About a Minute

10th Dec 2010 – 13th February 2011

The Gopher Hole, 350-354 Old Street, EC1V 9NQ

About a Minute is the inaugural exhibition at The Gopher Hole, a new project space in Hoxton founded by aberrant architecture and Beatrice Galilee. For their first show, The Gopher Hole invited carefully chosen conceptual artists, architects, designers, poets and writers to respond to a premise – the idea that today, a minute is all we seem to have.

Increasingly hyperactive consumption of data, information and images has trained the brains of a generation to multi-task, skim, tweet, comment and status-update, but has eliminated the notion of patience or pause. The sheer volume of things available at the touch of a button or swipe of a finger has lead to a saturation point, where boredom and irritation arrives sooner than we may like to admit.

Galleries are easy victims of the phenomenon. Visitors may spend a few moments to asorb an artwork, half-read a caption and move on. This leaves both curators and artists in a conundrum. How does one respond to the knowledge that no more than a minute may be spent with a painstakingly crafted exhibit? After all, it can take less than a minute for everything in the world to change.  Each work in this show was chosen for its thoughtful, provocative or playful interpretation of the minute through the lens of number of disciplines and mediums.  This plurality is key to the curatorial philosophy of the Gopher Hole: interrogating popular culture across disciplinary borders.

About a Minute Participants

Rachel Armstrong is a science fiction writer, TED senior fellow and pioneer of living architecture.

www.rachelarmstrong.me

Shumon Basar is a writer.

Diane Cochrane was a co-founder of Urban Salon Architects and is a course leader at London Metropolitan university.

Economy is a Swedish-Australian platform working working in architecture, art, education and management.

www.this-is-economy.com

Glowacka Rennie & Robin Dutson is an architect-artist collaboration based in London.

www.glowacka-rennie.com

The Go West Project is a crossover research project between architecture and journalism that studies new metropolises in Central and Western China.

www.gowestproject.com

Elaine W. Ho works in the realms of art, urban practice and design.

www.iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter.net

Sam Jacob is a director of FAT, a critic and teaches at the AA and Yale.

www.strangeharvest.com

Christian Kerrigan is a digital artist based in London.

www.christiankerrigan.com

Pedro Gadanho is an architect, curator and writer based in Lisbon.

www.shrapnelcontemporary.wordpress.com

Ralf Pflugfelder is an artist interested in the spatial aesthetics of narratives and utopias.

www.noffice.eu

Postworks is a design collective working across the fields of art, architecture and performance.

Jon Stone is a poet, and co-editor of arts journal Fuselit and publishers Sidekick Books.

www.drfulminare.com

Sunday Collective is platform for explorative, cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Luke Wright is a poet and a poet-in-residence on Radio 4’s Saturday Live.

www.lukewright.co.uk

Dominic Wilcox is an artist and designer based in London

www.dominicwilcox.com