Thumbs That Type and Swipe: The DIS Edutainment Network

Spanish curator Marco Roso from DIS collective presents a program of videos that range from documentary to instructional video and self-help guide, and invites Spanish architect and researcher Nerea Calvillo for a talk on June 29.

The Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art hosts the exhibition Thumbs That Type and Swipe: The DIS Edutainment Network, and organizes in parallel a Summer Institute, where DIS invites Spanish artist Nerea Calvillo to give a talk on June 29, with discussions on media and the visual arts, and group activities that privilege participants and their ongoing work.

About the exhibition

In the exhibition, curator Marco Roso explains, seven images (from an enlarged and isolated mosquito to a close up of a ‘thumbs up’) are placed in light boxes commonly fabricated for advertising —selling you a pesticide or a national symbol? But of course you are in a gallery within an exhibition and this assemblage of seemingly incongruous images is selected by DIS who use the propaganda of nations and promotional material of markets to chop off heads. A figure stands in a fashionable down vest, hands in pocket, headless in a park amongst the trees, or on the video monitors, media theorist McKenzie Wark lectures about the possibility of a post pornographic state of being and techno gender, with his head in his hands or resting on the floor as his body paces near him. After the beheading what is left on our shoulders?

About DIS collective

DIS is a New York based collective best known for DIS Magazine (2010-2017), and curating the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2016). DIS has become an umbrella for a number of networked and collaborative platforms – all of which reimagine one format or another.

Today DIS is focused on dis.art. While remaining true to the novel approaches to critical inquiry that defined life as a magazine, DIS is now focused on redefining entertainment and education through the new streaming platform on dis.art.

DIS enlists writers, filmmakers, and artists to offer new forms of genre-bending edutainment that help cut through the atomization and polarization that defines the noisy, disjointed mediasphere. In the last century, public television programming meant that quality information, education and artistic formats could go hand in hand.

About Nerea Calvillo

Nerea Calvillo is an architect and researcher, Assistant Professor at the Center for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (University of Warwick) and unit master at the Architectural Association. Her research explores the material, technological, political and social dimensions of environmental pollution at the intersection between architecture, feminist studies of technoscience, new materialisms and urban ecological policies.

Calvillo will give a talk on June 29 at 6 pm on toxicity and politics, pollen and queer urban political ecology, as part of the Summer Institute.

Program

• Exhibition June 26–July 29, 2018.
• Summer Institute: June 25-July 7, 2018.
• Summer party & Opening reception: July 7, 2018.