#2. The Auditorium

The VINYL Group Residency engaged in an experiment to de-code the practices of a heterogeneous group of artists by means of institutional methodologies and then tried to re-code the group to function as a single unit. Taking the proposal of the the Auditorium within an Institution as the starting point the participants were led by means of a workshop to consider their performative value within the group and used the outcome as a mechanism to deconstruct, de-author, redistribute and ultimately reassemble. Stretching the artists and their understanding of their practice, giving them new insights whilst being aware of others; forming a group were there was none before. Comparable to Derrida's critique of Kant's definitive delineation of the artwork's intrinsic beauty inside the frame versus the contingency outside, the project interrogated the Institution from the outside by means of methodologies from the inside hybridising the Avant-Garde's Critique of Institutions and the Neo-Avant-Garde's Institutional Critique. The process was as important as the outcome.

VINYL started in 2010 as an artist-led project in a living room in Moseley, Birmingham. Interested in experimenting with the de-coding and re-coding of space and being VINYL now operates nomadically from various sites.