A Source of Uncertainty

A Source of Uncertainty
Video documentation of a Kinetic Art Work by Peter Kädergård.
From the exhibition Valand ’15 Master Thesis Exhibitions .
March 27 to April 11, 2015 in Gothenburg.
www.valand15.com/
My work is centered around our experiences of Western popular culture and how that affects our imagination. In my work I use film, images and discarded consumer products from our Western cultural archive and transforms them into alternative views of the world other than the view the media is presenting us.
When working with film I use recognizable and familiar mainstream movies which I alter by cutting out certain elements to re-contextualizes them. Often I replace the music with a self composed noise soundtrack to transform the film into a surreal sound-scape. In this new context, the associations that the viewer has with the appropriated film are subverted, and he/she is forced to reexamine his/her relationship to it.
With my photo collages I construct new surreal realities out of found images. Primarily using pictures from books and magazines. I use these images as building blocks to construct new and imaginative machines and bizarre widgets. Inspired by popular trends within the entertainment industry, like science-fiction and super-hero themes these new images often take a dystopian and dark form.
When working with kinetic art I usually build musical machines. These machines are constructed out of wasted and broken consumer products. They are fragile and their functions are unpredictabale. They operate on the border between non-function and total failure. These machines hardly do what they are supposed to do, they are on the verge of falling apart. The idea of not being of any use, the idea of not fitting into the hegemonic standardization. I see my machines as a form of resistance to the neoliberal biopolitics of the Western world. They are made out of found, discarded or broken objects. They are almost impossible to mass produce and are not inventions that can be used as a form for music composition/production even though they often inherits the idea of the “general purpose machine”. They can not in a predicted way reproduce what they are programmed to achieve. Their unpredictability and their resistance to conform is, in my opinion, Noise.
We, in the Western world are exposed to the norms and values of the entertainment industry all the time and everywhere, which makes it difficult not to be affected and we unconsciously adopt these values. Even though most of us are aware of that the industry is presenting unsound values I see a lot of people take what they see on TV and film too seriously. They let this control the way they think and behave. This repetition leads to a very limited and standardized view of the world and of our imagination. By re-working these materials, mainstream movies, images and consumer products, I hope I can give my viewers the ability to see new configurations emerge out of our cultural heritage and at the same time the viewer can reference to the original material used and hopefully this will broaden our view of the world and liberate our imagination.