What if one could hack into the world’s Saturn and MediaMarkt electronics stores and feed their screen walls with video art from one’s own laptop and thus replace the pristine pictures of Wildlife Channel and Planet Earth advertising the pixel splendour of future e-waste? What would become of a supermarket if one cloud place one’s own homemade products there or replace original goods by fake products?
Offering criticism always comprises a compulsion to disturb in the work of Benjamin Gaulon. The result may be a manifest possibility, a tactical instruction for change. But Gaulon’s work goes beyond these acts of “retail poisoning”, i.e. the deliberate mis- or replacement of consumer goods aiming at a reconsideration of one’s own consumer behaviour or even the practices of entire industries. Apart from kinetic installations, and light paintings, his artistic endeavours also involve recycling electronic gadgets or hacking into wireless surveillance cameras in order to produce his own videos from their material only to feed these back into the streets. May we also perceive the things that we daily experience.
- Edition:
- Sharing Cities
- www.recyclism.com/
Artists