[spectre] Feral Trade Café by Kate Rich at HTTP Gallery.

[marc garrett]

sorry for any cross posting...

Feral Trade Café by Kate Rich at HTTP Gallery.

Exhibition: Free entry
13 June – 2 August 2009
Open Friday-Sunday 12-5
Private View: Saturday, 13 June 16:00–19:00
http://www.http.uk.net/

Feral Trade Café, an art exhibition that is also a working café, opens
at HTTP Gallery for 8 weeks during Summer 2009. Serving food and drink
traded over social networks, Feral Trade Café by artist Kate Rich (AU)
provides a convivial setting from which to contemplate broader changes
to our climate and economies, where conventional supply chains (for food
delivery and cultural funding) could go belly up.

Feral Trade uses social and cultural hand baggage to transport grocery
items between cities, often using other artists and curators as mules.
The exhibition includes a retrospective display of Feral Trade products
(2003-present), alongside ingredient route maps, bespoke food packaging,
video and other artefacts from the Feral Trade network. The café will
stock and serve a selection of Feral Trade goods from a menu including
coffee from El Salvador, hot chocolate from Mexico and sweets from
Montenegro, as well as locally sourced bread, vegetables and herbs.
Along with their food and drink, diners will be served waybills
detailing the socially facilitated transit of goods to their plate.

Feral Trade Café is the first element of Furtherfield.org's three-year
Media Art Ecologies programme, which aims to provide opportunities for
critical debate, exchange and participation in emerging ecological media
art practices, and the theoretical, political and social contexts they
engage. The café will be host to events, initiated by Furtherfield.org
and others, examining issues related to the Feral Trade and Media Art
Ecologies projects, including a Media Art Ecologies networking day.
Further info and dates (TBC).

On the occasion of the exhibition, Furtherfield.org and HTTP Gallery are
pleased to publish a new essay about the Feral Trade project by writer,
artist and designer Femke Snelting of De Guezen (http://www.geuzen.org/)
(NL), http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=349

About Kate Rich
Kate Rich is an Australian-born artist & trader. In the 1990s she moved
to California to work as radio engineer with the Bureau of Inverse
Technology (BIT), an international agency producing an array of critical
information products including economic and ecologic indices,
event-triggered webcam networks, and animal operated emergency broadcast
devices. The Bureau's work has been exhibited broadly in academic,
scientific and museum contexts. Restless at the turn of the century, she
headed further east to take up the post of Bar Manager at the Cube
Microplex, Bristol UK where she launched Feral Trade. She is currently
moving deeper into the infrastructure of cultural economy, developing
protocols to define and manage amenities of hospitality, catering,
sports and survival in the cultural realm. More information:

For more information about the exhibition:
http://www.http.uk.net/exhibitions/FeralTradeCafe/index.shtml

Feral Trade - http://www.feraltrade.org
Kate Rich - http://bureauit.org/data/krcv/

Contact:
Ruth Catlow, HTTP Gallery
email:ruthATfurtherfieldDOTorg

HTTP Gallery
Unit A2, Arena Design Centre
71 Ashfield Road
London N4 1NY
+44(0)7737002879
map - http://www.http.uk.net/docs/gettingto.shtml

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HTTP Gallery is based near North London's thriving Green Lanes area is
Furtherfield.org’s (www.furtherfield.org) dedicated space for media art.
Furtherfield.org provides platforms for creating, viewing, discussing
and learning about experimental practices in art, technology and social
change. Furtherfield.org and HTTP Gallery are supported by Arts Council
England, London.