Cut Up, Grand Hotel Abyss

28^th May – 28^th June 2008

Visible from outside the gallery’s large shop front window is a darkened room. Within the room, lying across makeshift work surfaces, pinned to the walls or fallen forgotten to the floor are materials relating to various indistinct urban areas. The scene is set; a place where grand interventionist ideas are supposedly developed, a scene which shows plans unrealised or perceived as unworkable or idealistic.

This fully functional studio is perhaps the clearest indicator of the quality of thought currently occupying the CutUp collective, a quality actualised in Grand Hotel Abyss – their third solo exhibition at Seventeen. The studio mock-up, relating as it does to supposed truths constructed around CutUp’s own practice as a politically charged anonymous collective, represents the most personal element in an entirely new series of process based installations through which the group critically reflect upon the fragility of inherited truth structures.

Within this environment, CutUp maintain their ongoing examination of spectacular culture and the mass media image through two new video installations. Static Iteration, 2007 is a series of televisions each unit with its own video recorder wired together and arranged on a shelf in single file. Each TV/Video unit is automatically programmed to record, rewind, stop and play continuously, taking a mainstream television broadcast received by just one of the units and transferring it to each of the others in an endless chain of renewal and obliteration.

The second video installation, Stages of Permissive Asphasia, 2008, is a complex, multiscreen reworking of a series of TV adverts. Each individual frame within the two and a half minute advert break is exploded into thousands of pixel-sized elements and then re-ordered into the corresponding frames of nine new films. What was once an ordered form is obliterated, leaving a fractured, chaotic, visual flux – destruction leading to a new construction.

Outside the gallery a series of large billboard works will be spread around the area, relating to the maps and plans found in the studio.

The final work in the exhibition, though methodologically similar to the other installations, represents a significant conceptual departure for CutUp. In Plain Bob Major, 2008 language itself is probed; syntax and linguistic structure being subjected to examinations previously reserved by the group exclusively for the image. Predetermined texts are programmed into a large-scale sonic sequencer hand-built by the group in their east London studio. As a permissible object, the viewer is asked to interact with the many knobs that march across the sequencers panels. Pre-programmed and linked to speakers, the sequencer ordinarily repeats the texts in their regular syntactical order, however with each tweak and turn the viewer effectively, but unwittingly and without obvious control, commands the sequencer to reorder the words in the text. In effect what was once a logical statement becomes a scattered combination of elementary words forming a new non-sensical yet deterministic language structure; a lexical metronome beating time to the fabricated systems.