“Meanwhile, in another visual universe, Charlie Tweed draws a parallel between genetic code and computer code. This raises the intriguing possibility that we might one day program living organisms, or hack our own susceptibility to disease. Once again the speculation is based wholly on fact, thanks to Tweed’s close collaboration with Dr Darren Logan.”
Archimeters is chosen as one of the best online videos of 2012 in Sight and Sound by Animate Projects
“By appropriating footage from the internet and adding a computer-generated narrative composed of lines from software testing handbooks, Tweed creates a work that questions social control systems. Whilst the neutral voiceover lends an air of authority, Tweed disrupts the action by disclosing the digital effects being used in the film. Chilling stuff.”
AN Magazine December 2011
“29 SNAPSHOT | A-N MAGAZINE | DECEMBER 2011 /JANUARY 2012 Looking at how artists have addressed the pervasiveness of managerial culture from the late 1970s to today, ‘All I Can See is the Management’ (Gasworks, London until 11 December) brings together historical and contemporary artworks that consider how late capitalist approaches to working life play out at work, in education and at home. Running into the New Year, Aspex’s highly regarded biannual open-submission exhibition/ competition ‘Emergency 5’ (until 8 January) showcases the work of eleven emerging artists. This year’s winner is Charlie Tweed, who reprocesses found video footage to explore ideas of control and intervention. www.gasworks.org.uk www.aspex.org.uk”
Natalie Liechti, Flavorpill, February 2011 (Editor’s Choice)
Natalie Liechti, Flavorpill
“Notes I, II and III are comprised of seven short films. Presented in full for the first time in London, Charlie Tweed’s sci-fi propaganda style is the result of taking found films and re-working them entirely to explore notions of fear and anxiety underpinned by a need for mass control.”
Back in the frame, Venue Magazine, December 2010
Steve Wright revisits the galleries, exhibitions and installations that made their mark on the local art world in 2010.
“Later in the year Spike hosted the apocalyptic darkness of Charlie Tweed’s ‘Notes Part I, II & III’, recent video works that posed as reports from a future dystopia, all the while mirroring the fears and paranoia of our age.”
Guardian Guide Preview of Spike Island Show, Saturday 16th October, 2010
“Notes, a series of sci-fi infused short videos by young artist Charlie Tweed, balances a perfectly orchestrated sense of unease with wit and observation. Like a public information doc from a bleak future, they’re narrated by a dispassionate computer voice explaining obscure, even absurd plans: mass flooding, or the necessity of controlling birds. These ominous, if nonsensical, communications are set to YouTube clips, news, and amateur footage, where everything from shots of birdhouses to people strolling by a lake seem part of a sinister masterplan. Set to melancholy music, the narrator takes our acquiescence for granted. Tweed’s target is the dangerous spread of ill-founded social neuroses and fears that serve as a subtle form of control.”
Guardian Exhibitionist: This week’s essentail art shows
“Navstevnici, Notes Part II (2009) is part of a series of sci-fi infused short videos by the young artist, which balances a perfectly orchestrated sense of unease with wit and observation. At Spike Island until 28 November” more
Appocalypse Now – Venue Magazine, Bristol October 2010
Strange, apocalyptic video artwork is on the menu this month and next at Spike Island, Bristol. The gallery is hosting a three-screen installation of ‘Notes’, a series of video works by British artist Charlie Tweed.
Tweed’s sci fi-influenced videos appear to be transmissions from shadowy collectives who are orchestrating change on a mass scale. Their plans include a worldwide flood and, more oddly still, a movement intent on capturing “all of the birds” in order to “store them securely in places where they can operate freely”. Commands for these apparently urgent yet nonsensical collective actions are conveyed by computerised voiceovers who, rather than barking out orders, merely outline their plans calmly and with authority, accompanied by melancholic music. The whole effect is fairly unsettling.
“The continual use of the plural is deliberate, implying that ‘we’ must have the same desires as the anonymous collectives who speak to and for us,” Tweed explains. “Compliance with these urgent actions also appears to be the only way that we can maintain our safety, albeit at the cost of everything we know.”
