Adam Chodzko(1965,生于伦敦)是一位英国当代艺术家,1988年毕业于曼彻斯特大学获艺术史学位,1994年在伦敦金斯密斯学院毕业获艺术硕士学位,他的艺术实践使用媒介广泛,包括视频、装置、摄影、绘画和表演,目前任教于肯特大学,在音乐与美术学院的做高级艺术讲师。Chodzko的作品探索了我们丰富的集体想象力,“在我们的现状和未来之间”探讨人类行为的互动和可能性。并在我们的价值观念和信仰系统之间提出新的关系,审视了它们对于公共和私人空间的影响,并研究了大量关于对系统和空间进行控制、描述、引导的文献和小说。同时,他经常使用人类学的形式,与周围的人和地域直接产生合作,通过在“错误”的地方进行激进地观察,关注文化边缘、结束、迁移、过渡和消失的关系政治。他的实践介于纪录片和幻想之间(特别是以“科幻小说”的形式,用艺术的形式来映射不同的现实),作品经常会在概念主义、超现实主义、公共和私人空间间相互转换,反射性地直接与观看者的角色进行互动。2002年,Chodzko获得了保罗·哈姆林基金会和当代艺术基金会颁发的艺术家奖;2007年,获得了坎特伯雷肯特大学电影系AHRC创意研究奖;2015年,入围伦敦贾曼奖;2016年,他获得了英国艺术与设计版权协会DACS ART360颁发的奖项,并对其从1990年至今的艺术作品进行全面归档。
2019 - 2020
A photographic image shows a patch of land. It is the edge of a field in Kent, after harvesting by migrant labourers, shot from above, in close up, at sunset; an area of soil just big enough for two people to sit next to each other, embracing. It’s a hybrid idyll of an autumnal British landscape; ploughed earth, stubble, fallen oak leaves and acorns, a few apples, a sprig of yew, a fig leaf (an alien’s expulsion from eden?), a flint, feathers from a bird caught by a fox, a fox hole…etc
The various psychologies of national identity seem to orbit around fantasies of ‘rootedness’ in land, apparently inherent connections between the human and particular areas of soil, natural affiliations between a pure, unsullied, unique patch of ground and a specific community of people who have always had an exclusive relationship and knowledge of that finite territory, a territory always too small to allow in those others who might also potentially contaminate it and spoil this timeless, fundamental patch of earth and its magical capacities to evoke belonging and kinship to a select few.
In order for ‘outsiders’ to win the tentative and restricted right to become a British citizen and claim some level of inclusion within its landscape and institutions the British Government developed a test of knowledge about particular aspects of the UK, ‘The Life in the UK Test’. In order to attain a form of belonging a foreigner would need to have learnt numerous obscure but apparently essential facts.
A text over the photographic image lists the various glossary terms that changed (a form of ‘refinement’) between the 2nd and 3rd editions of the ‘Life in the UK Citizenship Test’. One shows, Glossary terms removed from Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship, 2007 (2nd edition) by the new glossary in Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents, 2013 (3rd edition), another list shows the Glossary terms consistent to both Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship, 2007 (2nd edition) and Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents, 2013 (3rd edition) and a final, much smaller list shows Glossary terms added to Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents, 2013 (3rd edition).* . As though for an archeological dig or forensic investigation the image is superimposed with a series of arrows relating apparently innocuous but distinct parts of that patch of land to the various new terms in that final category. It is as though the notion of attachment between person and land has been enacted upon, or discovered within the ground itself, elements in the image providing an arcane mnemonic system for an outsider to learn and embody the peculiarly limited, barren and archaic notion of Britishness that these words seem to describe.
