UPSTRE AM FOCUS
JODI
&
JEROEN JONGELEEN
UPSTREAM FOCUS During the lockdown, while the gallery is closed, Upstream Gallery presents a new series of Upstream Focus. In this series of short exhibitions in our private viewing space we highlight one or two works of our artists. Until the gallery reopens this will only take place online. From 24 February – 2 March we present two videos that respond to each other in an interesting way, JODI’s Street Legal (2004) and Jeroen Jongeleen’s Donut Car Park II (2020). They are both performances, in which the artists leave traces, documented by a bird’s-eye view camera. JODI’s work though completely exists in the digital space, in a game the artists hacked. Jongeleen’s work originated in public space, on an abandoned parking lot. At the same time, both works raise the same questions about the (un)limited use of public spaces. About the limitations and possibilities that we experience, may it be in the digital or in the physical world. Two worlds that have increasingly overlapped over the years.
JODI - Street Legal While JODI is widely known for their internet art works, another important part of JODI’s practice are the modifications of popular games. By adjusting elements in the games, often stripping them down to the bare essentials, the games become an alienating and usually pointless experience. Street Legal (2004) is a video documentation of gaming sessions on the racecar video game Street Legal. The game was hacked by the artists, and the cars evolve in the environment by turning on themselves in an uninterrupted fashion. As the player’s vehicle sharply turns, accelerates, and brakes at the same time, it creates a theoretically perfect spiral while generating skid marks upon the virtual terrain. The artists approach the code as a material for creation, a sort of active paint allowing them to generate works where all the behaviors internal to the materials work together, confront each other in order to evolve together.
WATCH VIDEO HERE JODI Street Legal, 2004 Video with sound 21:26 min.
“The spectator is freed of our role as a player enclosed in the logic of winner/loser, inherent to video games. He discovers new possibilities for experimentation with the medium. JODI thus critiques the attitude of the typical user evolving in a closed system without exploring either its limits or the possibilities that going beyond them would open up—a critique that the collective applies more generally to political and social issues brought about by a consumer society and by advertising and institutional communications.”
WATCH VIDEO HERE
Jeroen Jongeleen Donut Car Park || In Jeroen Jongeleen’s video, he is the one leaving his mark. On an abandoned parking lot we see the artist running in circles. With his interventions he promotes the free use of urban public space and questions the way corporate influence, advertising, architecture and regulations limit and direct a citizens’ behavior.
WATCH VIDEO HERE Jeroen Jongeleen Donut Car Park II, 2020 Video, mute 5min 52sec
WATCH VIDEO HERE
“I’ve been creating art from running over the last few years, starting from doing long distance and then ultra long distances runs in straight lines and other shapes, then came to the essential form of a small circle, a simple challenging loop, leaving a temporary trace. [...] As an active citizen, the vandalistic gesture of leaving a mark on the fabric of regulated space, is an invitation to my fellow citizens in the free and unlimited usage of our surroundings.”
^ JODI Screenshots of Street Legal, 2004 Video with sound 21:26 min.
Where JODI’s intervention disrupts and creates chaos, Jongeleen’s work is much more meditative. But conceptually, the artists have a similar aim: by leaving their mark in public spaces, may it be digitally or physically, they (re-)claim these spaces, and promote to make free use of it, while keeping you aware of the limits and possibilities one has when moving in these spaces. This issue has become even more relevant in the past year of lockdowns and extreme regulations of public space, and where digital spaces have become even more important with most people working from home.
> Jeroen Jongeleen Donut Car Park II, 2020 Video, mute 5min 52sec
JODI JODI - the art collective consisting of Joan Heemskerk (NL, 1968) and Dirk Paesmans (BE, 1965) - pioneered web-based art in the mid-1990s. Their work uses the widest possible variety of media and techniques, from installations, software and websites to performances and exhibitions. In a medium-specific way, they (de) construct and analyze the languages of new media: from visual aesthetics to interface elements, from codes and features to errors and viruses. They challenge the relationship between technology and users by subverting our expectations about the functionalities and conventions of the systems that we depend upon every day. JODI's work is featured in most art historical volumes about electronic and media art, and has been exhibited widely at venues such as Museum of Modern Art, New York; Documenta X, Kassel; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Bonner Kunstverein and Artothek, Bonn; InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Center for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Eyebeam, New York; and Museum of the Moving Image, New York, among many others. They received a 1999 Webby Award in the category Net Art. In 2014, JODI was awarded the inaugural Prix Net Art Award by Rhizome, a leading art organization dedicated to born- digital art and culture affiliated with the New Museum in New York.
Further reading • JODI at Art Basel 2021 Feature Section with Upstream Gallery • JODI’s My%Desktop (2002) at MoMA • Artist Profile by Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Jeroen Jongeleen The work of Dutch artist Jeroen Jongeleen, otherwise known as Influenza, is characterized by a distinct stance of dissensus: one that opposes both the superficiality of urban design and the increasing colonization of the street. In a practice that engages with images and public space in a militantly active way, he employes numerous methods and materials - including stickers, plastic bags, spray paints and even the human body itself - in an effort to enliven the banality and sterility of the modern city. Championing a more liberated public sphere and critiquing the over-regulation of both the city and art, Jongeleen's understated but always ingenious urban interventions are heavily influenced by art movements such as Fluxus (a multidisciplinary group of avant-garde artists in the 1960's), who he sees as the true descendants of the Dada spirit. He describes his motivation to create art as not about 'decoration or making people happy, but about free speech and movement, about opposition as the essence of a truly democratic society'. His politically motivated work therefor sets out to illustrate the power and the dynamics of the street, while offering a utopian vision for the future.
Further reading • Jeroen Jongeleen currently has a solo exhibition in Upstream Gallery’s main gallery space, to be visited from March 3rd. Book a timeslot here. • Jeroen Jongeleen’s solo exhibition at AVL Mundo • Jeroen Jongeleen publication by Trendbeheer
Kloveniersburgwal 95 1011 KB Amsterdam t. +31 (0)20 4284284 e. info@upstreamgallery.nl