DIS

Genre-Nonconforming: The DIS Edutainment Network

02 December 2017 — 10 June 2018

DeYoung Museum, San Francisco

DIS with Korakrit Arunanondchai, Darren Bader, Will Benedict and Steffen Jørgensen, CUSS Group, Aria Dean, Casey Jane Ellison, Ilana Harris-Babou, Daniel Keller and Jacob Hurwitz Goodman, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Amalia Ulman, McKenzie Wark, and Women’s History Museum

DIS is a New York–based collective formed of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, and David Toro. DIS works across a wide range of media, most recently transitioning platforms from an online magazine to a video-streaming edutainment channel. The group has become the central nucleus of an ever-growing international community of artists, musicians, photographers, writers, and designers; functioning as artists and curators, DIS weaves together the content of collaborators with their own to propose discourse around chosen topics.

Genre-Nonconforming: The DIS Edutainment Network, a newly commissioned project for the de Young, reveals a “DIS-topian” take on the future of education — decentralized and open access, yet communal and physically connected. Composed of a multitude of films, documentaries, cartoons, and talk shows, authored by DIS and its artistic collaborators, and broadcast across thirty-six LED screens in Wilsey Court, Genre-Nonconforming proposes “a counter strategy to our incomprehensible moment of post-truth, a clickbait cultural landscape that has generated misinformation and overexposure as a general condition.” A wry hybrid of entertainment and education, the video installation is built to parse meaning from a constant flux of information and unmask the hidden structures of power and information that shape our lives.

Genre-Nonconforming features new works from a prominent group of cultural producers who regularly collaborate with DIS. The viewer will be guided through the “program” by “The Host,” an avatar developed with Chus Martínez (director of the Institute of Art at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel), Culturesport, and Ian Isiah. The program includes a variety of formats, including a cooking show by Will Benedict and Steffen Jørgensen; a show on human-animal relations in Africa and Thailand by Korakrit Arunanondchai; a “general intellects” video with McKenzie Wark; a visual essay by Aria Dean; a docu-short on “seasteading” in Tahiti by Daniel Keller and Jacob Hurwitz Goodman; a report on “reparation hardware” by Ilana Harris-Babou; a cartoon by Amalia Ulman; a docu-short on “economic utopias” by Christopher Kulendran Thomas; a fictional drama by the South African collective CUSS Group exploring the influence of technology and digital culture in South Africa; and a contribution by the Women’s History Museum. The different elements will be connected and disrupted by interstitial “ads” and interviews conceived by Darren Bader and DIS.

DIS

The collective DIS is exemplary in defining what Hannah Black in Artforum describes as the “relentless anxiety about the conditions and possibilities of art and life, express(ing) the despairing atomization, and the compromised longing for solidarity, of a post-bourgeois creative class hovering on the brink of its own obsolescence”.

Formed in 2010, after the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis and global recession, DIS as an entity has over the decade typified its aesthetic, cultural, political and economic impact. Composed of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro, DIS’ interventions blur the distinctions between art, curation, theory, advertising, fashion, retail and technology, manifesting across a range of media and platforms, from site-specific museum and gallery exhibitions to ongoing online projects, often all at once. Their work exists often simultaneously online and in situ, as well as more traditional mediums like photography, sculpture, video and installation. Their current multi year project dis.art is a subscriber-based online video channel popularising in “edutainment”, helping us understand the complicated social machinery of our techno-capitalist world. The channel presents new commissions with other artists as well as DIS’ own content.

In 2021, DIS co-curated the Biennial for Image Movement Geneva, featuring their latest work Everything but the World. In a series of interrelated vignettes, Everything But The World presents a non-linear, natural history show about homo sapiens, linking the agricultural revolution to Amazon fulfillment centers. It addresses the gulf between the complexity of the human’s global existence and the smallness of their private everyday lives, and confronts our obsession with “the end of the world” knowing the arrogance of that word: ‘the’.

Recent solo exhibitions include, How To Become A Fossil at Secession, Vienna, Everything But The World at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin and Big Beat Disaster at Project Native Informant, London.

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