25 Oct - Total Disinformation Awareness

LAUNCHPROJECTS - November 4 will mark the opening reception of the Toronto-based collaborative Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borin's debut solo exhibition at LAUNCHPROJECTS, Total Disinformation Awareness. This exhibition of installation, sculpture, painting, and works on paper references the Total Information Awareness surveillance and information technology network utilized by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to prevent terror threats. Enormous computer databases currently exist to gather and store personal information including e-mails, social network analysis, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, and ‘private’ data from myriad sources -- all harvested without permission, awareness, or authorization.

Furthering their stance on how total information systems impact culture, Marman and Borins will present the video surveillance and electronic art installation Google (pictured above). Playfully disguised within a cartoon-like set of eyes that follow the viewer within the gallery space, Google highlights the esthetic ambiguity -- and carefully veiled possibility of harm -- within the electronic information haze that surrounds us all.

Total Disinformation Awareness is misinformation aestheticized and packaged as fact, presented in the form of multiple installations and interventions within the LAUNCHPROJECTS space. The works in this exhibition are “obscured, hidden in caves, shredded to pieces, covered up and erased, concealed within facades, and burned” as mirror and critique of the constant surveillance systems quietly at work in both the

physical and the virtual reality of contemporary society.

Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins (Marmco.com) have practiced sculpture, installation and media art in Toronto since 2000. In 2009, Marman and Borins completed a commission for a large-scale interactive work for the Martin Prosperity Institute. In 2008 Marman and Borins participated in a group sculpture show at the National Gallery of Canada, Caught in the Act. Upcoming public projects include a sculpture commission for Downsview Subway Station received from the Toronto Transit Commission, and a commission for an outdoor sculpture at a high-rise building by the Toronto waterfront. Currently, Marman and Borins are exhibiting at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY which was named among the Top Twenty Museum Exhibitions in the United States.