Annie Hägg

Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia / K-U-K – Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst / Exhibition May 6 – August 14 /
Curator: Zane Cerpina / Co-curator: Espen Gangvik

PsXCare / 2021

Annie Hägg [SE]

PsXCare takes place in a fictive future where the border between the digital and the physical is blurred, shifting between filmed and animated material.

The work portrays a feeling of alienation related to cities and constructed spaces. A feeling that stems from living in a time and place where everything is designed for specific purposes, hence steering your attention and needs much like in a video game. According to German philosopher Hartmut Rosa, alienation is a direct effect of what he calls modernity’s backside; social acceleration, often experienced in a fast-paced city environment.

Nature, either designed in the form of a city park or growing freely as a forest, is commonly seen as a place of relaxation and restoration. A place of freedom if you will. The video considers what role public spaces intended for leisure hold in society, both digital and physical, such as parks or online gaming platforms. People who spend a lot of time in nature and people who spend a lot of time in fictional digital worlds are often viewed as escaping what the rest of us are living through. But is gaming really an escapism today?

In a lecture by Hito Steyerl, Why Games? Can People in the Art World Think? She describes how people have thought historically that games or forms of play are just a form of ”emancipation from the tyranny of management and labor” – a performed escapism. However, and this she points out later, games are not purposeless from either a societal or personal perspective. According to Steyerl games function as a sort of behavioral training for people because they ”present the platonic ideals of how people thought humans should act and think”. Many video games are in fact functioning the same way as labor does, you perform a task, you receive 500 points. Actions steered by scores.

PsXCare is partly made within a Playstation game called Dreams, a so-called sandbox-game where the players themselves create environments and modes to play with, compared to games that come with fully formed content. Dreams without players is nothing more than a game engine, an empty shell, so players are customers and at the same time co-creators (only unpaid).

The character in PsXCare wants to escape society, or at least has a strong longing for leaving, and becomes absorbed by a game while looking at 3D-renders on her computer of a soon to be built park in a well-funded area, longing for the simple, nature-bound life portrayed. However, she doesn’t reach the pristine nature that often defines open-world games such as extraordinary mountain views, deep forests and vast meadows, but a small piece of land comparable to a city

park. Here she performs a digital way of park maintenance, picking up trash to keep her score at a sustainable level. This can be read as an allegory of countries’ systematic outsourcing of labor, e.g. placing dirty work such as pollution-heavy industries in other countries so as to not have to deal with your own issues.

The labor-focused narration is a comment on a new type of economy, an economy that dismantles the idea that games aren’t labor. So for a long time, games have only mimicked economic systems upon which modern society is built, as described by Steyerl. While today, many games are economical systems themselves with the expansion of cryptocurrencies. One can breed imaginational creatures, sell them as tokens and via these sales pay your rent and buy your bread. A currency development that isn’t new per se, but for the first time available to anyone with an Internet connection, highlighting how the world is and has been for a long time steered by imaginational sums of money that never touches the hand.

While games themselves often take place in beautifully curated landscapes, seemingly untouched by the human hand, the servers needed to keep these worlds going are consumers of nature, dependent on natural resources to exist. So what’s going on is an extraction of the real to create the fictive, a tree for a tree?

We often talk about the digital and the physical as something separate, the video strives to narrate a reality where these concepts are naturally connected and where common ideas about what is work and what is play are being challenged.

Annie Hägg
Annie Hägg, born in Växjö, Sweden, received her Bachelor in Fine arts from Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2021. Hägg’s work focuses on the constructed and designed aspects of modern society both from a social, economical and environmental point of view. Her practice includes storytelling as a way of articulating how characteristics of contemporary changes affect our perception of reality and emotional states, how they manifest in the mind and the body.

In her recent solo exhibition at Amaze gallery in Stockholm she exhibited the video PsXCare together with replicas of objects found in public places in the city. The use of replicas is a recurrent theme in her work, a copy-paste style that imitates a digital presentation of information. By extracting objects from their initial environment and curating them into a new context, she both highlights and alters their meaning.

Hägg’s work stretches towards multiple directions simultaneously, in accordance with her own fabricated connection and logic. These fabrications often point towards societal developments through an emotional and playful perspective, commenting on the complexity of knowledge and reality.

Header Graphics: “PsXCare” by Annie Hägg. Video Still.

Frank Ekeberg

Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia / K-U-K – Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst / Exhibition May 6 – August 14 /
Curator: Zane Cerpina / Co-curator: Espen Gangvik

Ingenmannsland / 2019

Frank Ekeberg [NO]

In his 1924 poem Stå vakt om naturen (Keep Guard over Nature), Norwegian poet and environmentalist Theodor Caspari (1853-1948) calls for “a shining `No-man’s-land ́” where “the creator is quiet” and natural forces roam. He warned against the threat posed to mountains, waters and forests and their inhabitants by “ill culture” and “fumes and roar of machines.” A no-man’s-land refers both to land undisturbed by human activities as well as to areas of conflict. The ambiguity of the expression reflects the discrepancy between the Norwegian myth of nature as plentiful, unbreakable and accessible, while at the same time it is subjected to fast-paced, destructive extraction and exploitation.

Ingenmannsland (No Man’s Land / Niemandsland) is a constantly changing, speculative soundscape highlighting issues of deforestation, resource extraction, habitat loss, species extinction and natural vs. artificial life. The installation is based on field-recordings made in old-growth forest that has been a constant for many hundred years and contributed to the Norwegian identity of closeness to nature, processed to reflect a contemporary reality of fragmentation and rapid change. The focus is in particular on the rainforest that once covered much of the west coast of Norway. Only scattered fragments remain of the rainforest today, and it is now on the red-list of endangered habitat types. 80 percent of the coastal rainforest has been lost only in the past 100 years, and it is predicted to disappear completely within the next five decades. Despite numerous warnings of species decline, loss of biodiversity and the importance of trees for carbon capture and storage, only 5 percent of Norwegian forests are currently protected, and only 3 percent of trees are older than 160 Years.

