Tate Modern
The Tanks: Art in Action
UNDERCURRENT
TWEET-ME-UP! - Tracey Moberly
Friday 24th August 2012
An exhibition, installation and sculpture of social media and remote participation ...
tate.org.uk - Tracey Moberly - Tweet-me-Up
Tweet-Me-Up!
Tracey Moberly has been invited to participate in the UNDERCURRENT programme at Tate Modern on Friday August 24th 2012. Tracey is putting together 'TWEET-ME-UP!', a multi-disciplinary, mass participation day using social networking sites, focusing on art, music, photography, words and short films. The project creates a variety of rolling exhibitions in the new Tate Modern Oil Tanks space. The digitally received works, photos, sounds and statements will be projected into the area creating an evolving installation. An LED ticker will display all the tweets and texts coming in. The project will be developed using a range of social networking sites including Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud, YouTube, Instagram and others along with SMS and MMS - text messages & photos.
August 24th has been assigned as the celebration of the International Day Against Intolerance, Discrimination and Violence based on Musical Preferences, Lifestyle and Code. The project will look to highlight individuality and expression through the arts and music. The words and images provided will include participation from outside groups from art schools to artists; social centres to artists and music makers and any other individuals interested. It will be covered nationwide and internationally through magazines, newspapers and online forums.
Background on the project
The International Day Against Intolerance, Discrimination and Violence Based on Musical Preferences, Lifestyle and Dress Code was a proposal of the Romanian Humanist Association supported by The Sophie Lancaster Foundation. Its purpose is to prevent discrimination and intolerant attitude towards people who live unconventional lives or adopt unconventional behavior. Sophie Lancaster and her boyfriend were attacked in 2007 and severely beaten while walking through Stubbylee Park in Rossendale, Lancashire, by a group of teenagers due to the fact that they were dressed in Gothic fashion. Her death has become a symbol for many people who experience intolerance, discrimination and violence only because they have different musical preferences, lifestyle or dress code.
Tracey's project will look at how the subterranean subcultures and venues that were offered by the likes of East London's Foundry help to create the subjects of the now and tomorrows mainstream popular culture activities. How the artists, performers and musicians who start from different subcultures, countercultures and the unrepresented become the people making tomorrows newspaper headlines on these subjects. The project will aim to reflect the creative, musical, social and political variants that people within different subcultures are exposed to and take interest in.
Tracey Moberly - TEXT-ME-UP!
Tracey Moberly is an artist, activist & author of Text-Me-Up! In this multifaceted book Tracey has used over 2,500 photographs and images and documents the growth of the SMS (short message service) and MMS (multimedia messaging service) eras which has resulted in her saving every text message and phone image she has ever been sent since 1999. Text-Me-Up! is made up of three narratives consisting of past texts; current text conversations and an autobiographical thread that weaves the twelve year period together.
Text-Me-Up! documents the start of the social media revolution beginning with the text message and the unique digital DNA text timeline of one person's received messages. It concludes with the emergent importance of other media such as Twitter - prior to the Arab Spring - as Tracey focuses on Haiti immediately after her visit to Port-au-Prince just prior to the devastating earthquake of January 2010.
Text-Me-Up! offers up a slice of social history and popular culture detailed from the period 1999-2011. In a venue Tracey co-owned for well over a decade in Shoreditch, East London called the Foundry she details many events that took place with her there. Tracey features the beginnings and rise there of bands and singers such as The Libertines with Pete Doherty and Carl Barat; Kate Nash being whisked off to Iceland to record her first album with Bjork's producer; members of Hot Chip first meeting there and doing their first DJ set. The many artists from Banksy and YBA members to people putting up their first exhibitions at The Foundry are documented along with the many photographers, musicians, performers and film makers who were also a part of this. See the cover feature of the May edition of Dazed & Confused magazine (attached pdf), entitled 'IS EAST LONDON DEAD? It starts: "For many people, the day Shoreditch died was the day the Foundry closed it's doors for the last time in 2010 ..."
Web links
Tracey Moberly Text-Me-Up!
Dazed & Confused - Is East London Dead?
Dazed Digital - Is East London Dead?
Text-Me-Up! covers the largest flash mob at Tate Modern - the event took place in the Turbine Hall which was then housing Doris Salcedo's piece Shibboleth. It also provides a detailed archive of the work and projects on mobilography* Tracey did with Young Tate:
tate_forum_mobilography_1
tate_forum_mobilography_2
*Mobilography is a branch of photography that creates pictures using such devices with built-in cameras, as cellular phones, palm pilots, compasses, binoculars, lighters, etc, not originally intended to be used for professional photography.
THE TATE MODERN PROJECT: UNDERCURRENT
Within the period of 17th August - 27th August 2012 a project titled UNDERCURRENT is running at Tate Modern as part of The Oil Tanks programme. The Young People's Programme will engage audiences 15-25 years in a series of events, installation and intervention which use live and performance art and participation as a route start dialogue, physical interaction and reconsider the affect space and art can possess within the area of galleries of the future.
The programme will build a series of focused events, sessions and workshops which enable input and collaboration with participating artists and young people to consider and explore the ideas behind the creation and production of their works, the role of art and location in the construction of culture.
Utilizing audio, light, moving image, digital media with focus on the experimental and interdisciplinary art practices, the programme will build a narrative based on the transference of culture.
The overarching theme for project artists and participants will be the analysis and investigation of the transference of culture. Focusing on subcultures/ counterculture, the unrepresented and their relationship or influence on dominant cultural icons.
The young people's festival Undercurrent will be ten days of audio, digital media and performance rooted in London's sub-cultures and includes events with Tate Collective, Rinse FM, Dubmorphology, ISYS Archive, The Orange Dot and David Kraftsow, W Project and Michael Barnes-Wynters: Dutty Lingo and artists such as Leo Asemota, Hetain Patel, Ruairi Glynn, Tracey Moberly and Jon Fawcett.