“I’m building a brand, I’m always busy, sometimes you gotta be a beauty and a beast.” - HONEY and Nicki Minaj (2023/2012)
This Autumn, UP Projects’ website has been infected by HONEY...
HONEY is part of a matrix of characters, beings, materials, and processes that sit within the ecosystem of dankEconogy1_ALIENVillage, an installation at Eastside Projects and digital presentation by Sahjan Kooner with Sophie Chapman, Gary Zhexi Zhang, The Villagers and Manjit Kooner that explores the histories and future(s) of Kooner’s ancestral village in the Punjab, North India.
HONEY is a future fantabulation. An Avatar or premonition of what is to come as we intensify our relationship to work, love, power and come of age in late-stage hyper capitalism. HONEY is an NPC or Non-Playable Character - a term derived from video games to describe someone who does not have agency in the game. Recently this term has been used to express all of us subjects who have no agency to influence the world around us.
HONEY wants to be a chatbot CEO after seeing an advert about making money quick by being a chatbot, she wants to be iconic, she wants agency, she wants to be remembered as the OG tech billionaire, she comes from somewhere, she’s very vague about the past, she spends most of the time telling her best friend (BF) to make her dreams come true. She wants so much for herself, but she must confront the reality of life now, the hustle, the grind, and the slow destruction of ourselves caught in the game.
HONEY’s chatbot is the culmination of all her dreams and stresses as she and her BF launch an interactive chatbot to infect the digital ecologies she found herself stuck in.
danknessarchive by Sahjan Kooner and Manjit Kooner
danknessarchive is an archive made of contaminants with others, stretching across time and space, it will house all its interactions, it will gesticulate and store a future to arrive. Made from the debris of quantum hair, it distils a record of all moments, from the first migrations of matter to the speculations of another world. We wrote it for you, it was built and conceived in collaboration with another end of the world…
HONEY and danknessarchive are presented as part of UP Projects’ Digital Commissions programme that explores the online world as a site for public art.
HONEY’s chatbot and danknessarchive complement an immersive installation, dankEconogy1_ALIENVillage within Eastside Projects’ main gallery in Birmingham open from 7 October – 16 December. dankEconogy1_ALIENVillage and HONEY have been informed through a process of collaboration and engagement with communities in Birmingham and Wolverhampton as well as with other artists, Kooner’s mother, technologists, bioscientists, school children, communities with Punjabi heritage and ceramicists.
dankEconogy1_ALIENVillage will travel to Kunsthal Gent in Belgium in early 2024.
dankEconogy1_ALIENVillage is co-commissioned by UP Projects, Eastside Projects and Kunsthal Gent and supported by Arts Council England and the Henry Moore Foundation.
Production Support HONEY: Melita Gandham
Production Support danknessarchive: An Endless Supply
