List of Residencies, Commissions & Collaborations

ALL COMMISSION ENQUIRIES / BOOKINGS ARE DIRECTLY THROUGH OUR CONTACT PAGE.

Some Days I Drink My Coffee By The Grave of William Blake video for The The, directed by Tim Pope [2024]
Elusive Butterfly video for Marc Almond [2024]
Linoleum Smooth video for The The, directed by Tim Pope [2024]
First Hand Experience In Second Hand Love video for Soft Cell live show [2024]
Cognitive Dissident video for The The, directed by Tim Pope [2024]
A Man Could Get Lost video for Soft Cell live show [2024]
Work in progress surround av work for a new RML CineChamber module [2024]
Multiscreen/multispeaker installation for Aveiro 2024, Capital Portuguesa Da Cultura [2024]
PhD Studentship – Northern Bridge [2023+]
Live AV performance collaboration with Ergo Phizmiz and Gwilly Edmondez, Cafe OTO / Arts Council England [2023]
Artist support from Lakes of Wada [2023]
Solo live AV performance “The Library of Babel“, IndieGoGo crowdfunded [2023]
CuratorSpace Artist Bursary [2022]
“Changing Your Mind” radio commission for Deutschlandradio [2022/2023]
108 radio commission for Radio Art Zone [2022]
Mind Maps: The Art of Vicki Bennett Sheehan Gallery, Walla Walla, USA | [2022]
Global Eyes video for THE THE [2022]
PRSF Open Fund For Music Creators recipient [2021]
Gone, Gone Beyond Commissioned by SPILL Festival of Performance, presented in partnership with Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (ACCA) and Barbican. Supported by Recombinant Media Labs (RML), DanceEast, nyMusikk, Gulbenkian, TouchDesigner, PRS Foundation’s The Open Fund and Arts Council England. Developed as part of Sound and Music’s New Voices Programme. [2021]
a-n Artist Bursaries 2019 recipient [2019]
I Can Fly new radio work for WDR3 [2019]
Hallwalls Artist in Residence Project (HARP) artist [2019-2020]
Sound and Music New Voices award recipient [2018-2020]
New live AV performance “The MirrorACE Grants for the Arts [2018-2019]
8 speaker / 10 screen audiovisual installation “Gone, Gone Beyond” with Recombinant Media Labs and Cinechamber [2016++]
Video editing/production for The The Comeback Special [Spring 2018]
Can’t Stop What’s Coming video for THE THE [2017]
Curation of radio station and artist residency (with John Kilduff) Optimized! on WFMU funded by National Endowment for the Arts [June 2016]
No One Is An Island radio commission for WDR to be broadcast 9 April 2016 on WDR 3 [Summer 2015-Winter 2015]
Curation of films for Concert of Collage, Watershed, Bristol [September 2015]
Nothing Can Turn Into A Void, editing a feature length doc film by Carl Abrahamsson about Vicki Bennett/People Like Us [Spring 2015]
Arts Council England award creating a new live AV performance Citation City and new short films with artist soundtracks pdf [Spring 2014-Spring 2015]
Book collaboration with Gregor Weichbrodt The Fundamental Questions [Summer 2014]
Those Who Do Not T Shirt Commission [Summer 2014]
Printed in a light blue and white on an electric blue T-shirt with The Wire logo and Vicki Bennett Those Who Do Not printed in light blue on the back of the neck. Limited edition of 100 shirts.
Solo gallery show Shutter at Leeds College of Art pdf [Winter-Spring 2014]
Touring award from Sound and Music for Notations [Autumn/Winter 2013]
Two short animation films for Animate Projects/Channel 4 television, UK as part of their Random Acts Series [March 2013-July 2013] broadcast on national television in Autumn 2013 pdf
Creation of online film with 7 artist soundtracks Gesture Piece, commissioned by Pixel Palace at Tyneside Cinema pdf [Spring/Summer 2013]
Creating a new live AV performance Consequences (One Things Leads To Another, commissioned by Arts Council England [August 2012-January 2013], supported by transmediale [January 2013]
Music for live performance piece Lost and Found by Anne Juren [Summer 2012]
Archiving Radio Boredcast on WFMU, commissioned by AV Festival wfmu.org/playlists/ZZ [May-June 2012]
Curating an online-radio station Radio Boredcast for AV Festival 12pdf [Sept 2011-March 2012]
Sound and Music commission to make AVlive performance Horror Collage for The Sound Of Fear (later changed to The Magical Misery Tour Southbank Centre, London [September 2011]
