牛牛资源

A 牛牛资源 academic’s audio-visual installation, created in response to the showtune My Favorite Things, has been awarded a new £10,000 art prize.

Jacob Love鈥檚 multi-channel video and sculptural work, THEN I DON鈥橳 FEEL, was selected by a judging panel for the inaugural  鈥� a national award to encourage visual art inspired by music.  

Over 700 submissions were made for the Prize, which required artists to create work in response to one of ten songs, from Rodgers and Hammerstein鈥檚 1959 Sound of Music classic to Pink Floyd鈥檚 Great Gig in the Sky or Krept and Konan鈥檚 Broski. 

Finalists were chosen by a panel which included British artist Mat Collishaw, representatives from the Royal College of Art, Central Saint Martins and Hiscox, Julie Lomax (CEO of a-n The Artists Information Company), Robert Yates of The Observer, and songwriters Mark Ronson and Joan Armatrading CBE.

Love received the prize on Thursday 9 September at a private viewing of finalists鈥� work hosted by Concord Music Publishing on the Strand, central London. 

Jacob Love is an artist working in photography, video, film, installation and dance. He completed his masters at 牛牛资源 in 2009 and for the past twelve years has taught photography to undergraduate students studying BA Media and Communications.

The Concord Prize-winning work explores themes of trauma, the autonomic nervous system, human agency, and the sublime. 

The installation draws on Love鈥檚 ongoing research into visceral video content and his experience of human behaviour therapies such as Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) 鈥� which requires patients to briefly focus on their trauma memory while experiencing eye movements, with the intention of reducing the vividness of the memory.  

Love is interested in the way platforms such as YouTube and Tiktok interact with our psychological and physiological selves to provoke certain reactions, in particular autonomic arousal, be that cathartic, traumatic or both.  

Describing his work, Jacob Love said: 鈥淣ow that we can choose exactly what we want to watch whenever we want, screen time becomes an easy way to disassociate. In the new media ecology, we no longer need to use our imagination to indulge in 鈥榓 few of our favourite things鈥�, content farms are serving them up to us on demand. 

鈥淭he lyrics of [My Favourite Things] have also informed the content of the work. Listening to the words I realised that the list of 鈥榝avourite things鈥� describes specific and fleeting moments of sensual intensity as much as it does physical objects. The line: 鈥榖rown paper packages tied up with string鈥�, made me think of the now ubiquitous unboxing video and the strange seductive draw of this type of content. More generally the list in the song could be a scene-by-scene description of the images in any one of the literally thousands of 鈥榦ddly satisfying鈥� videos that have become increasingly popular.鈥�  

Ali Hillman, curator of art consultancy Friday Trampoline said: 鈥淲e were delighted with all of the finalists鈥� work and felt their contribution to the inaugural Prize was exceptional. We will continue to follow their careers going forward. Jacob鈥檚 work proved subversive, thought provoking and timely. For us it stood out as a relevant and contemporary interpretation of this iconic piece of music.鈥