DullTech™ operates as both as a hardware startup and performative artwork. Created as a form of radical corporate publishing in an age of high efficiency capitalism it creates technologically simplified or DULL products in order to distribute artworks in tribute to the late Ray Johnson. The company has exhibited in the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam HMKV Dortmund Transmediale Berlin and the White Building in London.
“DullTech is an exercise in ‘participatory anthropology.’ The work grew out of years of working with technology, without ever setting foot in a production facility or digging into the mechanics of scaled manufacturing, something few of its peers or audience had done either. The impulse was to see the process firsthand: a felt responsibility, as an artist working with all this technology and commenting on the distribution of wealth, to visit the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China and research each culture. It was conceived as a Grand Tour, in the tradition of artists going on their Grand Tour in Europe during the Renaissance.” - from article published in Kickstarter Magazine
“Though disturbingly realistic, DullTech™ is a fictional project: it is both an analysis and a critical reflection on efficiency-oriented capitalist society. It raises questions on modes of factory production, market economy by fully deploying its methods and corporate visual language. DullTech™ actually produced their product with the help of Chinese factory workers. Their Kickstarter campaign actually got funded. The speculation became reality and a critique of finance actually got fundraised.” - words by Vera van de Nieuwenhof, published on the blog of Institute for Network Cultures
“You’ve dedicated DullTech™ to the dissemination of artwork in tribute to American artist Ray Johnson, who impishly lampooned established pop art modes by using the mail service to distribute his work - also putting into question perceived notions of value. How does DullTech™ seek to comment on the same territory?
Johnson started the New York Correspondence School and sent his mail art works to the Museum of Modern Art in New York - knowing that the museum archived all correspondence and wouldn’t destroy it, which means his artworks would default into their collection. Seeing that the DullTech™ player caries the work on it as a screensaver, it defaults to an artwork when no other video file is playing through a USB key. Meaning that the person or institution that bought the DullTech™ media player, because it is the best and easiest, also just acquired an artwork.
The idea of having one artwork playing through the enabling characteristics of another artwork reveals an interest in the utilitarian approach to distribute the absurd. It can be seen as a buffoonish form of modernism. In the end the entire process is the artwork. Researching the best paint for a painting meant going to China to find a factory. And the Kickstarter campaign is the performative aspect of it, creating the identity, begging for financial validation for the art piece. Fighting the urge for efficiency in culture as a Kickstarter.” - from interview with the ICA in London