Bird[s] in [cyber]Space 🐦

Exhibit : June 8 to July 18 2022

Artist talk : June 8th at lunch (12 to 1pm) at Imago

Opening reception : June 9th 5 to 7pm

The Binder Institute is a Pokémon card research chair founded in 2018 by Professor Samphire Green at Tamamushi University’s School of Art & Design, Celadon City. Although focused primarily on print matter, the Institute acts more broadly as a think tank for pokédemia (Pokémon academia) and occasionally hosts guest researchers such as Professor Djinn Proxy, adept of video game music composition.

“Bird[s] in [cyber]Space”

“I now realize that the anarchy of childhood – that which resists to the prejudice of the adult world – was always going to be key in my gaining access to my femininity, to my most fantastical desires. Today, I am a glamorous anarchist: I live out my transgendered Pokémon professor fantasy on Instagram, writing honest, heartfelt, and informed analysis of cards pulled from my (auto)institutionalized binder collection.

These self-same anarchist affinities are how Professor Djinn and I eventually came to meet; having succeeded in defying his classical training as a percussionist, Djinn dons an experimental practice in glitchy video game-inspired music as the perfect counterpoint to his emerging practice as an illustrator of hallucinogenic technicolour nightmares. Together, our goal was simple: to cross that line between societal expectation and personal desire; to feel weird and to make others feel weird; ‘to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant’, in Jack Halberstam’s words, and to ‘[run] the risk of not being taken seriously’. This was to be the hallucinogenic technicolour guts of our experiment.  Now all we need is a test subject…”

– Prof. Samphire Green

This project is presented as part of the RE:FLUX Festival at the Imago Artist -Run Print Studio gallery in the Aberdeen Cultural Centre.