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Kristin Lucas, Air on the Go, 2014, multi-channel video installation with sound, 4:40 min., dimensions variable, courtesy the artist
Versions: Kristin Lucas and Judy Malloy
Organized by Tanya Zimbardo, Krowswork's third guest resident in 2015. Saturdays, April 11 through May 2, 1 to 5 p.m. First Friday, May 1, 5 to 9 p.m. Judy Malloy infiltrated the tech community in the role of president of her own R&D companies—"OK Research" (1980‒82), "OK Genetic Engineering" (1983‒85), and "Bad Information" (1986‒88). She solicited technical information from various industries through official letterhead, tradeshows, and visits to Silicon Valley companies. The Berkeley-based poet incorporated the language from the disparate materials she collected, including advertising slogans from vendors, into these artistic projects, which encompassed mail art, experimental books, performances, and installations. As publicity for "OK Genetic Engineering (OKGE)" in 1983, Malloy drove her company car, a station wagon with “OK Genetic Engineering – Quality Clones since 1984” painted on the sides, and asked passersby about their attitudes toward the field. Her public interventions in the Bay Area included making handmade matchbooks with Xerox copy and leaving them on tables at restaurants, as free handouts at art events, and distribution by mail. Small reproducible combinations of words and images formed the basis of her reports dealing with various aspects of the biotechnology industry and her related products: the HLIV (Human Lust Inducing Virus), SH gene (Shrinkage Hormone Gene) and NFD bacteria (Nuclear Fuel Devouring Bacteria). The current exhibition revisits Malloy’s prescient examination of the role of technology in our society through documentation of this key information art project as represented in the "OKGE Files" (1986) and "OKGE Briefcase" (1991). "Versions" pairs Malloy with Kristin Lucas’s "Refresh" (2007), another landmark public intervention in the Bay Area addressing perceptions of change and promise of technology. The artist became the most current version of herself when she succeeded in legally changing her name from Kristin Sue Lucas to Kristen Sue Lucas in a Superior Court of California courtroom in Alameda—to “refresh” herself as if she were a web page. For Lucas, the outcome she sought was a new vantage point or intervention into her own life. This action was also analogous to putting a virus into the system, an imperceptible change that would cause a wave of legal red tape and discussions with various agencies processing the same name change. The idea of a distributed sense of self is mirrored in the iterative nature of the project, which has included participatory readings of the philosophical debate between Lucas and the presiding Judge in the courtroom transcript, and is represented in this presentation as an installation of a take-away "Refresh zine" (2014). Lucas performs a monologue about staying current in a data-driven climate in the multi-channel video installation, "Air on the Go" (2014). Her text is culled from online forums and user-generated product reviews about tools and apps designed for monitoring and tracking the human body and atmospheric conditions. Both Lucas and Malloy employ found language to describe perceived shifts in the media landscape and in the sense of being in the world. For more information, please visit: krowswork.com
