gas-tower.com presents Pizza by Neil Bickerton

gas-tower.com presents Pizza, a media performance by Neil Bickerton.

Pizza

In the disembodied and global age of digital communication, understanding ideas of community has shifted from being based in a specific geo-location to wherever it is you share a particular set of interests and allegiances - it could even be argued that the word community has taken on an entirely new meaning. Community exists on particular websites, blogs and technologies. Identity is corralled into loose groupings of style, created from commodities, technology and media. In the hegemonic peer-to-peer network there is the confusion or collapse of identity because everyone constantly speaks in the first person; ‘I’ becomes an echo chamber of being, loneliness and loss of sincerity.

Pizza playfully satirizes the loss of idealism surrounding the Internet as a place to bring about social and economic change, and the alienation of ‘being’ online, abstracting notions of participation and performance from any material expression.

This will be the first episode in a series of works where participating artists are asked to emerge out of the messy stuff of actual lived lives, to attempt to inhabit the contradictions and possibilities of one’s position in the world. The series will look at rejecting a singular dynamically autonomous self speak - the constant need to share and be seen online in this digital age - to instead “focus the ‘I’ as a weapon to explore its own fragility” (Karl Smith). This is an effort to evoke ‘liveness’, a willingness to speak to the present with immediacy and a sense of reality. This series will bring out alternative modes of sharing the disorientation of existing within a personal yet political notion of self.

Find out more about performer Neil Bickerton here.

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