The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery
Showing: 7th – 30th January, 2016
Opening: Thursday 7th January, 6-8pm
Facebook event
An exploration of the materiality of the digital and the inaesthetics of spam, waste, and the digital banal.

“The digital realm is an avant-garde to the extent that it is driven by perpetual innovation and perpetual destruction” Sean Cubitt, interviewed by Simon Mills, Framed.

Error Message is an installation work comprised of digital audio-visual elements that engage with the aesthetics and methodology of the glitch, aggregated with found sculptural elements comprised of e-waste. The work seeks to explore the underlying materiality of the digital, and the relations of production that constitute and sustain the aura of the digital. The generic desktop landscape wallpaper, given both its ubiquity and its implicit gesture towards a romanticised yet simulated environmental exterior, is employed as an aesthetic and conceptual departure point, as well as the original data-input for these explorations.

Richard Benjamin Keys is an artist, writer and electronic musician who is currently based in Lyttelton, New Zealand. Richard’s work explores the convergence of media technologies, spatiality, subjectivity and political-economy employing a critical materialist methodology that seeks to interrogate and explore what underlies given techno-sociological surfaces. He produces and performs electronic music as Voronoi, and runs the label/mix series VMR. He was the founder and curator of the New Zealand Sound Map (2012-2014), and is the co-editor of New Zealand’s only Sonic Arts journal Writing Around Sound. He has exhibited and performed his work throughout Australia and New Zealand.

Richard currently works as the Assistant Gallery Manager of the Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery in Christchurch New Zealand. He holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Media Studies, and a Masters of Media Design, from Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.