DIGITAL TRASH: zoom flops, digital stench, and things that make your phone pulse with trepidation | Week 10 of 12
Saturday, March 27, 2021
PARTICIPANTS:
Claire Coutts
David Ferris
Evangelos Lambrinoudis
Galina Shevchenko
Michelle Murphy
Matthew Waddell & Laura Anzola
Caitlind Brown & Wayne Garrett
Theme by Matthew Waddell & Laura Anzola (of AZMA)
From the hilarious minds of artists Matthew Waddell & Laura Anzola comes DIGITAL TRASH, a theme inviting participants to dredge their spam folders, upend their “garbage cans,” dig deep into the annals of the internet, and mine their meme vocabulary for artworks ranging from the digital to the performative to the readymade. Part original content and part show-and-tell, nothing was too out there or outrageous for DIGITAL TRASH.
We purposefully didn’t record much from this theme – we wanted participants to live in real time. Plus, you really had to be there. Below is a deeply incomplete account of the week, transforming DIGITAL TRASH into digital treasure.
David Ferris make a purpose-built video game intended for Wayne Garrett to play. He lost to the goblins without winning the shower of confetti. Sorry Wayne.
Her Majesty the Queen of England (a.k.a. “Thin Lizzy”) made an appearance, and brought us on a tour of her royal collection of masks and gloves. Facilitations by Matthew Waddell.
Michelle Murphy shared “Recreational Recycling,” documentation of a 2020 performance at the recycling facility, relating directly to literal digital trash.
Wayne Garrett taught us how to make multiple functional crafts – from Pizza cutters to “sun reflecting glasses” – using old CDs as a base material.
Claire Coutts (a.k.a. @artafpodcast) shared her growing collection of art-specific memes, inspired by her own experiences as an arts administrator in Calgary.
An educational minute with Matthew Waddell & Laura Anzola, where we learned about NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
We watched a selection of short animated films by Evangelos Lambrinoudis, created to his own DJed music.
Galina Shevchenko presented a live VJed version of Pandemic Bloomz, with original music by her partner Val Kuznetsov.
Matthew Waddell & Laura Anzola shared more information about the evils of Google, and other search engines – like Duck Duck Go – that capture and store less personal information about each user.
While this is an incomplete testament to DIGITAL TRASH, the night brought artists together across virtual space (and geographic distance) to explore the internet as a site-specific medium, particularly at this moment in time. Thank you to all the artists and participants for getting weird with us.
THE HIBERNATION PROJECT 
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