CONTO 4056: June 19
Nordstern club: June 20
Nordstern
Voltastrasse 30
4056 Basel
CONTO 4056
Gasstrasse 1
4056 Basel
www.blenderarts.com
www.nordstern.com
www.conto4056.com
A time of technological evolution: a new, greener futurism where creative streams crossover and connect conceptual and productive fields; never as close and mutually responsive. This is the scene where Blender begins.
The project is a global itinerant one-nighter, a performing platform, a cross-disciplinary project connecting dance music and contemporary arts. It draws its inspiration from Fluxus’s disdain for hierarchy and from the heritage of European club culture. Developed by DJ and musician Davide Squillace, in collaboration with creative laboratory Boiler Corporation, Blender re-thinks and re-stages the experience of the club merging music, art and technology.
Data collected and recorded during every event is subsequently mixed and processed to design a three-dimensional, sculptural artwork; produced in a series of limited editions. The music of the live sets as well as site-specific field recordings, the noise made by people, their movements, the temperature of their bodies: all data give form to a unique object, a testimony of a particular happening. Here process and result are equal: they mirror a generative, potentially endless chain of collective experience. The project aims at drawing new relationships between sound and image, artist and audience, venue and exhibition space, redefining the role of music—and the body—in the universal context of creation.
Blender issue zero took place at club Verboten in New York on April 3, 2015. The data collected on that night was processed and transformed into Blender Sculpture 001 by Belgian artist Frederik De Wilde. The result of his work will be visible on Friday June 19 in the caveau of CONTO, a former bank and a brand new venue in Basel. On Saturday June 20, Blender’s first official night will take place at club Nordstern, where all guests will be involved in the creation of Blender’s next artwork: Blender Sculpture 002.
Davide Squillace is an internationally acclaimed techno DJ and an art collector, founder of This And That Lab, an electronic music label which collaborated with gallerist Giangi Fonti and artists such as Piero Golia, Delia Gonzalez, Gavin Russom, Seb Patane, Birgit Megerle and Fabian Marti to produce visuals and album sleeves.
Boiler Corporation is a creative laboratory led by Ivanmaria Vele and Massimo Torrigiani, with offices in Shanghai and Milan, where it was founded in 2001 to edit and publish contemporary art magazine Boiler.
Frederik De Wilde works on the bordering areas of science, technology and art. Sometimes on the side of the technological, and often in the perceptual, conceptual, social-human-register, his art is grounded in the interaction between complex systems, both biological and technological.