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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Super Kingdom : Monarchy
Dugal McKinnon,
London Fieldworks,
Jo Joelson,
bruce gilchrist
Original: Image of "Super Kingdom : Monarchy" | 6144 * 4096px | 19.7 MB
Original: Still of "Super Kingdom : Monarchy" animation | 7282 * 4096px | 40.8 MB
Original: Still of "Super Kingdom : Monarchy" animation | 7282 * 4096px | 33.4 MB
Original: Still of "Super Kingdom : Monarchy" animation | 7282 * 4096px | 16.7 MB
Original: Image of "Super Kingdom : Monarchy" - Stalin | 6144 * 4096px | 24.7 MB
In 2008 London Fieldworks created “Super Kingdom”, an installation of animal “show homes” modeled on the authoritarian architecture of dictators’ palaces set within the ancient woodland of King’s Wood, Kent, England. In 2009 the artists re-purposed their forest-based installation as a film set for a digital moving image work: “Monarchy”.
“Super Kingdom” can be viewed as a social engineering experiment for animals—a new community in the making referencing despots’ palaces, gated community developments such as Alphaville in Brazil and the fortified exclusivity afforded to the wealthy and super-rich—all designed to keep urban reality at bay.
The title, “Super Kingdom”, is a reference to both the utopian imaginary and biological taxonomic hierarchy. The project reflects both human and animal hierarchy as territorial relationship to landscape; it is informed by changing habitat, the displacement of animals as a consequence of urban development and conservationist strategy, and global concerns about fluid populations and porous borders.
The project was initially inspired by reports of anomalous animal behavior in the natural world as a response to shifting environmental cues, and the controversial conservationist practices of re-wilding and assisted migration where animals are strategically re-located—redolent of human social engineering projects. The project also drew on the artists’ experiences of edge cities or self sufficient off-worlds and the collision of habitats and inequality that exist around them and resulted in the series of “Super Kingdom” structures referencing the off-worlds, the architecture of fear (as Tunde Agbola describes fortified lifestyles in Lagos), and the architecture of dictators’ palaces.
The score for “Monarchy”, by their long-term collaborator Dugal McKinnon, contributes to the sense of dislocation through shifts in what sonically seems to fit or not fit with what is seen. Mixing naturalistic sounds of flora, fauna and weather—recorded in New Zealand woodlands—with industrial noise results in a terrifying soundtrack for the English countryside, which serves to challenge our presumptions of the safety and longevity of the woodland environment.
Links: http://www.londonfieldworks.com/projects/super-kingdom/index.php
“Super Kingdom” can be viewed as a social engineering experiment for animals—a new community in the making referencing despots’ palaces, gated community developments such as Alphaville in Brazil and the fortified exclusivity afforded to the wealthy and super-rich—all designed to keep urban reality at bay.
The title, “Super Kingdom”, is a reference to both the utopian imaginary and biological taxonomic hierarchy. The project reflects both human and animal hierarchy as territorial relationship to landscape; it is informed by changing habitat, the displacement of animals as a consequence of urban development and conservationist strategy, and global concerns about fluid populations and porous borders.
The project was initially inspired by reports of anomalous animal behavior in the natural world as a response to shifting environmental cues, and the controversial conservationist practices of re-wilding and assisted migration where animals are strategically re-located—redolent of human social engineering projects. The project also drew on the artists’ experiences of edge cities or self sufficient off-worlds and the collision of habitats and inequality that exist around them and resulted in the series of “Super Kingdom” structures referencing the off-worlds, the architecture of fear (as Tunde Agbola describes fortified lifestyles in Lagos), and the architecture of dictators’ palaces.
The score for “Monarchy”, by their long-term collaborator Dugal McKinnon, contributes to the sense of dislocation through shifts in what sonically seems to fit or not fit with what is seen. Mixing naturalistic sounds of flora, fauna and weather—recorded in New Zealand woodlands—with industrial noise results in a terrifying soundtrack for the English countryside, which serves to challenge our presumptions of the safety and longevity of the woodland environment.
Links: http://www.londonfieldworks.com/projects/super-kingdom/index.php
Commissioned by: Stour Valley Arts; Supported by: Arts Council South east, Arts Humanities Research Council, Henry Moore Foundation, London South Bank University
London Fieldworks was co-founded by artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson in 2000. Their practice moves between landscape, the East-London-based studio and the gallery, reflecting an interdisciplinary enquiry into how natural phenomena and human experience are interpreted and manifest in science and art. Imaginatively sited projects typically engage with technology and the methods of science within a wider cultural context to explore data and narrative. Their projects are concerned with the mediation of experience and the exploration of ecology as a complex inter-working of social, natural and technological worlds. London Fieldworks recently returned from a British Council artists’ residency in the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest. www.londonfieldworks.com