Part of the Are We All Addicts Now? exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery

Furtherfield co-director Ruth Catlow and artist Katriona Beales will be talking about the artwork featured in the exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery, Are We All Addicts Now?, followed by a group discussion.

In the exhibition, Katriona Beales addresses the sensual and tactile conditions of her life lived online: the saturated colour and meditative allure of glowing screens, the addictive potential of infinite scroll and notification streams. Her new body of work for Are We All Addicts Now? re-imagines the private spaces in which we play out our digital existence. Beales celebrates the sensuality and appeal of online spaces, but criticises how our interactions get channeled through platforms designed to be addictive – how corporations use various ‘gamification’ and ‘neuro-marketing’ techniques to keep the ‘user’ on-device, to drive endless circulation, and monetise our every click. She suggests that in succumbing to online behavioural norms we emerge as ‘perfect capitalist subjects’.

Join Ruth and Katriona to find out more about the works featured in the exhibition and to discuss the issues that it raises around digital addiction and online behaviour.

Katriona Beales is an artist who makes digital artefacts, moving image and installation, stressing the physicality of digital life. Are We All Addicts Now? develops Beales’ 2015 work ‘White Matter’ (a FACT commission for ‘Group Therapy: Mental Distress in a Digital Age’) which is showing at the University of New South Wales, Sydney as part of Anxiety Festival (Sept 2017). Beales’ received an MA from Chelsea College of Arts and has an artist profile on Rhizome.org
www.katrionabeales.com

Ruth Catlow is an artist and curator working with emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics. She is co-founding director, with Marc Garrett, of Furtherfield. As new digital processes change the way we live, Furtherfield champions the need for society and culture to evolve critical, aesthetic and ethical responses in parallel, bringing together cultural and technological innovation. Recent commissions include Time Is Speeding Up (20-21 Visual Arts Centre); Sociality-machine (Tate); and Play the Web We Want (Southbank Centre). Catlow is named by the Foundation for P2P alternatives in their list of 100 women Co-creating the P2P society.
ruthcatlow.net
furtherfield.org

Furtherfield Gallery
McKenzie Pavilion
Finsbury Park, London, N4 2NQ
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