DPRK7 F.C.

In June 2010, a live football match was broadcasted for the first time in North Korea (DPRK) resulting in the iconic image of Cristiano Ronaldo being aired on the (limited) national television. Under the frame of chaos theory, this event cannot be understood as fruit of mechanistic determinism: the unfolding of social system in terms of such complexity demands a different approach. Today, even marketing enterprises have acknowledged the importance of stochastic modelling.

These episodes, therefore, must be conceived in ontological terms of contingency — yet we cannot help looking for patterns. For example, we might see the footballer as the paradigm of success: that who, as the Romantic poet or the monk in the Middle-Ages, epitomises life and is, paradoxically, unable to »live« it. The life of the maximum is subject to machine-like routine.

Under this perspective, our residency consists in a one-month work of accumulation in a website. It builds on the North Korean sports page design, and integrate audiovisual pieces of rhizomatic character. In this way, the site works as a channeling of the chaotic — yet perceived as patterned — images of transcendental masculinity that CR embodies. Though the fractal dilution of images, digital décapée, and post-production, DPRK7 F.C. adds to the chaotic glitches of reality and rationalisations of the virtual.

 

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Javier Ruiz (Toledo 1993) has been involved with the visual arts in the past and is currently undertaking research in the field of anthropology. Federico Pozuelo (Madrid 1992) had formerly an objectual approach to sculpture and now investigates technological processes, virtual reality, and social contexts of aesthetic production. Together they are developing web-projects that emerge from the interrelation of social research, audiovisual production, and the rhizomatic accumulation of material.