The Doors of Perspection at Vitrine Gallery London [July/August 2011]
Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival commission to create a new live AV performance The Keystone Cut Ups with Ergo Phizmiz [2010]
Curation of Nothing is New, Everything Is Permitted. as part of AV Festival 10 at the Star and Shadow, Newcastle [2010]
Edinburgh Printmakers commission to create audio and artwork for a picture disc LP “This Is Light Music”, as part of their group exhibition Prints of Darkness to be shown at Edinburgh Printmakers in Summer 2010 then touring venues [2010]
Grants For The Arts commission to create new AV performance Genre Collage [2008-2009]
Great North Run Moving Image Commission 2009 The Great North Run Cultural Programme – to create a film using the archives of the Great North Run, Parade pdf [July 2008-October 2009]
Grants For The Arts commission to release Rhapsody In Glue with Ergo Phizmiz on bleep.com – an album created with audio collage sourced from the podcast Codpaste (May 2008)
 Retrospective solo exhibition of People Like Us AV work, entitled We Edit Life at alt.gallery Newcastle curated by Rebecca Shatwell pdf [May 2008]
Curation of CD Smiling Through My Teeth – Sonic Arts Network [May 2008]
Forma/AV Festival commission Breaking Waves to make Bluetooth audio compositions for mobile phone [January 2008]
Lecturing Music and Other Media at Goldsmiths [2006-2008]
Wandsworth Film Awards commission to make short digital film Skew Gardens, exploring the boundaries of urban land use – [September 2007]
Lovebytes commission in association with Millennium Galleries, Sheffield to make three screen AV film Work, Rest & Play [June 2007]
 Grants For The Arts commission to make podcast series Codpaste on WFMU, where People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz explore the working process of creating music from scratch [September 2007]
Radio session for BBC Radio 3’s Mixing It [February 2007]
Artist Residency at BBC Creative Archive with “access all areas” to work with their archive – Arts Council England (Interdisciplinary Arts) with BBC, White City – [March 2006]
Grants For The Arts commission to create 10″ record to be given away for free in selected international record stores Honeysuckle Boulevard [August 2006]
PRS Foundation award to create a new live performance (with artist Ergo Phizmiz) using dansette players and self-pressed vinyl compositions Boots! [June 2006]
Sonic Arts Network / Goldsmiths Electronic Music Studio (EMS) commission working with Daphne Oram’s sound archive [Summer 2005]
Grants for the Arts commission to create new live AV performance – [April 2005]
LUX commission to make digital short film sourcing the LUX archive collection Resemblage [October 2004]
Residency at FACT to make radio play Molaradio in collaboration with artist Felix Kubin and Croxteth school children [January 2004]
Sonic Arts Network commission to make short film and subsequent DVD release – Story Without End [June 2004]
Live performance with Wobbly for radio broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Mixing It, London Spitz [May 2004]
BBC Radio 1 session for John Peel [January 2003]
Future Physical commission to make digital short film The Remote Controller [June 2002]
Baby Zizanie (JG Thirlwell and Jim Coleman) live video for BZ performed at David Bowie’s Meltdown at QEH, London (June 2002)
Lovebytes commission to make short film We Edit Life [December 2002]
Curated line up for Humour in Music event, Ether Festival at Purcell Room, London [May 2002]
Year of the Artist Residency, Lighthouse, Brighton with Brighton & Hove Music Library, teaching sound collage [June 2001]
Year of the Artist Residency, Hull Time Based Arts, making AV collage – [January-April 2001]
Live session and BBC Radio 3 broadcast for Mixing It, Dingwalls [March 2001]
Work & Leisure International commission to make new AV live performance – [September 1999]
Ars Electronica – The Sound of Music live collaboration with Negativland and Barbed [Summer 1998]
Various radio commissions for De Avonden on VPRO, The Netherlands [early 1990s]

Exhibitions and Editions

ALL COMMISSION ENQUIRIES OR BOOKINGS FOR GONE, GONE BEYOND ARE TO BE MADE DIRECTLY WITH US THROUGH OUR CONTACT PAGE.

