5th - 12th April 2006
Time Out London (page 38)
By Martin Herbert
* * * Danielle Arnaud, South.
Featuring nine artists engaged in empirical research, ‘Day-to-Day Data’ could almost date from Conceptualism’s heyday were it not for its underlying uncertainty and humour. A two minute video traces Richard Dedomenici’s attempts to identify the boundary between inner and outer London - between 0207 and 0208 phone numbers. After knocking on doors and consulting phone boxes, this denizen of Watford finally declares it a fascinating learning experience - but there’s a strong whiff of satire. On video, Ellie Harrison explains the absurdist measuring devices - which include an inflatable plastic banana, balls suspended at changeable heights and coloured lights - that she has laid out to cross reference certain variables in her life. She sends in the data each day; on my visit, she’d been sleeping well, not arguing much, and feeling uncreative. The absence of any kind of tally until the project ends makes it impossible, though, to know if anything unpredictable has happened.
Christian Nold’s project is visually intractable but conceptually comprehensible. Volunteers venture into the area wearing fingertip sensors that measure their heart-rate; a computer display presents their walks as upright cardiographs - like 2D mountains, projected onto a map provided by Google Earth - while fragmentary notes, such as ‘I heard Kevin Spacey lives around here’, seek to elucidate the spikes and dips of their excitations. Although they depart from the show’s time-based theme, Abigail Reynolds’ sculptures stand out. Either suspended or freestanding , these convocations of glassware, coloured seeds and stockings represent, we’re told, the etymological roots of the words ‘flame’ and ‘pay’ translated via a strict, self-invented code. Their hermeticism has a cloudy conviction that goes way beyond games playing.