A Hostile Environment 2019 c-type photograph/lithographic print 59.5 cm x 42 cm
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O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix 2020Commissioned by Camden Art Centre, London
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O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix (2020), a two screen video with image recognition algorithm, stems from Adam Chodzko’s memories of lying on the earth in a forest and looking up at the tree canopy with its perpetually shimmering back-lit leaves, breeze stirred, like a mass of flickering digits, and him sensing that there was, perhaps, a code being made, a signal, telling us something, that we were, as yet, unable to comprehend. But, perhaps, it would have been an invitation for the human to completely dematerialise, atomised, becoming the signal itself. It is also a piece that evolved from Chodzko experiencing the inverse – another form of blocked translation – in the process of making previous works; the ability of plants and trees to apparently resist their representation through digital video; their shape, movement and tone always remaining too complex to be rendered in a way that feels true. From not being able to see the wood for the trees, or, the trees for the wood, grows a desire for a deeper image recognition. This new digital commission has been developed especially for The Botanical Mind exhibition at Camden Art Centre. Working with computer coders, Black Shuck, Chodzko has developed an algorithm that searches for ciphers from the Litterae Ignotae – a script devised for the Lingua Ignotae, a secret language (perhaps the first conlang), created by the 12th Century Christian visionary mystic Saint Hildegard von Bingen. The image recognition algorithm scans footage of undergrowth, woodland and forest, both real and virtual, looking for the ciphers’ shapes that might be found in the dark, particularly in the shadows cast by, between and under the vegetation; a sur-real manifestation. Once located, the code proceeds to assemble any discovered ciphers to spell out (and murmur) plant names from the 150 plants she catalogued in the Lingua Ignotae as well as deviating to construct new hybrid varieties. Montaged images of these plant types and their hybrid forms surface through the algorithm, previous iterations receding behind them to generate an infinite ‘garden’; a mass of green – virga, viridity, chlorophyll. Chodzko has assigned each cipher a sound, extracted as fragments from the opening phrases of Hildegard’s choral compostions: O Viridissima Virga (O branch of freshest green) and O Frondens Virga (O blooming branch, you stand upright in your nobility, as breaks the dawn on high). Through O, you happy roots… Chodzko speculates that the sacred code Hildegard developed, as mediatrix, some 900 years ago, in order to create a channel between the earthly and the divine, might, in the present, be channelled by us (with the assistance of algorithms) as a visual and auditory incantation, a spell, to activate new forms of psychological and spiritual growth. Here language is detected in the shapes of darkness rather than light; a growth emerging therefore specifically within the unconscious or unknown. The work seeks to catalyse this germination through invoking an ecstatic, erotic and meditative relationship, vibrating between mind, bodies, plants, light, dark, desire and the acts of looking and naming. Together these elements combine as a shimmering hallucinatory vision or dream, constantly active and in a state of unfolding and becoming; a new form of human movement through a new form of garden, perhaps attempting to become botanical transformation itself, creating a path into an infinite Eden. An installation version of O, you happy roots… will be developed for Camden Art Centre using a live video feed from the gallery’s garden to allow the algorithm an infinitely variable environment of chance in which to detect the sacred code, generating, during the course of the exhibition, a multitude of Hildegard’s plants and their hybrids, through voice, text and image.
O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix 2020 Two screen video, Hildegard von Bingen’s lingua ignotae and image recognition algorithm Duration variable
Voice:Gretchen Egolf Music:O Frondens Virga,by Hildegard von Bingen(1098-1179),‘O Jerusalem’,Sequentia,1997
O Viridissima Virga,by Hildegard von Bingen(1098-1179),‘A Feather on the Breath of God’,Emma Kirkby with Gothic Voices,1981 Gameplay footage:Far Cry 5,(Ubisoft), by Clay Barnard Chodzko Additional camera:Seth Barnard Chodzko
Fluid Dynamics; The Quail is Rising 2020Screening at Tintype Gallery, Essex Road, London
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Under Essex Road, (Islington, London) flows the remains of the New River, a sophisticated engineering project from the early 17C designed¹ to bring fresh water to London from the countryside to its North.Chodzko’s video proposes that from the remains of its systems of flow arise the fragments of a collective imaginary that draws aquatic elements from that vicinity together, across time. A ship, the Training Ship Quail, (a secluded purpose-built space for Islington Sea Cadets, currently closed but soon to be relaunched for local children) has become stuck in a glitch in the present whilst its crew try to navigate it along the New River’s subterranean channels. This same crew simultaneously haunt the TS Quail’s sister ship, the destroyer HMS Quail (adopted by the people of Islington in 1942, for service in WWII) whose wreck lies on the seabed in the Gulf of Taranto (under the sole of the ‘boot’ of Italy).Their group actions (eg; listening, winding/unwinding, compressing and dancing² ) as well as their collective consciousness and time travelling restore everything, through this ‘channelling’, to a state of liquidity, allowing us, the viewer, to ‘float’ once more.
In the future the New River is seen to resurface in a completely rewilded Islington that still retains some traces of a few of Essex Road’s premises from the present; a library, a pub, a dry-cleaners and a shop selling tropical fish for aquariums.
From a stagnant woodland pond something rises; The call of a quail (translated by birders as ‘wet my lips’) levitates us towards the sky.
Fluid Dynamics; The Quail is Rising 2020 Single screen video with sound 6 mins 20 secs.