Tristian Koenig is delighted to present Idle Resources, Great Hits first solo exhibition with the gallery and the first exhibition of the 2014 season. Idle Resources engages with the fallout of the attention economy. It reflects on the extremes of cognitive connection and disconnection, focus and distraction, within our highly mediatized society.
Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. Within this theorization, 'attention' is defined as focused mental engagement on a particular aggregate of information and the subsequent decision of whether to act on this information or not. As content has grown increasingly abundant, and aggregates of information are now readily and immediately available, gaining ‘attention’ has now become the defining and limiting factor in all areas of contemporary consumption.
For the exhibition, Greatest Hits will present three suites of new work that probe different areas of the attention economy - from the aesthetics of acoustic damping and pharmacological treatment of attention deficit disorder (ADD), to a soliloquy on the pervasive presence of screen-mediated experience.
Greatest Hits is the collaborative practice of Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer and Simon McGlinn. Recent exhibitions include Video Arte Australia y Nueva Zelanda, Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile, Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Reinventing the Wheel: the Readymade Century, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Creative Suite, City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand and Put up a Signal, Bus Gallery, Melbourne & MES 56, Yogyakarta, Indonesia