In 2018 Blast Theory were the first ever artists-in-residence at the World Health Organization in Geneva. A Cluster of 17 Cases is inspired by the stories like the 17 unsuspecting people who stayed on the 9th floor of the hotel on the night of Feb 21, 2003. These 17 people were subsequently identified as spreading the SARS… Read more »
To find out where you can experience Gift now, have a look at the list of Participating Museums in the sidebar. Want to host Gift at your museum? Click here to find out how. Gift draws on the practice of gifting as a way to facilitate personalisation and social sharing in museums. It allows visitors… Read more »
Matt Adams, co-founder says: “Ju, Nick and I are thrilled and honoured by this award, which has allowed us to create You Start It. Nam June Paik was one of the great innovators of twentieth century art; his playful use of cutting edge technology has always been an inspiration. In You Start It we’ve brought… Read more »
Step into a corner of the city and look around. Gaze at the towers in the distance. Pick out the path trodden through the park or the eddy in the river. And then jump decades into the future to imagine a new city and the life you might live there. Featuring a series of short… Read more »
Ghostwriter is a commission for the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter as part of the relaunch of the renovated building in November 2011. The work springs from the saying that “A million objects give rise to a million thoughts” which the museum uses as a concept for their collection. Each object in the collection… Read more »
From 2011 to 2013 the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum closed for a major refurbishment with new areas designed by Gringo Cardia, Diébédo Francis Kéré and Shigeru Ban. We were awarded the commission for a game in the Refusing Fatality area designed by Shigeru Ban. The game demonstrates the vital role that the… Read more »
Sidetrack: Body Chemistry 4 and Sidetrack: Light Sleeper were micro commissions for Shifts ’00 – Shifts In Choreography (Conference) by Barrierdale Opera House presented at The Chisenhale Dance Space in 2000.
The work was subsequently shown in a pedestrian precinct in Nottingham and in a bank in Hildesheim in Germany. Looking at the obsession with crime reconstructions the piece features exploding bullet hits courtesy of a film special effects company. Lasting up to 12 hours per day the piece re-enacts a murder again and again, each… Read more »
In 1998 Blast Theory launched a lottery in which the winners had the chance to be kidnapped. Ten finalists around England and Wales were chosen at random and put under surveillance. Two winners were then snatched in broad daylight and taken to a secret location where they were held for 48 hours. During the run… Read more »
Three booths in CASCO gallery in Utrecht are connected. One booth is for the interviewer. It has a monitor, a pair of headphones and a microphone. By switching a button the interviewer can connect to one of the other booths. They have a pair of headphones, a microphone and a camera. When your booth is selected… Read more »
Each poster shows a photograph from in and around various cities: some with people in the shot and some deserted. In each of the four pictures a different question was asked, for example “ What do you fantasise about on the bus?” or “Describe a stranger you once saw and have never forgotten”. This is… Read more »
Stripped of their narrative drive these fragments take on a new set of resonances.
Filmed continuously over 24 hours using a time lapse technique Viewfinder juxtaposes the everyday with the pornographic. Referencing web cams and reality television, the piece poses questions about mediation, self reflexivity and the voyeuristic impulse. Viewfinder premiered at the LISTE01 Young Art Fair, in Basel, Switzerland where Blast Theory were invited as special guests. Thanks… Read more »
The books display a collection of pornographic images, some chosen and some made by the members of Blast Theory. All the images – including those made by Blast Theory – are available on the internet. Each image is spread across all nine books so that individual books only show one ninth of each image. When… Read more »
By partially erasing the ephemeral passage of traffic and people, the video presents the urban fabric as monolithic, expansive and subject to minute shifts that might otherwise pass unmarked. While superficially absent people are in fact constantly present on the margins: a running man appears as blur, another is briefly reflected in a marble column…. Read more »
Rock music roars in. And out. Then a real flash, hugely bright in the tiny room from behind the visitor, casting their shadow onto the wall, leaving a vivid after image on the retina. The woman murmurs, another man alone in the room onscreen, another real flash. And so it unfolds. A work about the… Read more »
The work is both a catalogue and an archive of hidden places, gathered from interviews with friends. Most are real, some are fictional, one or two are imaginary. All are important to someone.
At each end of the space is a laptop showing video excerpts from Return of the Living Dead Part II, Weekend, Alphaville and Bande à Part. Actors fight, cower, run, act the fool, dance, play dead, stagger down corridors and watch aerobics on TV. In silence, three performers – Paul Dungworth, Sheila Ghelani and Matt… Read more »
The Exploratron is a touch screen mounted on a rotating post which allows users to navigate a 360 degree panorama. By turning the screen, visitors are able to look across a photographic collage of an imaginary landscape of the year 2050. As they turn the screen, they are invited to find answers to questions posed… Read more »
In this interactive work, the participant drills through two thousand either/or questions. Starting with the question ‘Urban or Rural?’, the piece moves from the expansive into the cloistered, finally arriving at a secret and private space. Reminiscent of ’10×10′ by Charles and Ray Eames, it uses this swoop in scale to explore the taste of… Read more »
The goal of the game is to ‘help other people’ but it is not necessarily clear how to do this. From the Gasometer to Product Barn, the Canal to the Rat Research Institute, up to 1,000 players roam the streets, defining themselves through their interactions. Day Of The Figurines continues Blast Theory’s enquiry into the… Read more »
The work has 11 terminals arranged around the central atrium of the gallery. Each is equipped with a monitor, a motorised pan-tilt camera and a footpad interface in the floor. Visitors create avatars which they’re able to fly around the atrium using the footpad. The camera tracks their position as they fly; crashing into other… Read more »
The installation comprises a series of rooms, leading to an interview. On arrival, a receptionist sits at a desk at the mouth of a corridor. Visitors are invited to fill in a waiver giving their name and personal details including their consent to be video recorded. At the end of the corridor is a door… Read more »
“one of the most complex and powerful responses to the first Gulf War to be produced within the sphere of theatrical practice.” Gabriella Giannachi, Virtual Theatres Desert Rain was, in part, a response to the assertion by French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard that ‘the Gulf War did not take place‘ because it was a… Read more »
To begin you select a small plastic figurine from a purpose built metal table, choosing from names such as Cutty Hugh, Edible Jenks or Meat Buttons. Your figurine is then moved onto the game table and you are given a badge to wear which shows your figurine’s name. As you join the game your character… Read more »
Riders Have Spoken is an interactive archive of selected recordings from Rider Spoke. As Rider Spoke toured the world, we collected tens of thousands of recordings. We listen to each recording on the day it is made and place it into one of five categories. Each category is summed up by a description, of which… Read more »
A disrespectful response to the Blast Theory archive. Take your pick from scores of VHS tapes scattered on the rug. Load them into nine players and get mixing. Our VHS archive contains over 200 tapes, featuring footage from 1994 to 2003. These tapes were digitised to computer and the resulting footage chopped up, edited and… Read more »
Five key pieces form the focus of the exhibition, the earliest of which is Stampede (1994). Presented through photo stills, footage of the performance and cue cards, Stampede is a promenade piece exploring crowds and rioting. The work posed pertinent questions; At what point are you prepared to declare yourself publicly? What would make you… Read more »
In its playful engagement with the languages of sales, persuasion and exhortation Car Advert has much in common with the Kidnap Blipvert made in 1998.