DiskoB.com
Oct 272014
 

COS-ARTSTRAVAGANZA-300dpiGlobetrotting performance, art, music, fashion and new media provocateurs Chicks on Speed (Alex Murray-Leslie and Melissa Logan) are back with their genre-defying and shape-shifting full-lenght album Artstravaganza.

Artstravaganza is Chicks on Speed’s innovative perspective on the current collision between analog and digital worlds. Their songs lie at the cutting edges of activism and media-pop-art, where the digital world embraces the hand made, rough and spontaneous, interlacing the programmed, the multi-layered and delicious data scapes, where sloganeering leads us through to time rippling via a stop in a self-made utopia and the strobe light stays on.

The album includes musical contributions from a diverse range of collaborators, such as Australian journalist and activist JULIAN ASSANGE, artist and musician YOKO ONO, 60’s performance artist and director of ZKM PETER WEIBEL, Philanthropist, TBA21 chairman and pop star princess FRANCESCA VON HABSBURG, Singaporean artist ANGIE SEAH, long time Chicks on Speed collaborator ANAT BEN DAVID and the students of Interface Cultures lab, University of Art and Design, Linz.

With ARTSTRAVAGANZA and six associated iPad apps, Chicks on Speed seek to overcome a separation of art forms and genres for an integrated artistic approach, influenced by the group’s multidisciplinary artistic research to date, which encompases sound, science, body-centric art performance, interactive technology and objectinstruments (new interfaces for musical expression). Alex Murray-Leslie and Melissa Logan engage collective strategies as well as radical approaches to making work which demonstrate their ethos of the Utopian Gesamtkunstwerk (all encompasing artwork). Chicks on Speed have presented their sensorial audio-visual pieces at museums including MoMA in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney, Centre Pompidou in Paris and 55th Venice Biennale.

ARTSTRAVAGANZA is produced by Chicks on Speed with CHRISTOPHER JUST, OLIVER HORTON, PHILL SPEISER and TIMOR LITZENBERGER.

UTOPIA, the first single of the album, was released worldwide on July, 3rd 2014 along with three remixes.