ANTENNA
Debris Facility & Bridget Chappell
9 September - 30 September 2023
Debris Facility and Bridget Chappell, ANTENNA (2023), digital graphic, courtesy of the artists © Debris Facility and Bridget Chappell
ANTENNA is a collaborative project by Debris Facility and Bridget Chappell which tunes into the disruptive, discursive and joyous potential of radio, transmission and localised distribution. By re-turning the dial both conceptually and literally on pirate radio, the artists sketch out blueprints for autonomous and micro cultural ecologies, embracing the possibilities of “narrowcasting” – the rejection of mass audience. Occupying the unused spaces and frequencies, ANNTENA provides breaks amongst the commercial stations.
The antenna is a speculation and production method of what it means to tune into, listen, and develop cultures around exchange, interdependence, critical reflections and collective organised chaos and partying. Resonating with the histories, aesthetics and tactics of pirate radio, illegal raves, bootlegging, counterfeits, theft, glitch, artistic pranks and hacking, the artists align with rupture.
Debris and Bridget flip the antenna from being a passive receiver to being one of agency and production, who has the ears and embodiment to tune into the many frequencies at hand. The artists attune to the localised and direct ways to produce and disseminate works to each other, in spite of the ongoing hegemonic forces of platform cultures and corporations. Through this distributed and participatory project, the artists invite you to share in the generative process of re-making existing media infrastructure into something which can be played, shared and driven to excess.
Debris Facility is a para-corporate entity founded in 2015 from the rubble of a single artist's practice. The Facility’s operations parasite onto processes between commodity and embodiments. Their cultural labour is engaged in queering hierarchies of value through producing artworks, installations, events, administrative interventions, discourse and design. They have exhibited and produced works in local, national and international contexts, in galleries, performance spaces, publications, online and elsewhere. They teach at the Victorian College of the Arts; their work is held in private collections and landfill.
Bridget Chappell is a reformed artist still making art. She enjoys tinkering with sound technology; writing essays, poems, and particular letters; putting on raves. She produces and DJs as Hextape, founded and ran Sound School in Naarm, and maintains a good network of borrowed cellos around Oceania for classical shows.
Debris Facility and Bridget Chappell are collaborators shoehorning themselves into unattended FM frequencies, buildings, technologies, mediums, etc.
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OPENING
6-8pm, Friday 8 September 2023
JWAC Gallery, 420 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley
ANTENNA AMPLIFIED: Panel Discussion
11am, Saturday 23 September 2023
JWAC Gallery, 420 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley
Join us on Saturday 23 September at 11am for ANTENNA Amplified, a panel discussion expanding on the themes of our current exhibition: ANTENNA by Debris Facility and Bridget Chappell. Facilitated by Outer Space board member Amelia McLeish, panelists Anna Carlson, Leif Arwen Gifford and Debris Facility will ruminate on the exhibition's themes of discursive localised distribution, commodity economy, cultural labour, cultures of interdependence and the generative potential of interactive hacked sound technologies.
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JWAC Gallery
Cnr Brunswick and Berwick Streets
420 Brunswick Street
Fortitude Valley Q 4006
(map here)
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Documentation by Louis Lim and Cian Sanders
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This project has been assisted by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland. |