At the moment we are working on an exhibition on tortures for Museum GoudA. And so we come across a lot of examples of torture on the internet. We stumbled upon the artist Steve Powers, who made an waterboarding installation in Coney Island. For just one dollar you can see an animatronic torturer waterboard an orange jumpsuited prisoner. Pouring water over the cloth covered face, and up the nose and mouth, the prisoner experiences the process of drowning and struggles at his restraints. This is of course done with a robot. But Steve also did a real live waterboarding for the sake of art.
Appeel is a virus spreading through interacting individuals.
Surfaces are covered by thousands of coloured stickers laid out in a grid. Peeling a sticker off leaves a white spot in the grid, people hence start individually and collectively changing its appearance. Once off the wall, the stickers ask to be sticked somewhere: people begin putting them on objects, walls, people, they collect them, they compose new images, they write messages. Slowly the little stickers spread, appearing further away from their source and occupying space.
Appeel inherits basic principles of interactivity and generativity applied to purely analogous means. Its immanent potential of penetrating regulated public and private space counterpoints its apparent plainness. The dot spreads with the promise to ironically mark its carrier as a symbol of sale and possession.
Alexandre Orion from Brazil makes beautiful graffiti without using paint. He scrapes, cleans and rubs the dirt of the walls until the original color appears. It has an unexpected beautiful result and this kind of graffiti isn't illegal so, the police can't charge him with anything.
