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kevin abosch

Yellow lambo
The piece, “YELLOW LAMBO” (2018)[…] is a reference to a half-serious joke in the crypto community about using profits to buy Lamborghinis.“I became familiar with #lambo as a declaration of success-identity, and because I always think in terms of how to distill emotions around value, I wanted to explore that,” Mr. Abosch said. He created another token, called YLAMBO, and turned its address into a physical sculpture in yellow neon. This sculpture then sold for $400,000 at a San Francisco art fair to Michael Jackson, the former chief operating officer of Skype. The meta-weirdness around the purchase of the art is at the heart of the questions Mr. Abosch wants to explore.

MICHAEL JOHANSSON

マイケル·ヨハンソン
Майкл Йоханссон
The Move Overseas

Created by contemporary Swedish artist Michael Johansson, these “real life Tetris” installations see other people’s unwanted objects methodically and painstakingly packed together into neat, colour co-ordinated blocks. Inspired by real life coincidences, such as two people passing each other dressed in the same outfits, Johansson has been constructing the sculptures since 2007, installing them in public areas like tight alleyways and strangely shaped doorways as well as showing them at group and solo exhibitions all over the world. Speaking to PINCH magazine, Johansson said:

“These irregularities, or coincidences, are a great source of inspiration for me. I have also as long as I can remember been fascinated by flea markets. And in specific a fascination by walking around to find doubles of seemingly unique, though often useless objects I have already purchased at another flea market. There is something irresistible in the knowledge that if you don’t buy that particular object right away, the opportunity might never come back. I think the same rules compelling me to select things at flea markets are also central to my art practice, that you need to combine something very familiar with something very unique to create an interesting art experience.”
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Stephen Cornford

Binatone Galaxy

An installation for used cassette players which looks on their obsolescence not as an ending, but as an opportunity to reconsider their functional potential. Superseded as playback devices, they become instruments in their own right. Replacing the prerecorded content of each tape with a microphone gives us the chance to listen instead to the rhythmic and resonant properties of these once ubiquitous plastic shells. Binatone Galaxy brings the framework within which a generation purchased their favourite records to the centre of attention, revealing the acoustics of the cassette and the voices of the machines themselves.“On the walls of a white room, brightly illuminated with natural light, Stephen Cornford, and artist who describes his work as existing “at the intersection of sculpture and music”, has mounted some 30 old cassette recorders. Models from Boots, Sanyo, Robotic, one lone and gorgeously named Binatone Galaxy: they all hang on the walls, wired up, tapes loaded and ready for action. Smitten by an attack of technological melancholia, the visitor can wonder who owned these things, what pop charts did these machines once record? Were they ever placed next to pillows, late at night for surreptitious listening pleasures? What happened to the voices that once rubbed the magnetic heads of these little machines? For some artists, the speed (and resulting impact) of obsolescence on the technology we once took for granted has spawned a form of fetishism, in which the voices – the human agency – they once recorded exist in an alternate, ghostly dimension, a reminder of what once was. This is not Cornford’s theme. The fact that each audio cassette in his machines is fitted with a motion sensor and a contact mic, so that, on entry the machines whirr into action, indicates that Binatone Galaxy is very much of the here and now. Yes, Cornford has chosen old, cheap and accessible technology with which to realise this, but I suspect that he is aiming for a furrruuuzzy audio intimacy.