To date, People Like Us/Vicki has had 6 solo exhibitions and participated in over 20 group shows including at MAXXI (Rome), HMKV (Dortmund), Centro de Cultura Digital (Mexico), Hatton Gallery (Newcastle), Vitrine (London), alt.gallery (Newcastle), Greene County Council for the Arts Gallery (NY), Peacock Visual Arts (Aberdeen), Kunstmuseum (Magdeburg), Pallant House (Chichester), Engramme (Quebec), La Scatola Gallery (London), Changing Room (Stirling), Franklin Street Works (Connecticut), Usurp Gallery (London), University of Greenwich Galleries, Matthew Gallery (Dundee), Edinburgh Printmakers, Millennium Gallery (Sheffield) Leeds College of Art, Sunbeam Studios (London) and Sheehan Gallery, Walla Walla.

Also featured in Sounds Like Silence – 4’33’’ Silence Today (Spectre Books 2012), The Journal of Writing In Creative Practice (Vol 7 Issue 1 2015), The Fundamentals of Sonic Art and Design by Tony Gibbs (Ava Publishing 2007), Cutting Across Media by Kembrew McLeod (Duke University Press 2011), Here To Go – Art, Counter-Culture and the Esoteric (Forum Nidrosiae 2014), Incredible Machines by Danny Snelson (avant 2014), writing for The Wire’s Collateral Damage (February 2012) and a whole chapter in Duchamp Is My Lawyer The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb by Kenneth Goldsmith on Columbia University Press (2020) and a chapter in Different People – Conversations on Art, Life and the Creative Process by Carl Abrahamsson on Trapart (2021).

.For gallery concerts and festival film screenings please also see Selected Performances and Screenings

Continue reading “Exhibitions and Editions”

Essay by Drew Daniel

Just What Is It That Makes People Like Us So Different, So Appealing?
Drew Daniel

Just What Is It That Makes People Like Us So Different, So Appealing?
Drew Daniel

From “Beware the Whim Reaper” (1995) to “Abridged Too Far” (2004), Vicki Bennett has a way with execrable puns. Confronted with the task of theorizing about what informs and unites the bewildering multiplicity of her life’s work creating painstaking, hilarious and disturbing assemblages out of sound, language and moving image as People Like Us, the title of hers that catches me by the throat is an oldie but a goodie: “Pompous Circumstance”. Wit’s last minute detour off the golden road to cliché, puns take a piece of shared culture and suddenly tweek it into a personal shape, creating something new by revealing what was already there. Inverting Alexander Pope’s formula for poetry (“what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed”), puns reveal a latent possibility within the given: what oft was expressed but never, until now, brought to thought. Puns are a kind of “black art” that throws received values into reverse: if good puns are bad, then the worst are the best. Ideally, you should be groaning and laughing at the same time. Fair is foul and foul is fair.

Risking a descent into pompous circumstances indeed, the occasion of this retrospective exhibition reverses Vicki’s direction of flow and prompts us to take her sound and video work seriously, and asks us to try to place her work in the context of an ongoing sea-change in how creativity is understood. Pompously put, the artistic re-use of found material confronts us anew with the enigma of creation. Up-ended by indirection, we can only half-see the artist at work in the capricious decision to smash and grab. Looking at the results when the glue has dried and the files have been rendered, can we do any more than catch the shadow of a hand in mid-flight as it grasps and folds a found form, clicks “Crop”, hits “Save”? Trying to catch up, we might ask some simple questions: why isolate and preserve these fragments? Why this piece, placed exactly here? Why this element and not others? Is this a work of love and preservation for what is disappearing, or an act of mockery at the expense of the found? Are we meant to recall the vanished whole, or to see this isolated quanta of material as newly self supporting?

Faced with mounting evidence of collage’s omnipresence and the increasing banalization of cutting and pasting as components of every form of content-management software, it may hurt more now than ever before to return to the old, awkward question: is this creative?

