DIS

Thumbs That Type and Swipe: The DIS Edutainment Network

02 February 2018 — 13 May 2018

La Casa Encendida, Madrid

La Casa Encendida presents the exhibition Thumbs That Type and Swipe: The DIS Edutainment Network, a guide for this brave new world that helps us understand how to be and how to view our own bodies and societies in the techno-capitalist context.

A project by DIS with Darren Bader, Will Benedict y Steffen Jørgensen, Casey Jane Ellison, Ilana Harris-Babou, Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman y Daniel Keller, Ian Isiah, Kim Laughton, Anastasia Davydova Lewis en colaboración con Eno Swinnen, Chus Martínez, Ada O’Higgins, Babak Radboy, Christopher Kulendran Thomas en colaboración con Annika Kuhlmann, Lance Tooks, Ryan Trecartin, Amalia Ulman, McKenzie Wark, Maroon World and Malte Zander.

A New York-based collective comprising Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro, DIS works across a wide range of formats and has recently switched platforms, transitioning from an online magazine to a video-streaming edutainment channel at dis.art.

It seems like we’ve lost our minds: but who needs a brain when we’ve got thumbs that can type and swipe across screens, seeking knowledge in a sea of online information too vast for the human mind to take in?

Thumbs That Type and Swipe: The DIS Edutainment Network reflects this important new stage for the collective: the launch of a video network that hybridises art education and entertainment, mobilising an intergenerational network around the critical issues we face today and will face tomorrow.

The collaborative output of an international group of writers, innovators and artists is presented in three immersive installations: The Restaurant, a cooking show with political themes by Will Benedict and Steffen Jørgensen; MAD, a debate programme on mothers and daughters by Casey Jane Ellison; McKenzie Wark’s zany lecture on Paul Preciado; an episode of Circle Time in which certain complex issues are explained to children; and a documentary short on seasteading (homesteading at sea) in Tahiti by Jacob Hurwitz Goodman and Daniel Keller. Ilana Harris-Babou presents Reparation Hardware, a tutorial about restoring furniture that also proposes making reparations to African-Americans, while Christopher Kulendran Thomas proposes a world where citizenship is erased by cloud technology. Maroon World and the economist Moritz Schularick disentangle the economic aspects of property ownership and inequality.

The transitional broadcasts devised by Darren Bader, Anastasia Davydova Lewis, Ryan Trecartin, Kim Laughton, Amalia Ulman, Malte Zander and DIS will link the different shows together, while “Chus” the announcer—created with Culture Sport, interpreted by Ian Isiah and inspired by Chus Martínez—jokes about the future of learning and the conservative nature of art.

Thumbs That Type and Swipe: The DIS Edutainment Network, straddling various cultural genres, is a guide for this brave new world that helps us understand how to be and how to view our own bodies and societies in the techno-capitalist context.

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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