ZAYNE ARMSTRONG
The Grind
2023
kinetic installation
Step into the bustling world of Days, where The Grind is not just a café; it's a thrilling amusement park of caffeinated wonders, managed by the mischievous Rudi and motion sensors. At The Grind, we don't sugarcoat; we brew the unfiltered truth, and each cup tells a story as heartwarming as a co-worker gathering. It's not just coffee; it's a wake-up call for your taste buds and your conscience. 🌟 We're thrilled to announce that Nan, our barista extraordinaire, is on a mission to open a heartwarming soup kitchen right here in our vibrant community! Nan's Kitchen of Compassion is more than just a soup kitchen—it's a place where warmth and selfishness meet in a bowl. Whether you're a regular at The Grind or a newcomer, your support makes a difference. As the sun illuminates the cozy exposed brick corners of The Grind, you might catch a glimpse of Alexandra immersed in artistic endeavors. The café doubles as Alexandra’s studio, where strokes of creativity meld with existential crisis. The Grind is not just a space; it is
🏡 Your Home Away from Home. 🏡
Sick of baristas spelling your name wrong? Fear not! Humans are Optional and our fully automated wonderland takes the "personal" out of personalized service! 🚀💡☕ #TheGrind #DigitalNomadHaven #SipSipHooray #FutureOfWork
The Grind, a cacophonous kinetic installation representing an automated cafe, questions the construct of ‘optimisation’. ; to the point where mechanical sculptures replace both the producers and consumers of cafe culture. A central figure of the work is our version of Venus de Milo to whom we’ve given arms, so that she can get back to work. Quilted pixelated landscapes, hypnotic latte art and a functionaless conveyor-belt describe the inner psychological state of the digital nomad, for whom the co-working cafe is a nightmarish theme park.
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The Grind looks at contemporary cafe culture and the idea of “third places”. Interestingly this theory has also been used by the international cafe chain Starbucks, which likens the cafe space to a third place: not work, and not home, but a third kind of place. The interior design of its various branches engage with these theories by mixing tropes of relaxation and work: there is always wifi and sofas––but to the profit of a large corporation. These spaces are often populated with customers who freely choose to work in such an environment. What exactly is appealing about this capitalist rendition of the third space is both familiar and alien to us, and a dichotomy that fuels much of The Grind. What freedoms are being exercised in having no office space, no dedicated desk, no tools with which to work apart from one's laptop and/or phone?
In our cafe, everything is automated — the work, as well as the experience — envisioning a future where humans no longer serve any function in the capitalist cycle, a kind of dystopian utopia where we no longer need to work, but also no longer serve any function as customers. With this, we want to question the fundamental understanding of efficiency as improvement. What do we mean by the term optimization? For whom are we optimizing, and at what cost? Rooted in today's high-tech development, the project explores a number of thematic tracks in an overarching attempt to provoke critical reflection on digital development and our own digital consumption. While we talk more and more about the downsides of the tech industry; how it controls the discourse, threatens democracy, increases class differences and emits huge amounts of greenhouse gases, we allow ourselves to become more and more dependent on their services.
Escargone represents a cafe table, and its spinning table top references Marcel Duchamp's rotorrelief. On this occasion, one of Duchamp's patterns depicting an escargot is presented as latte art, spinning forever in a vortex attempting to hypnotise the audience into believing that "everything will be fine if you just drink more coffee". The table’s base is a flying saucer emitting a beam of neon green plexiglas embedded into a box of paintings. Inside the box is an unattainable spinning sculpture of a power outlet: what we deem to be the most sought after object in a contemporary cafe. The paintings are Munch-inspired renderings of Google Street View images of Bliss Hill in Silicon Valley. The hill was made famous by being the default computer wallpaper of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. It is estimated that billions of people have seen the picture, possibly making it the most viewed photograph in history.
