[spectre] Piratbyrån and Friends | Exhibition At Furtherfield 3 May - June 2014

[marc garrett]

Sorry for any cross posting...

Piratbyrån and Friends | Exhibition At Furtherfield 3 May - June 2014

Curated by Rachel Falconer & Furtherfield
Opening Event: Saturday 03 May 2014, 2-6pm

“For the last sixty years, capitalism has been running a pretty tight 
ship in the West. But in increasing numbers, pirates are hacking into 
the hull and the holes are starting to appear. Privately owned property, 
ideas, and privileges are leaking into the public domain beyond anyone’s 
control." - Matt Mason, The Pirate's Dilemma.

Piratbyrån and Friends traces the stories of cultural sharing and 
affinity-building among the activities and values of the members of 
Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy), a Swedish artist/activist group 
established to support the free sharing of information, culture and 
intellectual property.

The exhibition presents screenings, installations and artworks by 
various members of the group, including a newly commissioned work by 
artists Geraldine Juarez and Evan Roth. The show also features a new 
networked audio project which mediates their rich archive and 
foregrounds the role of piracy as an agent of innovative disruption and 
cultural transmission. Includes other works by James Cauty, Simon Klose, 
Palle Thorsson, Jaime Ruelas & Polymarchs, and more…

More Details about the exhibition, Piratbyrån and friends.
http://www.furtherfield.org/programmes/exhibition/piratbyran-and-friends

EXHIBITION TRAILER - Piracy as Friendship @Furtherfield “Don't contact 
future. Future will contact you!”
https://vimeo.com/89247743

Piratbyrån (The Bureau for Piracy) was started by a bunch of hacking, 
coding, reading, listening, philosophising, clubbing, rioting, carding, 
chatting, loving, slacking people in 2003 as an antidote to Hollywood's 
representatives in Sweden -- Antipiratbyrån.

Still to confirm - dates for presentations and discussion at the 
Furtherfield Commons.
Will update & let people know as soon as we know ;-)

About the Artists

James Cauty
For Piratbyrån, James Cauty's personal work resonates with the themes of 
abundance and rarity, presence and absence, functionality and waste, 
control and chaos, and draws on the same symbolic language that mixes 
clarity with suggestion. There is also a similar urge to *stir things 
up* and *stick ones nose where it doesn't belong*.

Evan Roth
Speaking of stirring things up, FATLAB was for Piratbyrån another one of 
those instantly recognizable friends that had never met; the art group 
that Piratbyrån never became, the "the unsolicited viral marketing wing 
of the open-source movement", the graffiti crew of the World Wide Web. 
FATLAB was born when the file-sharing debate was buried and the new web 
2.0 era transformed the web.

Evan Roth, co-founder of FATLAB, has made a piece for the exhibition 
that in a subtle but direct way captures the concept of KOPIMI; how 
meetings and connections leave traces and makes you a carrier of ideas 
and information, sometimes without you even recognizing it.

Jaime Ruelas & Polymarchs
The soundsystem collective Polymarchs and their illustrator Jaime 
Ruelas, probably happily unaware of the existence of Piratbyrån, 
embodies a scene in Mexico where piracy has always been a way of life 
and a mode of existence. They have materialized, expressed and lived 
what was only hinted at in glowing screens up in Sweden. Having 
outlasted all of the above mentioned collectives and managed to stick 
together for decades, they also highlight both the potential strength 
and -- as a contrast -- the fragility of so called "confidential 
projects"; those moments when friendships turn into expressive units and 
the borders between the intimate and the public are blurred.

Geraldine Juárez
Last but not least, Geraldine Juárez is the reason this exhibition came 
together at all. She began to read the Swedish-language blogs of 
Piratbyrån members through google translate -- whose mistranslations 
made them sound like they came from the near future instead of the near 
past, until she finally came into contact with Piratbyrån by translating 
updates from the trial -- or Spectrial, as it was known -- into Spanish. 
Now she returns the favor of time-travelling by re-awakening Piratbyrån 
one last time, to allow their archive to again live up, their ideas to 
be carried over to others and perhaps even some sense made from what 
happened, although these things can only be interpreted, misunderstood 
and re-appropriated-- never explained.

Inside the tent that she has crafted for the exhibition -- a torrent for 
piracy as the last shelter of culture -- there will be a collection of 
tapes prepared and circulated by Piratbyrån and friends, perhaps giving 
some seed for thoughts and guidance in the process of excavating the 
archive of Piratbyrån.