This evening, our Artists in residence, Dennis J Reinmuller and Debbie Moody, will be opening their piece "The Strip" in our Events Space. The show will run every Saturday and Sunday of August from 10AM-6PM. They wrote a guest blog for us, explaining their work:
In November 2014 we, Dennis Reinmuller and Debbie Moody, known as Dennis & Debbie Club, were invited to become CodeBase’s first artists in residence as part of Code:Concept, curated by Janine Matheson of Creative Edinburgh.
In the summer running up to the start of our residency, we taught ourselves how to use 3D modelling software and were stunned by the range of possibilities that opened up by going digital. To illustrate, this is what we used to do before rendering became part of our practice:
We identified an aspect or fleeting notion relevant to our lives that escapes verbalisation, something that, for whatever reason, causes irritation, unrest, anger, anxiety, depression, mania or all of these at once. Once identified, we solidified this kernel of an idea, transformed it into material. If we said we knew for what reason this process had to happen, we would be lying. We don’t know why we abandon conventional careers to make art installations that are commercially ruinous, economically ridiculous and sometimes just insulting.
Now, after learning to use 3D modelling to basically conjure up any object from the digital ether (to conjure might be misleading here, as it still takes long hours to create these assets), we are not limited by material anymore – more dramatically even, the objects we now make don’t even have to adhere to the laws of physics! It’s the wonderful abandonment of reality that we have been dreaming of, interposed with the vague sense of impending tragedy that when our civilisation starts to collapse even a tiny bit, none of our digital art will exist anymore, gone without legacy until somebody or something learns how to open a .mp4 again.
We then started our 6 month residency at CodeBase. We talked to some of its tenants, chatted memory, the loss of it, parallel worlds and, of course, the singularity (which is basically about ensuring that somebody or something will always know how to open a .mp4). We learned that at the core, technological innovation and art can come from the same place: the desire to overcome limitations, to negotiate restrictions and redefine structures that all of us defiantly believe to be stable and enduring. It also seems to be true that in both the technological and the art world, most of us won’t make it big, yet, somehow that doesn’t deter us from trying to make it happen somehow.
For the end of our residency at CodeBase, we proudly present a piece called THE STRIP, which is also part of the Edinburgh Art Festival 2015. THE STRIP is a looping 3-channel 3D animation concerned with some of the endpoints of our aspirations. The computer-generated locations are informed by crime scene images, 3D photographs and geographical data taken from Google Earth. These past, present and future places of nostalgia are captured in HD-VHS / vertical mobile phone footage and accompanied by an original score.
We will have a little preview evening on 31 JULY, 6PM – 8PM at the event’s space on FLOOR L, please do have a look.
The show will then be open every Saturday and Sunday, 10AM – 6PM, throughout August.
by Dennis J Reinmuller and Debbie Moody
