DMSTFCTN “ECHO FX” | Film Screening & Talk

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230616 2200: as polls close on Brexit referendum night, Nigel Farage, a former commodities broker and the face of the Leave campaign, concedes defeat.
230616 2252: in a Foreign Exchange market driven by Remain sentiment, the network effect of Farage's concession pushes the Pound to a 6 month high.
240616 0528: the Pound reaches its lowest point in 30 years, losing 12% of its value against the Dollar.
ECHO FX replays the night of the 2016 Brexit referendum through the echoes of misleading information spread on social media. Triggered by a perfectly timed concession, those echoes contributed to inflate the value of the Pound market before the refendum outcome became apparent. As the Pound crashed, a few London City traders with access to private polls pointing to a Leave win made millions from shorting it.
ECHO FX was screened on the third anniversary of referendum night in June 2019 (Ø, Corsica Studios, London) and performed as the United Kingdom left the European Union in January 2020 (CTM x transmediale, Berghain, Berlin). In November 2021, Krisis Publishing released ECHO FX as a book, including digital download and visual and written contributions expanding on the night's event.

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Marko Cicilliani | Why Frets? | Lecture, Exhibition, Concert, Album Release

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Why Frets? by Marko Ciciliani is a series of three works – a multimedia performance, a performance lecture, and an installation – that illuminate different aspects of this fictional history of the electric guitar from varying angles. The story is based on speculative fabulation – a deliberate re-invention of the past.
Rather than pursuing the idea of creating something new as an envisaging of the future, speculative fabulation and the rewriting of history proceeds from an examination of the conditions of how society and culture arrived at their present state. As an artistic practice of “arrière-art” – as opposed to “avant-art” –, rewriting the past offers a method of imagining what contemporary society might look like alternatively, and thus of creating a vision of a future. Or as Donna Haraway put it: "The open future rests on a new past" (1978).
In this way, the three individual works Why Frets? – Requiem for the Electric Guitar, Why Frets? – Downtown 1983 and Why Frets? – Tombstone – complement each other in the sense of a transmedia storytelling. Each of the individual works is a self-contained work, but taken as a whole, the three artworks cast different spotlights on the electric guitar, focusing on aspects such as techno-cultural developments, inscriptions of gender, or social values.