These voiceovers are accompanied by fast-changing images which depict the world at the edge of some vast, imminent but unnameable crisis. Tweed has created these montages by collaging together extracts from broadcast documentaries, YouTube clips, instructional videos and amateur news footage. Further distortion, such as added pixellation or analogue noise, makes them hard to place in time or space – they are just dimly recognisable renditions of mountains and the sea, power stations and mobile homes, floods and storms. Accompanied by the insistent narrative and melancholic soundtrack, these everyday images acquire a distinctively apocalyptic quality. more
Sarah Thompson in Transjuice review of Multichannel, Artsway (2010)
“There was also a strong sense of a kind of ‘video science fiction’, a quality to several of the works: Notes: Part 1 by Charlie Tweed, which reminded me of John Lansdown’s Earth, particularly in terms of the nature of the soundtrack which had the effect of portraying ‘another race’ looking at the Earth. The piece was composed from an archive of “appropriated digital material” and gives the sense of aliens looking at the Earth’s resources and wanting to control, and trying to understand its environment”
curator: Edith Jerabkova text for the exhibition: ‘So much more’ at MeetFactory, Prague (2009)
“Charlie Tweed constructs other worlds and other alter-egos. He puts on a pragmatic face in a fictive pre-apocalyptic world and misuses scientific information to construct hypothetical scenarios for the future to give some sort of premature potential survival instructions. Recycled film footage and sound collages, sometimes being made indistinct by simulated mechanical damage, mingle with his own film content. Using a captivating atmosphere, he melodramatically brings the moment of a worldwide collapse of science, technology, ecology and the whole civilization into the present tense.”
“”Charlie Tweed diagnoses (or forecasts) the political mood in art and in the world – vaguely and terribly threatening yet somehow primed with possibility – in his three stunning and disturbing short manifesto videos, which feel like terrorist training guides – pixellated, fanatical, illicit, anonymous, you could be watching them on YouTube pre-their removal, or on some dodgy backwoods website, and the feds could be about to bust down your door. The videos, made primarily with found footage, are paranoiac calls to arms from bizarre political cults, made in blank, earnest computerized voices, for an apparently imminent revolution or action, like the release of a flood when a secret signal is given. In Where We Are Now a voice pushes on us its massive suspicion of mere birds and says ‘we need to do more’ to round them up and ‘store them securely in places where they can operate freely’.” James Westcott, Art Review
Review of Studio Voltaire Member’s Exhibition (2008)
“”Charlie Tweed’s sci-fi videos of dystopias that are even worse than the cultural wastelands Bracewell decries in his pop-criticism.”
Curators Oscar Tuazon and Clementine Deliss
on the exhibition: dragged down into lowercase at Zentrum Paul Klee (2008)
“Charlie Tweed proposes an alternative housing model for Bern’s citizens in the form of a safe community that lives below the ground in dugout shelters lined with disused washing machines and fridge freezers. Tweed’s Man from Below updates autochthonous mythologies of origin into an urban, new age pitch for white goods eco-homes.”
Tweed’s text for dragged down into lowercase
Selectors New Contemporaries (2007) (Nigel Cooke, Linda Norden and Michael Landy)
“Charlie Tweed gives new meaning to civil disobedience, full disclosure – and underground. His Man from Below TV is more like a message from the boy–child you hope will never grow up. He’s too smart for his own good, but you know you’d never let him get away with his astutely, acutely damning enactments if you took him for an adult. Check out his graphic for the video Man from Below TV: a literal kid’s rendition of his instructions for its display: ‘7 inch screen with live aerial extending as if live broadcast.”
“Is funny. He lives on nothing much but the idea of rebellion, off grid, down below. The expanse at the edge of London. Near City Airport perhaps is the basecamp for his pioneering media and eco activism. The props are limited, the hole not big, but the encouragement is surely convincing. Everyone should do it now, go there, dig, rebel, and then pass it on.”
BBC Collective on New Contemporaries 2007
www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A25691600
Conflicting Interests and Interesting Conflicts’ by Fiona Woods
www.shiftingground.net/research_papers_conflictinginterest.htm
On Neue Freunde, Stadtgalerie, Schwaz, Austira (2005)