Glenn Kaino: Don't Bring a Gameboy to a Gunfight

As society becomes ever more distributed, networked, and connected, digital media and new forms of production are increasingly implicated in the leveraging of power. From extremists to revolutionaries to activists, the capacity of technological connectivity to coordinate, inform, mobilize, and threaten brings with it new realities both terrifying and hopeful. The exhibition Don't Bring a Gameboy to a Gunfight juxtaposed digital media’s varied incarnations in society, manifested in a sculptural cairn of 3D printed rocks, a screen, printed poster, and tote bag edition. 

Each tote bag features a 3D-printed rock. The rocks are facsimiles of actual rocks collected by a world-wide network of the artist’s agents, from sites of protest and extremist oppression like Benghazi, Tahrir Square, and Yemen. For the exhibition, the rocks were scanned and sent out to yet another network of renegade, underground 3D printers, and returned to the artist. In creating the possibility of an unlimited multiple, an inexhaustible cache of ammunition, and in igniting a process that connects revolutionary spirit across the globe, the exhibition raised the questions about how object, value, functional utility and symbolic agency become entangled in social and sculptural practice.

Glenn Kaino, natural 100% cotton tote bag with silkscreen print and 3D-printed rock, unsigned edition of 50.