Ghost of Impasse represents an “espresso bar”, made from a motorized conveyor belt with a print of the two main characters (Scarlett Johansson, Thora Birch) from the movie poster of the 2001 comedy Ghost World. The film depicts the slow deterioration of a friendship, and here we are attempting to rekindle it by having the characters hold onto each other while the belt spins around forever. The “espresso machine” has been replaced by a plexiglas tank, lined with emojis and credit cards symbols, encapsulating a spinning wheel of coffee cups endlessly milling pellets of rodent bedding with coffee beans, evoking both a wheel of fortune as well as the idiom “hamster on a wheel”, meaning someone being busy all the time but never achieving anything important or reaching the end of a task. The plexi tank is encapsulated by a structure of Lego, spelling out the words “No Laptops, No Babies”, a rule many contemporary cafes have implemented in order to increase their revenue. The tank sits on top of a table top painted to look like the game Fussball, evoking how tech startup companies are known for reinventing the "office space", with gaming corners and endless team-building activities. Emerging from the grass field, are a series of camouflaged barista tools carved out of cardboard and paper mache paste. The sculpture as a whole takes its inspiration from the amusement park. Historically, the amusement park emerged almost in parallel with the coffee houses in the wake of the industrial revolution, which in many ways can be seen as the starting point for neoliberal development. The amusement park is a constructed social space that aims to entertain its customers, often with a horror-mixed delight. The fact that this is the main function of the place makes the amusement park a perfect figurehead for the experience economy that dominates our time. Just as interesting when it comes to the amusement park is that, despite its aim to be a fun place, it can still be experienced as pure hell - suddenly you are surrounded by children puking and crying. Not unlike how, in the playground of capitalism, one moment you can experience progress and success, but suddenly find yourself at the bottom of the system. The fact that our "amusement park" is placed in a museum gives the work an additional dimension in light of how neoliberalism's penetration of the welfare state has led to public art institutions increasingly adopting strategies from New Public Management and the experience economy.
Desktop of Multitasking Truths was attempted to be made “in character” as an AI, resulting in many forms of representation here being “off”, as an AI might blend parts of human bodies in a way that confuses human anatomy. An image of a Mac OS desktop Sierra mountain landscape has been quilted from disposable oil tablecloths forming a highly pixelated image. The work is made from three panels each with a central “image” window, and a window header box made from prefabricated Ikea CD shelves, pointing to the aesthetic of many contemporary cafes. We see this aesthetic as a product of various internationally used platforms that have established some standard assumptions about common human needs; a so-called "superhost" on AirBnB is expected to have not only a certain set of available household appliances, but also a "neutral" atmosphere, the same can be traced in housing ads - the more neutral the atmosphere, the higher the apparent sense of home, and people's ability to empathize with the idea of living there themselves. This trend can be linked to the export of Scandinavian design, and IKEA in particular, to all corners of the world. Not only does IKEA sell their products all over the world, they sell the same packages and rooms; the same atmospheres and homes - which is also a deliberate part of their marketing strategy and probably one of the keys to their success: IKEA doesn't sell furniture, they sell a range of styles that the customer combines to create their 'personal' but nonetheless generic 'home'. This marketing strategy is dominant among several of the world's most successful chains, including H&M and Starbucks, but can also be translated to the art scene where the largest museums are increasingly buying works by the same contemporary artists - where are the real distinctions in such a grinder?
The left and right windows are replicas of the famous Roman sculpture Bocca della Verità. According to an enduring mediaeval legend, it will bite off the hand of any liar who places their hand in its mouth. Our imitation is made from vacuum formed thermoplastic, both making it a translucent window but also alluding to a kind of toy packaging for the historical artefact, as if it’s a mass produced piece of tourist fodder for people on a Roman holiday. Between the multiple “truths” is a print on textile of the famous Venus de Milo, also known as Aphrodite de Milo. The goddess of pleasure is stuffed with objects that represent some of the excesses of consumer culture: green polystyrene packing peanuts (non-biodegradable), trash packaging, and dogs squeak toys, as well as a number of motorised massage pillows. She is not massaged from the outside but rather from within, the idea being the conflation of experience economy with the consumer. Venus de Milo has famously lost her arms, which we have returned to her, and motors inside these arms make it so that she throws “coffee” (a net crocheted out of plastic beads) on one of the truths, as well as simultaneously working forever by typing on a keyboard made out of paper mache painted to look like wood. On the quilted landscape, hangs a group of small “icon” paintings representing files on the desktop. The paintings play with two phrases about labour: to burn the candle at both ends and trying to make up for lost time. These are paired with texts that are quotes from Karl Marx’s love poems written to his wife, Jenny von Westphalen, in which we’ve replaced key words with some of the most common words used in Airbnb listings such as “balcony”, “breakfast” etc.
