Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA) is pleased to present the public lecture "Comparative Extraction" by Simon Denny where he will discuss his recent project at the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, Australia. The project titled “Mine” is an installation-based series of vignettes reflecting on contemporary extraction – extraction of data harvested through increasingly omnipresent platforms, extraction of labour from people and other beings in different formations of conscious and unconscious “work” and the extraction of resources from the earth and its ecosystems as they are organised to support human activity. Produced for an enormous subterranean private museum in Tasmania, which is founded and funded by algorithmic gambling prodigy David Walsh and excavated from a cliff face on the River Derwent near Hobart, the project responds to an exceptional site which relates in more than one way to the theme of extraction. The museum works closely with Art Processors, a digital experiences company working with museums, and has a specially developed platform for use throughout the museum where viewers receive information about artworks in the space via proximity sensors and one can “love” or “hate” artworks. The project looks into the data capture capabilities of the museum through this platform and compares it with other types of data-rich businesses across other industries – from surveillance capital companies like amazon to the increasingly automated resource mining industry in Australia. The exhibition experience does through a sheep farming themed board game, an amazon patent and a critically endangered bird across three spaces and a layer of augmented reality. It forms a complex picture of human relationships to other entities – non-human beings, machines and the earth.
Simon Denny (*1982 Auckland/New Zealand) lives and works in Berlin. He makes exhibitions that unpack the social and political implications of the technology industry and the rise of social media, startup culture, blockchains and cryptocurrencies, using a variety of media including installation, sculpture, print and video. He studied at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, graduating with a BFA in 2005 and at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, with a Meisterschule in 2009. Denny’s work has been exhibited recently in solo exhibitions at MOCA, Cleveland (2018); OCAT, Shenzhen (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2016); Serpentine Galleries, London (2015); MoMA PS1, New York (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt (2014) MUMOK, Vienna (2013); Kunstverein Munich (2013). He represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. Denny co-founded the Berlin Program for Artists, an artist mentoring program in 2016 with Willem de Rooij and Angela Bulloch. Since 2018, he is a professor for Time Based Media at the HFBK, Hamburg.
ABOUT SFSIA
Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA) is a nomadic, intensive summer academy with shifting programs in contemporary critical theory. SFSIA stresses an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between art and politics. The program consists of seminar-style lectures, deep readings, and workshops. An evening lecture program is free and open to the public. SFISA was founded and is directed by Warren Neidich and is co-directed by Barry Schwabsky. Sarrita Hunn is the artistic coordinator.