Demitrios Kargotis (b. 1982/London) and Dash Macdonald (b. 1983/Wendover-England), have been working in collaboration since they both graduated from the Royal College of Art. They exhibit internationally, most recently in Tokyo, Austria, Zurich, Zagreb, Spain and London.
From remote controlled roller skates which place the artists fate in the hands of the audience, to a machine that proffers soft scoop ice cream depending on the perceived happiness of the user, to a workshop teaching primary school children political spin and the art of successful persuasion, our work aims to de-condition, exposing the potency of existing socio-political systems to manufacture, control and dictate our behaviour by publicly staging social experiments and interventions in which objects serve as the catalyst.
Inspired by a situational approach to understanding the condition of human action and social experiments, such as the Stamford Prison and Milgrim experiments, which demonstrated the transformation of human behaviour through hyperreal simulation and meticulously designed environments that concealed the potential to shape behaviour in a specific direction, our work assumes a similar approach but takes it out of the laboratory into the public arena. Aiming not only to expose the reality of human vulnerability to situation inducements and the extent to which our behaviour is determined by context, but to exploit role play, enactment and simulation, to create the framework for engaging and entertaining human dramas which force the protagonists to re-asses the extent of which institutional mechanisms of control impede on our decision making process throughout our every day life.
For example, ‘Imagine being a World Leader’ a project which uses the fictitious ‘Summit for World Change 2008’ to create the basis for a role-play exercise that teaches primary school children leadership and public speaking skills:Staged around a scaled podium and the accompanying paraphernalia of a political event and lead by professional public speaking coach Ysabel Clare, the workshop and accompanying exercise book breaks down key rhetoric rules, body language and voice projection into a series of engaging exercises which arm primary school pupils with the same set of skills, whilst at the same time becoming a vehicle to address the artifice behind the methods used by politicians, public leaders and figures of authority to persuade and win over an audience. The children become the medium through which the viewer can gain a novel insight and re-examine these set mechanisms of control.