Teemu Kivikangas

Radiowave II (20x30 cm, edition 10+2)

Works Radiowave I-III are from a new series Thefts, Fakes and Versions, exploring themes of authorship and originality in art through juxtapositions of high and popular culture. Sampling and remixing are essential yet controversial production methods - or rather a whole paradigm - in today's pop music. This is an area of cultural industry where the battle over copyright and definition of ownership rages most fiercely. While piracy is clearcly one side of the coin, on the other side lie the rich methods - employed especially in third world countries - that build new, innovative cultural products from left-overs of the west. From Brazilian avantgardists of the 70s to contemporary discources on (super-) hybridity, issue remains a subject to debate.

Images are remixes of Peter Saville's design for album sleeve of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures. Both the design and the album are classics of pop music. Saville originally took the design from a graph of radio waves sent by a pulsar star, found in a science book. The remix was made by an photographing an old, worn-out T-shirt - a pirate one - and printing it as a serigraphy print. Images ironically contrast personal and intimate (used shirt) with universal (of celestial scale) and abstract deformed waves with concrete pattern of the fabric.

Radiowave
2008
Photographs, screenprints
20x30 cm, edition of 10+2 (Radiowave I-III)
80x80 cm, edition of 5+2 (Radiowave I)
Exhibition history
2010:
Photokina meets Academy, Cologne, Germany

On the left, original image of pulsar radio waves. On the right, Peter Saville's design for the Joy Division album sleeve.

Radiowave I (80x80 cm, edition 5+2)

Close-up image of Radiowave I, showing the worn-out surface of the fabric used to produce the image.

Radiowave II (80x80 cm, edition 5+2)

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