Gallery Times: Tues –Sat: 11am – 6pm,
Closed Sun & Mon

Irational is a loose grouping of six international net and media artists who came together around the server irational.org, founded by the British net artist Heath Bunting in 1996, going on to make decisive contribution to early net art from the mid-1990s onward. They include Daniel Garcia Andújar / Technologies to the People (E), Rachel Baker (GB), Kayle Brandon (GB), Heath Bunting (GB), Minerva Cuevas / Mejor Vida Corporation (MEX) and Marcus Valentine (GB).

Irational.org’s goal is to use the media of a large-scale showing, workshops, and a comprehensive documentation to make these artistic-activist pieces more accessible to a general public.

Irational’s early work commented the Internet hype of the mid-to-late 1990s, competing with the commercialisation-euphoria of the new market by developing its own pseudo-ventures. Moving on from net art Irational now experiment with interrogating and overcoming economic, political, and social boundaries in real space, producing a great deal of comic relief, among other things.

Among their works are Natural Reality Superweed Set 1.0 (1999) and International Tree Climbing Day (2003 onwards). In Natural Reality Superweed Set 1.0 a genetically modified Superweed was engineered in order to attack commercial agricultural monocultures and contains a mixture of natural and GM seeds (rapeseed, wild radish, yellow mustard, shepherd’s purse). The mixture grows into a Superweed that is resistant to commercially available weedkillers and therefore a threat to the profitability of growing GM plants and also to the production and deployment of broad-spectrum herbicides.

International Tree Climbing Day invites a different kind of participation. Since 2003, Irational and their friends at the Institute for Applied Autonomy have arranged an annual event during which people are invited to join them in the almost forgotten but nonetheless pleasurable activity of climbing trees. The event is part of Irational’s ongoing involvement with hacking the city’s familiar physical surroundings in order to find more mentally enriching, physically challenging and socially exciting ways of using them.

Events

Irational wikipedia - the hartware (soft) guide to Irrational

Date: Saturday 16th June
Time: 11:00 – 18:00
Free event

Come join the inauguration of the irational wiki where you can comment on the +150 works (and still counting) on the web server. learn about the Irational way to use the net for all sorts of fun and subversive activities and participate with your own anecdotes and reflections. this is art history as open source for the networked public.

Sport, Art and the Praxis of The Proletariat

Date: Saturday 16th June
Time: 20.00 – 22.00
Free event - First come first served basis

“SportArtists, are quietly turning the distinctions between sport and art into spaghetti shapes. As they so provocatively ask, who will sponsor this aberration? What does it mean for audience participation? What does it mean when the Arts Council starts sponsoring people to go to holiday resorts and roll pebbles? And will the media start asking 'but is it sport?'” MetaMute Sept 2006

This seminar will examine ‘Sport Art’ techniques, its historical contexts in both sport and art, its relationship to regeneration, and whether it proposes any kind of challenge to the Olympics and the cultural apparatus that is being built to sell it as an opportunity for artists and communities in London’s East End .

Featuring Kate Rich, Heath Bunting, Kayle Brandon, Mark Saunders, Jim Colquhoun. Chaired by Rachel Baker.

There is a history of contemporary artists inscribing outdoor surfaces one way or another; graffiti art, land art, performance art, along with urban adventurers, parquet practitioners, skateboarders, and psychogeographers. This is a practice intent on physically levering the body to change the relationship with the environment, invoke new metaphors and meaning, deterritorialise over-coded, privatised space. In an era of intense regeneration, property development, and urban planning throughout Europe, these artistic practices have a particular resonance, and have caught the eye of those in the cultural industries whose job it is to soften, and indeed justify, the brutalising effects of gentrification with art, entertainment, leisure and culture.

The DCMS announcement that the biggest regeneration project to hit the UK, the 2012 Olympics, will require 112.5 million of Lottery funds forced the Arts Council of England to cut its grants budget by a third and this transference of funds has seen the media engage in a simplistic debate pitching sport against the arts.

Meanwhile Heath Bunting, Kate Rich and Kayle Brandon have declared ‘Sport Art’ a practice, convening several events and perfecting their various sport/art techniques over recent years.

The exhibition is curated by Inke Arns, Jacob Lillemose, http://www.hmkv.de

irational.org