Yodeling in the valley, the fragment oscillates between emotional pitches. When T. S. Eliot wrote “These fragments I have shored against my ruin,” he figured modernist fragmentation as a melancholic funeral rite, a minor key lament at cultural collapse sung against the headwind of history. The irony is that his flimsy barricade of found fragments of popular songs and overheard conversations and quotations proved surprisingly durable; far from a last gasp, it was a breathtakingly successful demonstration of the energies of a new, combinatorial poetics. Jump-cut from Eliot to Dada. Like the public torture of the corpses of suicides in medieval Europe (designed to purge the village of an evil selfishness through a gratuitously “meaningless” display of cruelty), Dada snippetry started as a hostile surgical intervention into a moribund and self-canceling society. The marginal chancers at the Cabaret Voltaire may have thought that their cut-ups of official rhetoric were the final harrowing of necrotic ideological tissue, but Dada collage inadvertently accomplished a revivifying transfusion into the post-war artistic bloodstream. Avant-garde art practices of mangling and attacking and distorting the detritus of mass culture birthed a portable technique of collage that proved all too adaptable to the posterboard and the advertisement and the radio jingle and the TV spot and the viral web campaign. Such are the ironies of what John Ashbery termed “acceptance culture”; the smothering bosom of official sanction muffles the howl of critique with a pillow of puff pieces. For further evidence, consult the PLU track title: “Cushions can Kill”.

Jump-cut to Richard Hamilton. Post-war fragmentation accelerated the centrifugal separation of the positive and negative powers unleashed by cutting up and reassembling culture into both an atomic optimism and an atomic pessimism. If anything could be harvested, shattered into fragments and then recreated for the sake of new art, then the entire archive (sound, image, word) was a standing reserve waiting to be taken by force. Unfortunately, thanks to the accelerating technology of nuclear warfare, this was also true of our own bodies: we were all going to be split apart and reconfigured against our will, and soon. William S. Burroughs’ nostrum “Cut into the present and the future leaks out” figures both the Pandora’s box of potentiality for recombination initiated by a self-consciously mature cut-up aesthetic and the radioactive fallout of anxiety and fear unleashed by a society which had cut into matter itself at its most basic level. We are still living with the results, as lurid narrative scenarios of the endlessly imminent total war choke present reality with a toxic cloud of futurity. Bennett revisits these fantasized bomb-sites and loops them, literally, in the “fort/da” game she plays with animated renderings of atomic explosions that wallpaper the backgrounds of the tank-faced, bighaired women in her video piece “We Edit Life”. Caught in the headlights of these macabre and hilarious people, with each improbable spit curl and passing facial tic replayed and looped into a digital tableaux vivant, we are embarrassed for them and yet find ourselves withering slightly under their artificially steady maternal gaze. In Bennett’s work, the past isn’t suddenly modernized by digital tools, but seems instead rendered even more saturated with the creepy alterity of its very pastness: the syrupy orchestral swells, campfire sing alongs, and outmoded fashions and forced smiles that she assembles and recombines aren’t so much preserved from the ravages of time as they are powerfully fermented in them.

The ability to cut up and transform found material would seem to constitute the ultimate post-modern runaround from older models of artistic expression as a self-revelation. Trading character and depth for a jigsaw surface, collage can seem like a cheap shot detour from being answerable for the self within the work. And yet there is something weirdly self-exposing about the cumulative results of Bennett’s excursions into the mass media archives; the obsessive return to certain images and sounds across decades of work grants them a weirdly personal quality, the fetishistic investment of a cargo cult of one that recognizes the deity of Rod McKuen and Dolly Parton. If it’s so funny, why does it make us feel so awkward? Bennett’s work registers a hot flush of manic exhilaration in the sheer powertrip of her sure technological command over her source material, but it pills the sugar with a certain lingering aftertaste of despair at the failure of the aspirations within the material she collects. If the surreal humor of her work at its lightest suggests the comic English anarchism of Monty Python or Richard Hamilton, the quotidian grimness of her work at its darkest suggests the mordant English miserabilism of Philip Larkin or Mike Leigh. Far from proposing a utopian or psychedelic “other world” of festivity in which to escape from the drabness of the everyday, after prolonged exposure to the alchemical work of Vicki Bennett, we see and hear our own everyday world as one big joke which is already cut to pieces. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry.

