? Issue O6

The sixth issue of the isthisit? book considers the importance of the news, questioning why fake news and alternative facts have become throwaway catchphrases, overwhelming and frightening to the mainstream media whilst enabling small groups and organisations to spark outrage and anger by manipulating imagery and falsifying realities.

Featuring AES+F, Diann Bauer, Amanda Beech, Bob Bicknell-Knight, Ami Clarke, Kirsten Cooke, Sandrine Deumier, Ollie Dook, Raphael Fabre, Beverley Gadsden, Tom Galle, Thomas Grogan, Benjamin Grosser, Alif Ibrahim, Melanie Jackson, Mathias Jansson, Ayesha Tan Jones, Susie Kahlich, Botond Keresztesi, Andrea Khora, Hun Kyu Kim, Tomasz Kobialka, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Vanessa Kowalski, Jonas Lund, Brianna Leatherbury, Eva and Franco Mattes, Erin Mitchell, Paula Morison, Claire Potter, Natalya Serkova, Tai Shani, Linda Stupart, Lynton Talbot, Charlie Godet Thomas, Frank WasserTrystan Williams and Thomas Yeomans.

Press Release︎︎︎
Front Cover: AES+F, New Liberty, 1996. Digital collage, c-print. Courtesy of the artists.
Back Cover: Benjamin Grosser, Safebook, 2018. Web browser plugin. Courtesy of the artist.
The book includes artwork and essays from 38 artists, writers, curators and collectives including AES+F, Diann Bauer, Amanda Beech, Bob Bicknell-Knight, Ami Clarke, Kirsten Cooke, Sandrine Deumier, Ollie Dook, Raphael Fabre, Beverley Gadsden, Tom Galle, Thomas Grogan, Benjamin Grosser, Alif Ibrahim, Melanie Jackson, Mathias Jansson, Ayesha Tan Jones, Susie Kahlich, Botond Keresztesi, Andrea Khora, Hun Kyu Kim, Tomasz Kobialka, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Vanessa Kowalski, Jonas Lund, Brianna Leatherbury, Eva and Franco Mattes, Erin Mitchell, Paula Morison, Claire Potter, Natalya Serkova, Tai Shani, Linda Stupart, Lynton Talbot, Charlie Godet Thomas, Frank Wasser, Trystan Williams and Thomas Yeomans.

The sixth issue of the isthisit? book contain artworks and essays from 38 artists, writers, curators and collectives. Over the past few years the series has touched upon a variety of topics, from the rise of memes and appropriation on the internet to how forms of Artificial Intelligence have and will continue to be utilised within homes and various industries throughout the world. The sixth issue considers the importance of the news, questioning why fake news and alternative facts have become throwaway catchphrases, overwhelming and frightening to the mainstream media whilst enabling small groups and organisations to spark outrage and anger by manipulating imagery and falsifying realities.

Corporations have become unreliable and untrustworthy to the average user due to the proliferation of fake and unassessed news stories that appear on our social media timelines and across a variety of pre-purchased ad space. Legitimate news outlets are hungry to be the first to feed on the corpse of a fresh piece of news, quickly turning to scraps and clickbait as lesser known, illegitimate websites and papers swoop in to create meme-filled articles on death and destruction, focusing on the worst, most readable aspects of our society. Since the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, media organisations have been forced to compete, leading to a severe decline in journalistic standards and quality news reporting, moving towards sensationalism, entertainment and opinion, and away from verification, relevance, depth and quality of interpretation.

The issue seeks to bring together a number of works and 10 texts critiquing, commenting and reflecting upon the rise of the media circus, documenting the decline in the relevance and reliability of the news and wondering whether citizen journalism is a worthy replacement.
108 pages / 197 x 132 mm / Full colour printing / Perfect bound / 200 gsm silk paper cover / matt lamination finish / 100 gsm uncoated paper inside / edition of 100
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