Methods of Art – Archive of Artists Interviews

Well, I think all startups are kind of- a form of Sci-Fi. I mean, if we’re talking about like potential high growth businesses, right? So, I think all ambitious startups that are kind of based on a radical vision for an alternate future. And as what a startup does is taken up, if it’s successful, then it transforms behavior. And if it’s very successful, then it could transform behavior to the extent that that behavior could become a verb. So, I think all startups are really about producing alternate realities. And I guess, what we’re working on with New Eelam is that we’re bringing together specialists from across the fields of real estate, finance, technology, design, data-science, architecture and art to develop a new form of housing.

So, I sort of like work from wherever I am and I don’t really live anywhere, I’ve kind of been living more or less on the route for the last, well several years now, since art school really. My laptop is my studio, I guess. And my cofounders are all in different places, we’re a remote team. Well, we’re all working on different things, so right now, we are prototyping our kind of show home and modeling a lot of the data involved. And the exhibitions have become for us a really good way of kind of bootstrapping the business and planning like the early stages of starting this company through doing these exhibitions. And that has been a way of kind of like talking to potential customers and like working with technologies that we’re interested in by making our shows.

Christopher Kulendran Thomas / Production

Bio

Christopher Kulendran Thomas is an artist whose work manipulates the processes of circulation and distribution by which art produces reality. Thomas’s work has been included in the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016), the 9th Berlin Biennale (2016), „Bread and Roses“, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2016), „Co-Workers: Network As Artist“, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2015) and „Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making“, Tate Liverpool (2013). Forthcoming exhibitions include shows at Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin) and Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm).

Credits

The interview was conducted in summer of 2017 at the „Institut für Kunst und Kunsttheorie“ in Cologne.
Interviewed by: Kristin Klein
Edited by: Elisa Roßkamp
Transcript by: Eva Klein
Produced by: Cologne, University of Cologne (Post Internet Art Education Research)