Superhybrid!

live audio / music concert, with Richard Crow, 
Superhybrid! (Concerto Bastardo), club night, 
curated by Peter Lewis & M.A Art & Design Leeds Metropolitan University, Highlight Leeds Comedy Club / The Cube, Leeds 

Invitation A.), Superhybrid! (Concerto Bastardo), club night, curated by Peter Lewis & M.A Art & Design Leeds Metropolitan University, Highlight Leeds Comedy Club / The Cube, Leeds, 2011 

 Venue: The Highlight Club, The Cube, Albion Street
Leeds, LS2 8ER U.K. 
30th Mar. 2011

Superhybrid!
Art and Comedy at The Highlight

A free event featuring performance, projection, stand-up and art at the Highlight Club, Leeds

Katrin Lock & Tim Brotherton, Michael Burkitt, Douglas Park & Richard Crow, Shezad Dawood, Black Dogs, Makiko Nagaya & Disinformation*, Alan Dunn*, Ben Judd, Rory Macbeth, Harold Offeh, Mark Dean Quinn, Clunie Reid, Paul Sakoilsky, Micheale Spessa with MA Art and Design, Leeds Metropolitan University, Tim Caswell, Matthew Day, Phillipa Dyrlaga, Ken Fackrell, Natasha Howe, Matthew Hynds, Ruth Jamieson, Samira Lalani, Layla Rassouli, Hannah Roberts, Natalja Sadikova, Owen Thomas, Elina Unger

Curated by Peter Lewis and MA Art and Design, Leeds Metropolitan University

What is ‘superhybridity’? 
The phenomenon of superhybridity hasn’t come out of the blue writes Jörg Heiser in Frieze. "It has been represented for decades in comic-book culture as, say, a powerful, elegant, brilliantly sculpted hero(ine) – or a decomposing monster rising from the swamps. Its more openly polemical – yet fragile – side was pioneered by artists who refused to take any medium, genre or discipline for granted. Mary Shelley, Alfred Jarry, Lina Wertmüller and Sigmar Polke are all super-hybridists avant l’Internet, but the question of what fuelled their methodical restlessness remains. Was it simply an eagerness to mimic capitalism’s restlessness? Yes and no (yes, because they’re fascinated by production; no, because they hate the business). Is it an adult form of child’s play? Yes and no (yes, because playfully testing perception is a part of it; no, because it’s too exhausting and risky for it to be just play)." Frieze, Editorial 133 September 2010 

The curator writes of the logic of the 'hybrid' in transversing cultures. The different lines that intersect explore curatorial possibilities that expand their own mechanisms beyond the normal processes of the art exhibition and the museum generating new concepts of the public as producers of an excess. This is superhybridity, spilling everywhere as a form in the process of an egalitarian renewal. An excess too risky to just play dead - if the artist is dead, long live the Superhybrid!

As Boris Groys writes, the modern state of things is like a spectacle without spectators - we are now the unofficial producers in the digital age of hyper-consumption. The question always returns to the imagination by way of an iconoclastic provocation. Nothing new, if we guess that its a symptom, by proxy, of the spectacle of global culture, we could re-think it as 'digital futurism', or 'electronophilia' in superfluidity, without anywhere left to go. Amid the ruins of an equality of cultures, images excrete the here and now in wasted time, issuing out of the terminal end of modernity.

We design our experience precisely from these excesses of material with a risk to falling prey to believing in their occult sovereign force. Just as Lawrence Weiner had produced the system for experiencing Conceptual art; Superhybrid art can be physically realised or remain as an idea, but in any instance the intangible 'experience' of new art always performs as unacceptable hybrids, being both lucid and funny.

Superhybrid! Wednesday, March 30th 8:00pm–2:00am Highlight Leeds Comedy Club, Leeds.

In March 2011 Black Dogs were invited to contribute to Superhybrid! a free event featuring performance, projection, stand-up and art at the Highlight Club, Leeds. Our contribution consisted of occupying a booth for the night that was used as a laboratory for mashed-up games surmised by Bryony Pritchard thusly..

'It was a bit like a party booth really-think we had about 50+ people come into the booth and stay 10-40 mins. We had a variety of games - what's the longest thing in your pocket/handbag?, dominoes/dice, dog of war (this has legs...), draw to audio almanac, biscuit riddles, sally's game, urrm think that was it (?!) if having decided they had won they could have anything they wanted from the Argos catalogue and take it home on a chip. Mick, James and myself had some interesting conversations with people, odd mothers, confused graduates.'

Other artists involved in Superhybrid! included:

Katrin Lock & Tim Brotherton, Michael Burkitt, Douglas Park & Richard Crow, Shezad Dawood, Makiko Nagaya & Disinformation, Alan Dunn, Ben Judd, Rory Macbeth, Harold Offeh, Mark Dean Quinn, Clunie Reid, Paul Sakoilsky, Micheale Spessa with the MA Art & Design, Leeds Metropolitan University: Tim Caswell, Matthew Day, Phillipa Dyrlaga, Ken Fackrell, Natasha Howe, Matthew Hynds, Ruth Jamieson, Samira Lalani, Layla Rassouli, Hannah Roberts, Natalja Sadikova, Owen Thomas, Elina Unger.

The event was curated by Peter Lewis and the MA Art & Design, Leeds Metropolitan University.

Black Dogs at Superhybrid! were
James Hill, Bryony Pritchard and Mick Welbourn

http://www.black-dogs.org/index.php?/superhybrid/