Sam's Cabinet of Curiosities

Identifying himself as a first-generation digital native, the Berlin-based New Zealand artist Simon Denny have long been interested exploring the influence of the advancement in information technology on contemporary humanity. This has especially manifested since his All You Need Is Data (2012), which laid out significant individuals, corporations and organizations of the Internet landscape at the time. Since then, we can see a significant proportion of his works evolved around tech related topic. From  some of Simon Denny's works, we can see how the collage of popular entertainment and gamification creatively and impactfully convey the discussed topics. From example in his exhibition Games of Decentralized Life (2018) and the related revamps in 2019 & 2020, Simon Denny had produced  a series of exhibits that drew inspiration from Milton Bradley's classic boardgame Game of Life . With the his research on the comparison of centralized and decentralized web technologies, the...

In his album Solo for Wounded (1997), Yasunao Tone present a 48-minute long sequence of fragmented and unintelligible sounds. High pitches scratching, stubborn pauses, unexpected burst - the sounds are so extreme, chaotic or even appalling, to the point that one may wonder what kind of eccentric instruments or synthesizing created such glitched sound.  Respective to the work's eccentric texture, production techniques of Solo or Wounded are equally radical ones. Presented by Yasunao Tone, the glitch doesn't only mean "error", not just simple interference but in fact the down-to-bottom distortion. Solo for Wounded is recorded from the mess of audio signal created through scratching and pinched originally audible CDs. Yasunao Tone also overrode to error-correcting system of CD player to made such derailing even more unpredictable, adding more noises that randomizes as the damaged CD deteriorates each time it was played. As a result, Solo for Wounded is fundamentally dif...