MIC Toi Rerehiko is pleased to present an exhibition by digital media collective SWAMP, opening July 3. This will be the first instance of SWAMP showing in New Zealand and follows the Colab residency of member Matt Kenyon.

Kenyon has collaborated with Doug Easterly as SWAMP since 1999. Originally formed in the United States, the collective has exhibited extensively over the past decade, most recently at Exit Art in New York City, ISEA2008 in Singapore and Videotageedia, Hong Kong. Trained formally in painting, their mutual interests in emergence theory, evolution and popular culture has led to research, production and lecturing in the realm of new media.

Featuring eight works that span a variety of media, SWAMP’s Fire Sale stages a critique of contemporary values through a medley of interventions and interdisciplinary enquiries.

A recurring concern for the collective is the corruption of popular culture at the hands of sensationalism, mass media and corporate entities like fast-food chains and big box retail; things which themselves construct the very foundations of everyday culture. In this way SWAMP (an acronym for Studies of Work Atmospheres and Mass Production) attempts to redirect the configuration of contemporary culture, and in the process reveal flaws and contradictions prevalent in its systems. Consequentially, SWAMP’s practice can be understood as a form of social activism. The collective states that it seeks creative expression within elements of culture that are inherently counter-creative.

Works in the exhibition reveal that forces of market/political hegemony, dominance and monolithic scale are being successfully advertised and understood as consumer and democratic freedom. Through compositions relying on satirical juxtaposition and scenarios laced with irony, SWAMP executes its argument in an intelligently playful manner, serving to both reflect and amplify the absurdity of their subjects. Coke Is It manifests its critique in a kinetic robot, which seeks out Coca Cola and proceeds to spray it over itself until it eventually erodes and self-destructs. Designed to search and consume until it kills itself, the robot embodies a form of modern-day lifestyle and exposes a hypocrisy in marketing that tries to link an elevated self-worth to consumption of toxins.

Through intervention and infiltration SWAMP sets up situations that then take place in their own time. POP Portraits probes into the policy of American retailing giant Wal-mart and its usage of thermally treated receipt paper, for the efficient printing of messages tailored to individual buying habits. SWAMP subverts and tricks this process, detailing the repercussions of switching the receipt paper and leading the corporation to it’s own undoing.

Notepad marks another intervention as SWAMP sends stacks of what appears as uniform stationery into the US Department of Congress. Unseen to the naked eye, lines on the notepads have been micro-printed with details of Iraqi civilian casualties, and the stationery acts as a trojan horse, slipping the unacknowledged body count inevitably into official governmental archives.

“At home, social spaces are replaced with control spaces: chairs and sofas rotate to obsequiously receive the glowing radiation from hundreds of channels whose collective voice weaves “BUY-NOW” messages into every facet of the meme-machine mislabeled ‘creative programming’”. - SWAMP