LICK PICK KICK

LICK PICK KICK Tenthaus Oslo, 14-31 October 2021. An exhibition with a VR (Virtual Reality) installation based on the classroom learning experience and gamification. Repeat after me: I work successfully as a team member. Now; grade yourself on a scale from 1 to 10. Do you agree? Shake your wand to start your session. (from script Lick, Pick, Kick)

Installation view. All documentation photos by Photographer: Øystein Thorvaldsen

In her third installation concerned with institutional spaces, Maren Dagny Juell has focused on the learning institution, specifically the classroom. Previously she recreated the gym in SQUAT and the office in Flexible Schedule. In this work, which consists of three rooms, you are guided through a set of lessons, where self-evaluation forms, testing, and play are a part of exhibition design and experience. Maren is interested in examining power structures through languages that praise optimization, flexibility and progression. The exhibition is conceived as a whole, and the work evolves from the theme and uses aesthetic markers and formal choices borrowed from institutions and systems that create and continue these structures, but in the gallery space, they are reworked into sculptural form. In VR she uses a game engine, and gaming language as a tool for visual representation and movement. «The physical states of the brain are closely connected to the social posture of the body, the way in which they fit into the space of the community» Morphing intelligence. From IQ measurement to artificial brains. Cathrine Malabou. 2019 CREDITS VR content: Breach VR Sindre Rennemo Grønvoll, Roald Høyer-Hansen, Joakim Snøfugl and Andreas Weiby Audio by Soundcuts Ltd Sound Design - Wilfried Nass Speech Production - Adele Cutting Actor - George Weightman. Interaction furniture by Simen Brekke Supported by Arts Council Norway Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond

The script that guides you, uses Maren’s usual method of blending quotes borrowed from a wide range of sources, including science-fiction, games, and popular science. In the same vein, the title is based on research in neurological science. In a study by Olaf Hauk, Ingrid Johnsrude, and Friedemann Pulvermüller (2004) fMRI was used to examine how the brain operates being exposed to passive reading tasks of worlds like Lick, Pick and Kick. These action words activated areas along the motor strip that either were directly adjacent to or overlapped with areas activated by actual movement of the tongue, fingers, or feet. This means that when we read a word like Kick, we activate the same areas in the brain as we use when we do the motion with our foot. Maren Dagny Juell is an artist working in moving images, installation, and virtual reality. Her Virtual Reality work is immersive experiences where a physical gallery space acts as an abstracted double of the Virtual Space. You navigate both spaces simultaneously. Maren seeks to activate the hardware and the engagement of VR with performative aspects, instructions, and an institutional setting where the expectation of behaviour is established as rules/habits. She is concerned with embodied cognition in institutional spaces. In these spaces, she questions how we relate to demands on the body and mind that are imposed on us in subtle ways and expose methods of control and pressure you cannot see.

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"Are you sure your surroundings are laid out as you think? That your body reacts as you wish, on sensory input? That your saliva is the result of pure bodily functions. Or a result of me saying: Imagine eating a lemon?" From LICK PICK KICK script.

Celestial, Fauna, Flora 2021 Plexi, silicone, painted wood panel, 3D printed space buttons. 86x60 cm. From the reception room of LICK PICK KICK. Three images based on children’s educational posters.

Installation view. Photographer: Øystein Thorvaldsen. Revision: Walk though of VR space with school chairs.