The sound material in Ingenmannsland is for the most part recorded in coastal rainforest areas in the southwest of Norway, using conventional as well as unconventional microphone techniques. Some sounds are easily recognizable, like bird calls, water dripping and rustling of leaves in the wind, while others are recordings of sounds that are normally not heard, like insects gnawing on logs and sounds of the inside of trees moving in the wind. The recordings are meticulously edited so that each component of the forest soundscape can be independently controlled and manipulated.

The installation starts off as quite a rich soundscape with sounds of birds and insects integrated with sounds of wind in trees and of water streams. Over time the sounds of wildlife gradually diminish, and many go extinct. As the day of the exhibition progresses, the sounds of birds and insects are reduced to a point where about 80 percent of the initial sound material is gone. This number reflects the assumed percentage of species that have been exterminated since the beginning of humanity, and also coincides with the percentage of the Norwegian rainforest that has been lost in the past 100 years. When a tipping point is reached, sounds start to reappear, but these are different – more static and artificial, as if we are entering another reality. The soundscape becomes a speculative environment based on projected future scenarios, and asks questions such as: What happens when forests disappear or dry out? Can our natural environment be replenished? Will it be replaced by artificial life? Is this the function of biomimicry?

Frank Ekeberg
Frank Ekeberg is a transdisciplinary artist, music composer and researcher working in the intersection of art, science and technology. He received an undergraduate degree in music from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) before he went on to pursue a master’s degree in electronic music at Mills College in Oakland, California, where he studied composition with Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Curran, and a PhD in electroacoustic music composition at City University London, UK, under Denis Smalley and Simon Emmerson’s tutelage. Ekeberg’s work explores issues of ecology, time, spatiality and transformation, with a particular focus on nature spaces, ecosystems and the interplay between human and non-human worlds. His research-based approach often involves collaborations within as well as beyond the art field. He has composed and designed sound for concert performance, dance, film, theater, radio plays and intermedia installations. His work is widely presented in festivals, exhibitions, concerts and conferences around the world, including venues such as Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany; The Peale Center in Baltimore, Maryland, USA; Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland; Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Germany; Foggy Bottom Sculpture Biennial in Washington D.C., USA; Seoul Arts Center, Korea; multiple times at the International Symposium on Electronic Art, and many more. Ekeberg was awarded the 2017 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and is currently Research Associate at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., USA. Most of the time he lives and works in Trondheim, Norway.

frankekeberg.no

Header Graphics: “Ingenmannsland” field recordings by Frank Ekeberg.

Maren Dagny Juell

Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia / K-U-K – Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst / Exhibition May 6 – August 14 /
Curator: Zane Cerpina / Co-curator: Espen Gangvik

The Party (variation 2) / 2021 – 2022

Maren Dagny Juell [NO]

A surreal post-apocalyptic home party placed in an undefined future where the location is fluid. This work focuses on 3D printed replicas of various household plastic objects, common in 2012, which take on a new role in an imagined post-plastic future.

The party-host guides the party participants through a fragmented story about and relationship with objects. Re-enacting a home party, in a world where this is not possible or relevant. Questioning ideas around Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and current collection and valuation of artifacts.

In addition to the film, a sculpture made of 3D printed objects was placed on display in the middle of an arboretum (in an archival research forest) at the University of Biosciences (NMBU) in Norway. The plastic objects are printed in PVA, a material made of corn that composts when exposed to nature. In this way everyday household objects can be thought of as a new temporary collection from the Anthropocene (human) era, but perishable and compostable.

For the new iteration, exhibited at Meta.Morf 2022: Ecophilia, the objects are literally composting in a pile of soil in the gallery. In this way, Maren aims to examine people’s unconscious consumption habits and rituals. As well as the hierarchical relationship between man, nature, and objects.

CAST
Host: Iselin Shumba
Man: Aslak Juell Kristensen
Women (from right to left):
Sarune Bartuasuite Kaupiene
Kuya Bae
Andrea Fritsvold
Yvonne Layne

CREW
Written, directed, edit, and graphics: Maren Dagny Juell
Director of photography: Mattias Pollak
B Photo: Annicken Aasheim
Light: Jon Andre Hakavåg
Sound recording: Rune Baggerud
Sound designer/composer: Arild Iversen
Colourist: Fredrik Harreschou
Makeup artist: Kristina Kvam
Production manager: Hanne Rivrud
Production assistant: Miriam Hald
Commissioned by KORO Norway
Supported by Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond and Nofofo

Maren Dagny Juell
Maren Dagny Juell (1976) is based in Ski, Norway, and works with video, Virtual Reality, and installation.

Maren has an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London and has had solo exhibitions at Tenthaus, Atelier Nord, Trafo Kunsthall, Trøndelag Center for Contemporary Art, Podium Oslo and Akershus Kunstnersenter. She has also participated in a large number of group exhibitions at home and abroad. Among others at the Astrup Fearnley Museum, Stavanger Art Museum, The Australian video Biennial and Riga Photography Biennial.

Maren co-runs She Will Artspace with Liv Tandrevold Eriksen, and Tone Berg Størseth.

marenjk.net

Header Graphics: “The Party” by Maren Dagny Juell. Video Still.