MerzBank
Explore the MerzBank by clicking the various “refresh” and “home” buttons or dip into the “Choose MerzBank Account” to see what deposits the artists have made.
Explore the MerzBank by clicking the various “refresh” and “home” buttons or dip into the “Choose MerzBank Account” to see what deposits the artists have made.
An IOS sound app available from the Apple App Store by Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, featuring Stewart Lee
App developed by 
‘London Onion’, Kurt Schwitters’ love-letter to the city that became his home, has been turned by artists Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard into ‘Londonion’, a pocket-sized mega-mix of the original, updated for the present as a digital app.
Centred on a performance of the poem by comic Stewart Lee, the piece combines verbal and sonic pyrotechnics with the potential for audience interaction that Schwitters encouraged in his art.
The app responds to the random sounds and fluctuating noise-levels of the immediate surroundings and is supplemented by short introductory videos about the project that will be disseminated on YouTube and elsewhere, introducing ‘Londonion’ to a wider online community.
Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson’s ‘From An’ is a series of downloadable PDFs that playfully re-imagines the 15 different application forms for residency and citizenship available from the UK Border Agency website.
The 15 individual works will be released at weekly intervals on the ‘MerzBank’ site. Reflecting on Schwitters’ skills as graphic designer and his own typographic experiments for public institutions in pre-war Germany, the pieces also allude to the themes of non-conformity, exile, migration and refugee status that dogged Schwitters’ later life.
Alec Finlay’s contribution to ‘MerzBank’ is an echo of Schwitters’ famous ‘sneeze poem’ of 1937, which he ‘scored’ to replicate the convulsive sound and shape of a human sneeze. Finlay compares the sudden burst of a single a-c-h-o-o to the flowering of the human rhinovirus (aka the common cold) as it develops and proliferates over time. Streaming continuously on the homepage of the ‘MerzBank’ site, a digital animation, made up of micro-particles of text, captures the beauty of the virus in full flow, while snapshot samples of it will be transmitted through social media, mimicking how the common cold insinuates itself within the general population.
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