Social Design # 11:

YOU REFER TO YOURSELF TO REDUCE THE MESSAGE TO ME
THE ACCUMULATED

April 29 – June 25, 2005

Private viewing 29 April 2005, 8.00 pm - 12.00 am, with the performance: The Rastafarian Hans Christian Andersen, 8.30 pm.

Galleri Christina Wilson has the pleasure of presenting FOS’s second independent exhibition at the gallery.

On the back of the invitation to the exhibition you will find a dictionary containing terms, concepts, descriptions of physical phenomena, baking recipes, extracts from the theory of design and architecture, lectures and poetic images, which will help to clarify the building blocks of FOS's universe as an artist. The dictionary is included in the catalogue ”Liquid Chain - into the Vapour Wall: the Fall”, which will be published on 1 June 2005.

The exhibition is based on three concepts: The Accumulated, Rastafarian Hans Christian Andersen and The Uniform. As usual in connection with an exhibition of FOS and his social design, the physical environment of the gallery will be altered to form a setting for these elements. The exhibition thus consists of, for example, a bar, a sculpture, a lot of earth, a false floor, a very large cup, a performance, a uniform for the gallery staff, and some fluorescent lights which have changed place.

Content:

Rastafarian Hans Christian Andersen is the hero, the embodiment of the Earth's culture, who can wander all over the globe, continually telling his fairy tales. On his journey, he enters into and passes through the various political, financial and market-related levels, but always remains intact.

What he is fighting against is the accumulated, in the form of the Phantom Audience. The accumulated is the mass of information and perspectives that arise in a cultural tradition – a tradition that is maintained via the media, political systems and market forces. The media speak to us and reproduce images that are reflected in our social values like a law of nature, an invisible power: the Phantom Audience.

In the exhibition, the battle between Rastafarian and the Phantom Audience is played out in the space of art, in the gallery, which thus becomes involved as a player. This is indicated by, for example, the uniform as the representation of a set of values, a symbol of specific social memories. The gallery's uniform represents the idea of a different attitude to life.

The Rastafarian is manifested in a performance created in co-operation with DIEM (the Danish Institute of Electroacoustic Music), and by the musicians Nis Bystad and Mikkel Hess.

The Accumulated is described through the physical interior design: the floor design, earth, objects, sculptures and prints.

The Phantom Audience is present at the exhibition in the form of a sculpture.

The Uniform was created in co-operation with the designer Sara Sachs, and will be worn by the gallery staff for the duration of the exhibition.


What is Social Design?

FOS's projects are based on the concept of Social Design – a wild-growing but refined and coherent system of texts, structures, ideas, objects, people and even animals. A straw bar is linked to electronic music, which in turn is linked to a lecture on social psychology, Niels Bohr and biosemiotics, which turns into rap, which leads to pizzas, performance and ice cream cake. Parrots, T-shirts, furniture and strange dogs keep the entire circuit operating. The exhibitions are feedback systems, and like a Heath Robinson machine, the point is not to produce a finished product, but rather to transform an existing situation into a new one: a scene in an Aarhus café becomes a gallery show in Copenhagen, a museum depot is transformed into an ice cream bar.

In their extreme, incomprehensible but nonetheless fully integrated complexity, FOS's projects invite on the surface metaphorisation as Heath Robinson machines. FOS relates to the objects that he produces in unaccustomed ways. He regards things as “communicators”, i.e. as social mediators and fellow players, rather than passive objects or the end-products of some process, idea or intention. When FOS says that the social is a material, it would thus be natural to add that materials are also social. That the social is a material does not, however, mean that it is qualified to take its place among the minerals or in the periodic system. Conversely, the fact that materials are social does not mean that materials and objects are intelligent and sensitive, i.e. possessed with a soul, like a favourite teddy bear or a pine tree in a fairy tale. It means that while humans may have their own consciousness, this consciousness is constantly being extended to integrate with a larger mental and material system incorporating other people and objects.

The fact that the social is a material should be understood as a pattern - a crystalline cell structure. The attempt to shape, alter and process these social patterns, which are the result of a given communicational feedback system between objects, people and environments, is what FOS defines as Social Design. Social Design has been the methodological framework for all of FOS's projects since 1999.

- Extract from the text included in the catalogue ”Liquid Chain - into the Vapour Wall: the Fall”, by Cecilie Høgsbro, 2005