Works Cited
William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin The Third Mind New York: Viking Press, 1978.
T. S. Eliot “What the Thunder Said” The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.
Alexander Pope “An Essay on Criticism” Collected Poems. London: Tuttle Publishing, 1991.
This essay was commissioned by alt.gallery to coincide with “People Like Us: We Edit Life” – a Retrospective of the work of People Like Us, which ran in the gallery from 16 May-12 July 2008. Documentation can be found on the gallery site and here:
http://www.peoplelikeus.org/2008/documentation_of_the_people_like_us_retrospecitve_at_altgallery.html

Documentation of the People Like Us Retrospective at alt.gallery

Documentation of the People Like Us Retrospective at alt.gallery
alt.gallery (entry via alt.vinyl) 61/62 Thornton Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 4AW.
http://www.altgallery.org/
16 May-12 July 2008

alt.gallery is pleased to announce the first retrospective exhibition of work by People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett).
ARTIST INFO
For the past seventeen years British artist Vicki Bennett has been an influential figure in the field of audio visual collage, through her innovative sampling, appropriating and cutting up of found footage and archives. Using collage as her main form of expression, she creates audio recordings, films and radio shows that communicate a humorous, dark and often surreal view on life. The exhibition will focus on the concept of collage, showing an edited selection of her work, including twenty album releases, numerous singles and remixes, live sets, seven films and over a hundred and fifty radio shows. These collages mix, manipulate and rework original sources from both the experimental and popular worlds of music, film, television and radio.   People Like Us believe in open access to archives for creative use, and have made work using footage from the Prelinger Archives, The Internet Archive, and A/V Geeks. In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Center and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show ‘Do or DIY’ on WFMU has had over a million “listen again” hits since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.
MEMORY STICKS

Every week during the exhibition a different collection of special downloads from the People Like Us archive will be available from the gallery, bring your memory stick along for a free take away!
ESSAY BY DR DREW DANIEL
A specially commissioned essay by Dr. Drew Daniel of Matmos accompanies the exhibition. Download pdf here. Drew’s essay can also be linked to here

Download a larger version of this flyer here
Download the poster (featured top right) here
The exhibition also included a framed essay by Rick Prelinger on The Virtues of Preexisting Material. Here is an excerpt:
On the Virtues of Preexisting Material
© Rick Prelinger 2007
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License
1 Why add to the population of orphaned works?
2 Don’t presume that new work improves on old
3 Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom
4 The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful
5 Dregs are the sweetest drink
6 And leftovers were spared for a reason
7 Actors don’t get a fair shake the first time around, let’s give them another
8 The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers
9 We approach the future by typically roundabout means
10 We hope the future is listening, and the past hopes we are too
11 What’s gone is irretrievable, but might also predict the future
12 Access to what’s already happened is cheaper than access to what’s happening now
13 Archives are justified by use
14 Make a quilt not an advertisement

Download a pdf of the full text here, or link to the essay here.


The exhibition will also launch a new CD curated by Vicki Bennett for Sonic Arts Network called ‘Smiling Through My Teeth’, a compilation of humorous music and sound art.

SPECIAL EVENTS
People Like Us Special on WFMU
Thursday 15 May, 11pm-midnight (UK time) www.wfmu.org/playlists/ER – To celebrate the exhibition opening Ergo Phizmiz hosts a People Like Us Special on his show ‘Phuj Phactory’ on WFMU, both on terrestrial radio and live internet stream.
People Like Us Talk and Screening
Friday 16 May, 7:30pm
Star and Shadow Cinema, Stepney Bank, Newcastle
Vicki Bennett presents a selection of films by People Like Us.
The Late Shows: Smiling Through My Teeth CD Launch
Saturday 17 May, 7pm-11pm
alt.gallery
www.altgallery.org

The Late Shows form part of NewcastleGateshead’s world-class festivals and events programme. www.thelateshows.org.uk

Many thanks to Rebecca Shatwell for inviting us to do this retrospective, it was great fun to work together. Rebecca is now director of AV Festival.

Continue reading “Documentation of the People Like Us Retrospective at alt.gallery”