Daata presents The Rockers Uptown – The Shoreditch Version for London Digital Art Week
Shoreditch Arts Club is delighted to collaborate once again with our long-time moving image partners David Gryn and Daata, who are presenting a curated playlist The Rockers Uptown – The Shoreditch Version for Digital Art Week at the club. The playlist will be shown April 22 – 26 with an exclusive feature event on Thursday 25th April from 7pm.
Screenshots of There Is No Up Or Down, Only Attraction (2022) by Jeremy Couillard
King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown, 1976
The Rockers Uptown – The Shoreditch Version features artists animations from the Daata Archive roster, including works by artists: George Barber, Phillip Birch, Jacky Connolly, Jeremy Couillard, Ollie Dook, Ed Fornieles, Jess Johnson & Simon Ward, Takeshi Murata, Eva Papamargariti, Puck Verkade, and Lu Yang.
The playlist takes its inspiration from the music: King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown by Augustus Pablo & King Tubby, 1975, a reggae dub tune, which at the time of its release was the B-side to Baby I Love You So by Jacob Miller, a monumental track that remains fresh today. David Gryn notes he first heard this sound as a fourteen year old entering the Music Machine in Mornington Crescent in Camden circa 1977 – the venue now known as KOKO, where Daata collaborates frequently.
The trance-like excitement from entering the venue, as well as the influence of music in formative years and its associations to personal experiences throughout life inspired the selection of works in the playlist, the video animations embodying an ‘equivalent reverberation, coolness, rawness, punkiness, soulfulness and a general joy.’
Screenshot of 2001 Colours Andy Never Thought Of (1990) by George Barber
Takeshi Murata’s OM Making It Rain (2015) is the sixth 3D animation in his series, a vignette of an old man in a white suit aggressively “making it rain” – other clips depict a silently cynical Popeye and a witch character – a hybrid of a Kabuki theatre villain and a generic Disney witch – gesturing its fingers as if scheming and cupping its ear listening suspiciously. Each are short and a gestural vignette of various combined TV, film and fairy tale archetypes, with sound by Robert Beatty.
Screenshots of OM Making It Rain (2015) by Takeshi Murata
Screenshot of Sonata for Piano and Dog (2019) by Ollie Dook
Screenshots of Luyang Interactive Hearse (2017) by Lu Yang
Ollie Dook's 2 Sonata for Piano and Dog (2019) is from a six-part series Animal Stories which takes multiple strands of recurring and memetic ideas of the animal image primarily accessed and shared via the means of YouTube, and re-told in an episodic tale harking back to the traditions of Disney’s ‘Silly Symphony’ series.
Jeremy Couillard reveals that the title of his 2022 workThere Is No Up Or Down, Only Attraction was said to him in a dream while falling down an endless hole. Through the familiar video game aesthetic he depicts a late-stage capitalist digitised hellscape of hopelessness and dehumanisation, where there are still opportunities for humans to find love and connection.
LuYang Interactive Hearse (2017) by Lu Yang links to her work LuYang Delusional Mandala, referencing the Chinese text within the artwork, derived from Buddha's first teaching: 'like everything high will fall down, everything together will separate, all living things will die'. LuYang Interactive Hearse is an artwork of the artist’s own imagined funeral, a death portrait as a living animation, with the imagined dead artist's face smiling at you on both sides of hearses LED screen, while it moves along its ever-lonely journey.
To read more about The Rockers Uptown playlist and discover, subscribe or collect digital artworks and commissions, visit daata.art
See the works at Shoreditch Arts Club from April 22 – 26 April 2024.