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Make Up Sex playing live at the May show

SAGAN performing at the May Show

The fabulous Zanzibar Chanel performing at the New Low April Show

Thethousands waxed up write up for the May Show - wax on, wax off.

http://thethousands.com.au/melbourne/out/new-low-may-exhibition-opening/

Miles Brown & Mat Watson playing at New Low On The Side April 2012

Design at the Digital Frontier by Scott Wark

The accompanying essay to Rohan Whitely’s Information Decoration
by New Low Arts Writer Scott Wark

The dividing line between the digital and the merely material is getting harder to pinpoint. As the media competing for our attention multiply – becoming more stifling and increasingly difficult to manage – the question of how we interact with the digital grows more urgent. This question guides Information Decoration. Rohan Whiteley’s practice is experimental, in the scientific sense. This exhibition presents a series of material explorations of our relationship to the digital. Or: gambits probing alternate ways of configuring this relationship.

Information Decoration challenges our assumptions about what is “natural”. In 2011, Whiteley spent six months researching the concept of “next nature” at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven in The Netherlands. Next nature rejects the nature/culture dichotomy, asserting instead that nature is influenced by cultural practice. Stripped of its purity, the idea that the “natural” could function as an interface for the digital becomes possible. In the essay that inspired this exhibition, “Information Decoration: Our Environment as an Information Carrier”, Koert van Mensvoort asks “what happens if we start looking at every pattern in our environment as a possible information carrier?”[1] Information Decoration is framed by this question. 

In GM’d biotweets, twitter feeds printed on transparent stickers have been applied to the leaves of plants dotting the exhibition space. In one sense, this work literalises van Mensvoort’s question. The informational is made decorative, providing an alternate way of accessing it. But this conceit also alerts us to a more primal aspect of the natural. By yoking together the informational and the natural, Whiteley shows us that the natural is always already informational. By pre-determining the meaning of “nature” - as purity, as other to culture - we have eschewed its informational potential. In other words, we are no longer able to read the natural world. Whiteley shows us that the distinction between the natural and the digital is false. Rather than advocating a return to a primitive understanding of nature, though, Information Decoration frames the re-engagement of the natural’s informational capacity as a design problem.    

By focusing on the decorative potential of the presentation of information, Information Decoration exposes the way that interfaces between the digital and the material recede from view. When we think of interfaces, we usually think of screens. The paradox of the interface is that if they’re working well, they should be transparent. This transparency is lost when screens proliferate to the point of distraction. In projecting a digital bookshelf onto a wall installed with actual bookshelves, appshelf brings this interface-function in to focus. By giving a digital application a material decorative element, this work experiments with methods of integrating form and function in ways that are less of a drain on our attention.

There is also a playful element to Whiteley’s works. Coverflow draws on one of Apple’s trademark applications to bring the dominance of the company’s design philosophy into question. Air Refresher consists of three air fresheners with prints of the ubiquitous browser refresh button printed on them. Here, Whiteley connects refreshing a browser with material freshness, bringing the connection between the material spaces we inhabit and the digital spaces that constitute our lives into sharp relief. This punning underscores Information Decoration’s focus on how design can help us better integrate the material and digital aspects of our lives. 

One way of thinking about the differences between art and design is to focus on their relationship to problems. For the designer, the problem – the brief – guides the outcome. Whiteley’s critique of new media is leavened with an experimental curiosity for potential future media forms. By bringing Whiteley’s experimental design practice into an art space, the relationship between the development of new media and problem-solving practice is brought to the fore. You could call this kind of practice a materialist futurology that’s looking for ways to implement radical ideas of re-organising the digital’s colonisation of the world. Art may not be able to understand this frontier alone.