June 17 – 21, 2020
2020년 6월 17일 – 21일
Media Gallery A, CICA Museum
MFGA (Make Floors Great Again)
“MFGA (Make Floors Great Again) is a robotic performance piece. Using an applet created with the IFTTT platform, The Resistance Roomba reacts to Donald Trump’s twitter feed. Each time Trump tweets, the gilded Roomba begins a cleaning cycle and sweeps my floors or the floors of the gallery.
I believe this subversion can be used to provoke action as a part of a participatory/critical art practice. Technology is so undeniably embedded in our daily lives in the form of house appliances, media platforms, electronic gadgets, we can become almost blind to it. By hijacking everyday technologies or even making our own, we can jolt ourselves into questioning the ways in which they are created, marketed, and used. Using these pervasive technological systems in ways they were not intended produces an opportunity for guerilla art tactics.”
Janna Ahrndt received her MFA in Electronic and Time Based Art from Purdue University and is currently the Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital art at Indiana University. She is a part of a wave of new media artists rejecting the notion that craft and technology are directly opposed. Her work explores how deconstructing everyday technologies can be used to question larger oppressive systems and create a space for participatory political action. Her activist and social art practice seeks to blur the lines between the materiality of craft and the digital realm of new media technologies to create socio-political interventions. She has presented research on the use of DIY electronics as a medium for participatory political art at ISEA 2019 in Gwangju South Korea and facilitated workshops in collaboration with the Science Gallery in Melbourne Australia, the Science Gallery in Dublin Ireland and the NEoN Re@ct festival.
Janna Ahrndt, “MFGA(Make Floors Great Again” (2019)