A project by Jonathan Frigeri, Daniel Kemeny, Rico Schalueck,
with Astro Pietra, Delmore Fx, TRema, Cabinet de Logique, Leon, Lamento Mapuce, Jay Pennington and many other music boxer!

Live streaming from Picnic Kunst und Musik Raum in Berlin where a human scale music box has been built.
On-site live ballerina show, Margarita Cocktail and Pizza Margerita.

Web Archive

Picnic is a project room dedicated to the development of experimental art and music.
Project in collaboration with Selene Mauvis.

Picnic website

Live on LapTopRadio

Invited to participate in a black market organized in a attic during one night. I filled a suitcase with DVD full of mp3 and movies all downloaded illegally from the Internet.

Mega Byte was a show composed by several installations (Wallpaper, Power of the research, New Kings, Creative Process) and a musical chapel (Sanatorium).

The exposition follows a symbolic trail divided by the two floors of the gallery: if on the ground floor we shall have visual representations of contemporary folklore, with the typically austere aspect of some contemporary art forms, the basement, hosting the Sanatorium, will exalt the new sacredness of contemporary folklore feelings through musical rituals. Open to the public only during the performance of these rites, the exposition Mega Byte intends to stage the difficulty to fix and represent, in the context of a contemporary art exhibition, the elusive concept of folklore and of its indissoluble relation to social aggregation. This is also why the exposition undergoes some slight but constant upgrades. Or better: updates.

MEGA BYTE
CONTEMPORARY FOLKLORE
text by Phileas Fog

INTRO
In today’s artistic landscape, foklore is a phenomenon generally considered as dépassé or even anachronistic. Indeed this term, which derives from the German “Volkskunde” (popular knowledge), and which determines the popular traditions as an anthropological field of study, sounds ambiguous today in that we often misrepresent and restrict this secular phenomenon of social and cultural life to the practice of folk art as well as to an archaic past. It is as if modernity, industrialization and finally globalization had announced the irrevocable end of this form or necessity of expression.
The Mega Byte exposition, centered around these considerations, asks itself whether folklore and its forms of expression are still possible in our over-mediatized world, offering itself paradoxically and with irony to ponder over these questions: what of today’s folklore will remain tomorrow? Or better still: will a folklore exist in the future? And if it does, what shape will it take?

COMMUNITIES AND RAW MATERIALS
Folklore, as the books say, has always expressed and passed on to posterity the aesthetic and cultural identity of an era and a community, when the work of an artist is spontaneously adopted by a collectivity, be it geographical, ethnic, social, religious, or whatever else. Thus the first paradigm that is questioned by today’s folklore, is the paradigm of community. In effect, the growing accessibility to means of production, the fluency of communication and the hyperconnectivity of present-day society, facilitates the prolifteration of new communities that cannot always be located geographically, yet that don’t lack any of the characteristics of folk culture.
Another interesting aspect of folklore, besides the techniques and the practice of so-called folk art, is linked to material. To produce his artifacts, a folk artist traditionally uses ordinary or used materials (iron, wood), inspired by popular subjects that will be transformed into new inventive creations, and thus express “subjective-collective” visions.
Yet, when the traditional materials are missing, folk art reacts by replacing them with new physical or conceptual materials, which includes a contemporary expression of traditional forms of popular art. This faculty of adaptation that is also linked to the subjects of folkloristic art, relates traditionally to representations of power, sacredness and belief, with a comical touch typical of popular art.
In the end, the codes of folklore bring together a vast spectrum of techniques and decorative or utiltarian medias. Occurences which are material (artifacts ranging from tapestry sewing to prow sculpting) as well as spiritual (culture, rites, oral traditions, and beliefs such as songs or processions) and that have always translated and described the aspirations of a community and the tastes of a temporal and geographic beyond.

ZEITGEIST
If folklore is eternal, the task of anthropologists or of posteriority is to establish with certainty what is or is not a particular folkloristic manifestation of an epoch or place.
The Mega Byte expo is born from the idea of applying – well ahead of its time – the codes of folklore to the reality of contemporary artists, and thus to offer the visitor an idea of what our folklore could be. This can be done by adapting folklore to contemporaneity in its local and global mediatized dimension and by studying the concept of new communities (facebook, internet, etc.), using the most accessible and functional tools and medias of our times (computers, printers, etc.) and adapting the themes and traditional forms of folk art to today’s corresponding subjects. Mega Byte presents itself in the shape of a showroom of possible popular representations capable of expressing the spirit of a time which we still can’t grasp.

LapTopRadio roaming around Neuchâtel
a project by
Jonathan Frigeri, Constance Allen, Laurent Schmid, Roman Urodovskikh, Martina-Sofie Wildberger

Radio Archive

With live music by Brian (Johnny Haway), Bulb, Tribute to O.Z.A.

During the year 2007, I was working as a video editor for the agency in charge to broadcast info content in the screens placed in a kiosk chain of the french part of Switzerland.
The programm of the channel doesn’t had a cultural rubric, so I decided to send whener (each time the journalist forgot to send me info content) possible video report about contemporary art, edited by myself.