The Grind follows two main thematic lines: one more societal and one more individual. The first, overarching theme highlights the contradictory and dystopian nature of our current economic model of society, motivated by efficiency and maximum profit. The second focuses more on the consequences this has for the individual, which is increasingly precarious in a labor market where opportunities for increased earnings almost always trump human needs. Our installation is an image of both of these things - on the one hand, it can be read as a dystopian representation of the future labor market, where people are neither needed to produce nor consume goods and services. On the other hand, however, the work can also be read as a depiction of the psychological interior of a precarious worker; the absurdity of how even the most elementary tasks are increasingly automated and digitized, to the extent that they no longer help the worker, but rather become obstacles.
As an extension of this focus on workers and the labor market, the exhibition also indirectly addresses a number of other themes and issues related to increasing inequality, consumption patterns and the downside of neoliberalism. We feel that our time is defined by an eternal split between what we call progress and that through this progress we are creating a world that is obliterating our own function and our surroundings. The Grind does not reflect on how we can get out of this soup, nor how we got here, rather the work aims to portray the complexity of the societal development track we are in and that through this we may discover new tracks that can lead us in other directions.
Eckbos jubileumsutstilling, The Vigeland Museum, Oslo (NO)
Images by Jon Gorospe
108 x 108 x 77 cm
Mixed media
Full material list...
motors, metal tube, metal bar, heat shrink tube, papier mache, acrylic paint, clear acrylic laquer, plywood, linen, hardware, acrylic glass, thermoplastic beads, mirror patient leather, threaded rod, melamine tabletop, balsa wood, colour inkjet print on blue-back paper, wallpaper paste, velcro.
220 x 180 x 90 cm
Mixed media
Full material list...
Conveyor belt: UBB steel profile frame with hardware, plastic kicker figures on metal tube, 6x stainless steel parfet spoons, shewing gum, plastic foil packaging, double sided tape, color printed PVC band, PVC epoxy adhesive, motor with cooling vent system and rubber roller system and berrings, dip-it, wood, acrylic paint, PVC tube, resistance band, food clip. Fountain: UBB steel profile and hardware, ply wood, papier mache, acrylic paint, clear acrylic laquer, cardboard, immitation lego, acrylic glass tank, coffee beans, rodent bedding, rodernt feed, acrylic milk cartons, super glue, Window Color, threaded rod, cake marker, ceramic espresso cups, rubber mat, motor with pullys, berrings, notch belt and cooling fan
ca 600 x 300 x 80 cm
Mixed media
Full material list...
Wood armature with pigmented polyfiller and hardware, sandbags, rubber matts. Quilted printed plastic oil cloth and mirror patent leather, webbing, eyelets, hardware, velcro. Thermoplastic forms with hardware. Photo printed jersey, RikRak, massage pillow motors, dog chew toys, plastic packaging, foam packing peanuts, chip-board IKEA CD shelves with hardware, wood glue, paper mache, plywood, metal angle, acrylic paint, printed cotton poplin, acrylic on canvas paintings. Wooden coffee slinger mechanism: plywood, hardware, resistance bands, PVC pipe, fishing line, metal pipe, pulleys, metal fixtures, thermoplastic beads, bungey cord, rope, zip ties, motor with pulleys, belts, bearings, cooling system and roller. Balsa wood with acrylic paint and matt acrylic varnish. Typing hand: metal cam system with bearings, metal brackets, wooden keys, and hardware.
34 x 32 cm
acrylic on canvas
34 x 32 cm
acrylic on canvas
34 x 32 cm
acrylic on canvas
Works from The Grind have been shown at:
01.06.-17.09.2023
GROUP SHOW: Eckbos jubileumsutstilling
The Vigeland Museum, Oslo (NO)