Electroboutique

Artist collective Electroboutique uses interactive technologies in its work to address questions around the mass media, art production, design aspiration and the capitalist system.

Operated by Russian artists Alexei Shulgin and Aristarkh Chernyshev, Electroboutique specialilises in the kind of highly interactive works that allow viewers to – for example – punch a padded TV set to change the channel, or dance to music from their iPods while it’s played through a gigantic pair of sunglasses.

Shulgin and Chernyshev describe this process as ‘Creative Consumption’, saying it allows them to create a dialogue with audience through the responsiveness of their works.

A series of Electroboutique works, including the punchable TV set and the giant glasses, will be on show at the Electroboutique Pop-up exhibition, which opens this week at the Science Museum in London and features a number of specially commissioned installations.

In the show will be the supersized ‘WowPod’, which invites listeners to plug in their own iPods and listen to distorted and processed versions of their music, and Artlet, an installation that allows visitors to create their own virtual artworks through using mashups of objects and cultural icons.

Hannah Redler, head of arts projects at the Science Museum, says, ‘With their funny and fluid manipulations of media objects, signals and outputs, the artists raise fundamental questions on the position that these media take in our lives right now.’

Electroboutique Pop-up is at the Science Museum, London SW7, from 23 November-14 February 2012.