All images Sam Roberts 2010
CACSA Contemporary 2010, THE NEW NEW is a multi-sited Adelaide-city visual art project conceived by the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, to present the very latest in quality South Australian contemporary visual art, involving forty-four artists across twelve venues, including the Glenelg-to-city tram, the CACSA and other galleries, Rundle Mall and Rundle Street East, the University of Adelaide, Victoria and Whitmore Squares, and the project’s focal exhibition point, the long-empty building, The Gallerie, on the ‘cultural boulevard’ of North Terrace.
New Sound, instsllation 2010, Acrylic on board.
Electronic music is an ever expanding universe. New genres are born, grow and die, a lot of the time without anyone really even noticing they existed in the first place. They spread out in every direction: evolving, mixing with other genres, taking the old and making it new again, creating new sounds never heard before to shape the path forward. We download these songs. We download whole albums or discographies. No longer even listening to much of it anymore, we begin collecting for the sake of it. The whole process is representative of how we construct culture and build our way into a future that holds the unexpected, the old reborn, the new and the piles of excess that ultimately amount to nothing. We are continually creating and expanding our knowledge, reinventing the past and re-positioning ourselves in the world, yet our basic human experience remains the same. There is no way that we can ever exhaust the information available now or able to be discovered, yet the search goes on and on relentlessly. The space for The New New acts like a media rich environment: saturated, overstated and intense. Any attempt to know or understand everything is a futile exercise. The work aims to entice the viewer to abandon attempts at complete understanding, allowing them to experience the space in a zen like way. The work is about experiencing and being in the space, people can take their own meaning from it. Experience is tangible and forgettable yet it remains for a moment until destroyed by our attempts to clarify it. The best things happen when we don’t even know it. Sam Songailo 2010
