Take a Good Lamp

Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen (www.cohenvanbalen.com) have investigated the multiple materialities, modes of production, and long networks of contemporary technological culture in many of their installation and film works. This has ranged from work with bioengineering (Sterile) to work with the rare earth minerals and metals that form the backbone of contemporary media. In works such as H/AlCuTaAu and the later D/AlCuNdAu, they remediated the existing chemical elements of electronics and data centers into an odd sort of hybrid art-installation object; in 75 Watt, they investigated the long production networks of another sort of real, and yet imaginary, object as part of its production chain, producing a weird choreography of imaginary technology becoming a consumer product. Recently they embarked on a field trip to Congo, one that served both as artistic research and as a performance of...