Soft Nails ~ ♥[ASMR] Kleincomputer Robotron KC87 ♥ | A Video by Nadja Buttendorf

December 6, 2019 – March 6, 2020
Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art | 1, 460 Portage Ave | Winnipeg MB | Canada

Plug In ICA is screening Soft Nails ~ ♥[ASMR] Kleincomputer Robotron KC87 ♥ by Nadja Buttendorf  in our Breezeway as part of  Labour of Love: On Digital Economies in the Arts, a series of lectures, screenings, and workshops. The video will be on display until March 6, 2020.

The KC stands for Kleincomputer, in English, literally small computer. Released in 1987 in the GDR by VEB Robotron-Meßelektronik”Otto Schön” Dresden. Originally, the KC 87 was intended as a home computer (HC) for private households. Due to a lack of resources, however, the KC87 was only in use as an educational computer in educational institutions.

ASMR, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is a net cultural form of physical stimulation through whispering and soft sounds that has developed and spread on the largest online platform YouTube. The listeners and viewers find the tingling on the skin, triggered by those very soft noises, very pleasant. The sight of bent fingernails, on the other hand, is often perceived as unpleasant. In Soft Nails, artificial fingernails made of silicone reinforce the viewer’s reaction. The typical noises of ASMR videos are complemented by this visually irritating stimulus.

Throughout the video, Buttendorf whispers the information about the KC87.  In most ASMR videos only current high-tech utensils appear to evoke tingles. In Soft Nails, Buttendorf deliberately uses high-tech from the GDR and transforms it into a pop cultural format. This video work is a satellite project for the web series Robotron – a tech opera.

Nadja Buttendorf (b.1984) questions current norms and codes of gender constructions and value creation mechanisms of the human body in our digital society. Her works make it clear that our understanding of technology is also linked to patriarchal power relations. Her interactive works and video projects, on the other hand, draw multi-layered new narratives in which women are visible as an elementary part of the history of technology. She extracts communicative moments of participation in the internet both in her performative jewellery objects and in her tutorial workshops. DIY, as a widespread online aesthetic, is used specifically as a strategy of access and rejection of neoliberal work ethics. Works and workshops by Nadja Buttendorf have been shown at the HKW, Berlin; the Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund; Künstlerhaus, Bremen; LaGaîtéLyrique, Paris; the MU Eindhoven; the NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf; Halle 14 – Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig; the D21, Leipzig; and the panke.gallery, Berlin. She has also given lecture-performances at Re:publica, the CCC, Creamcake and the nGbK in Berlin. Buttendorf is a trained goldsmith and studied fine arts at the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle (Saale).

Labour of Love or LOL, takes the “public course” as a platform for engagement, this program highlights the various ways in which the digital is interrogated, explored, celebrated, pushed to its limit, reworked, re-invented by artists, scholars, curators, writers and others. The course encompasses a full array of events, delving into such topics as coding, circuit bending, VR, 360 video, scanning, and 3D printing. Divided into two streams, a lecture and screening series, and workshops, Labour of Love at its most general examines the relationship between the economics of labour and the digital arts as it contends with the conditions of racial capitalism. As a research platform, we aim to build an understanding of the digital by presenting artists who invent new trajectories through various technologies.

All lectures and screenings are free and open to the public.