NewfrontEars
Biography
NewfrontEars is an artist duo working and living in the UK and Berlin, creating music videos, video installations and durational performances. Their work has been shown at international venues such as Fondation Cartier Paris, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Tate Modern and documenta X. They are founding members of Gob Squad, the collective with whom they worked from 1994 to 2001. In recent years, they have specialised in hybrid projects together with HAU. Most recently, they took part in the festival “Spy on Me” #2 (2020) and #3 (2021) with the livestream project “FEEEEEED”. In these works, Large and Sommers have established artificial intelligence as an equal artistic partner, where transmission errors offer a productive way to look behind the surface of technology. Their long partnership with HAU extends beyond these aforementioned projects: for example, they designed the spaces and façades for the festival “The Aesthetics of Resistance: Peter Weiss 100” (2016) and were responsible for the theatre's print and online campaign “Keep it real” (2017), which established a series of avatars as fellow HAU players. With the help of the avatars, Large and Sommers succeeded in depicting an awkwardness that can arise when human and non-human intelligences first encounter one another. These avatars continue to be part of HAU’s pictorial design and were also animated for the Kampnagel app as part of the Alliance of International Production Houses. They maintain a key position in the video and pictorial design in the promotion of the digital stage HAU4, where online visitors are greeted with moving background images created by the duo. The artists have also produced various trailers for social media and for cinema.