0RPHAN DRIFT 1994-2003 ARCHIVE IN PROGRESS

0rphan drift was a collaborative artist created in London in 1994 by Suzanne Karakashian, Ranu Mukherjee, Maggie Roberts and Erle Stenberg. It was said to have 4.5 members because its core artists collaborated with numerous people on mostly site- specific works. Although it was predominantly made up of visual artists, it also involved sound designers, concept engineers and media activists.

As an artistic entity, orphan drift was known for immersive and visually complex works which used the sample and the remix extensively, treating information as matter and the image as a unit of contagion. It produced video and AV performance, collage, text and print works, and published the cyberpunk novel o(rphan)<d<rift. Much of its work explored mimetic patterns of desire, production and consumption- particularly in relation to the rapid technological changes happening at the time- drawing heavily on cyberpunk fiction, polyrythmic electronica and the underpininngs of African religious systems.

0rphan drift also functioned as an experiment with artistic subjectivity, operating collectively as a singular artist which subsumed the individual artistic identities of its core members. Its mode of production questioned art world conventions around labor and individual authorship as well as object hood, preferring site specific, temporary installation and sometimes performative modes of address - though still rooted in visual aesthetics.

Orphan drift was cross-contextual and made extensive contributions from 1994 - 2003 in the social arenas around contemporary art, underground music and cyber-feminism/post-structural philosophy. They were shown widely including at the Tate Modern, Hayward and Cabinet Galleries in London, contributed cybervisuals to the set of Stephen Speilberg's 'AI' and 'Minority Report' features and Leftfield and NIN world tours and participated in 10 years of international Video art and AV Electronica art events in Norway, Germany, Canada, UK, South Africa and USA.

We are currently building an online archive as an attempt to make some of the works we made between 1994 and 2003 accessible, and to prevent them from disappearing. In doing so we face all of the difficulties of attempting to make an archive of material which involves an untranslatable dimension- the -you had to be there- factor inherent to site specific work ( much of which was poorly documented as a result of our anarchic nature). Although the work was mostly site-specific, it always had an intensely visual and aesthetic dimension to it and a basis in visual object making- making its documentation quite trickster-ish. When you see it here, it will appear to be complete, though perhaps missing something which formalizes it. That something is a social context in which its shifting layers of frightening, disturbing, abject, schizophrenic, beautiful, deconstructive, poetic and fragmented were able to take affect.

SYZYGY 2000 Beaconsfield, London
SYZYGY- 26/02/99-28/03/99 at Beaconsfield Arts, London Project developed and curated by 0rphandrift with CCRU ­ŒCybernetic Culture Research unit¹ ­ resulting in an installation animated by audio visual works presented in a series of events over five weeks. Each week was devoted to a different Œfictional numeric character¹ whose principles were embodied in installed static art, video, sound, live performance and discussion. 0rphan drift produced the main installation- (see collage images); the video work (production and live mixing-see clips) ; and directed commissioned collaborators for events; Traxis (performers), Ocosi, Apache 61, Dmitri Nakov (sound). CCRU events also included sound by Kodwo Eshun and Kode9.
Excerpt from Review by Jim Flint, Mute Magazine, issue 13 "While the CCRU was more interested in the theoretical underpinning of the show , the 0rphan¹s side concerned itself with the dynamic reconstruction of various numerically based cultural machines, and to this extent there was a fictional element.- 0D used the notion of the demon in its various forms( though they prefered the term ¹avatar) to code the various elements they were trying to make coherent within the contemporary mediasphere. Thus we were shown the avatar as a unit of sorcery; as a figure historically used to provide an Œinformational outside¹ with physics, a link between logic and noise, as in Maxwell¹s demon; as a software agent, as semi-intelligent and semi-autonomous code-bot; and as a disruptive figure of darkness. For 0D, all of these have in common the casting of the demon as a multiple and individious unit of ontological disintegration, but one that is implicit in any act of communication- something which the angelogies of Michel Serres have already taught us. By recasting each node/operation on the CCRU numagram as an avatar or demon- the art on display- the collages, dancers and audiovisual events- -expressed each avatars realisation as a tendency in cultural production. Thus one avatar, KATAK, grew out of the conflict between electricity and sunlight and linked to belief systems and sacrifice, to the concentrations of power typical of fanatacism, while another, XES, was born of the reality of total surface presented by the camera. One creative conflict, one source of power, for all five of the avatars was the duality that exists between tools and weapons, each able to perform the function of either depending upon the circumstance."

Orphan Drift now
In the early years of the 21st century, the orphans began to drift around the globe, resettling in distant lands.
Orphan drift has recently reformed as a collaboration between Ranu Mukherjee (San Francisco) and Maggie Roberts (Capetown and London), with Mike Maurillo making audio for various projects and other occasional named collaborators. We are multi-disciplinary artists, currently focused on making discrete works of art. We continue to make science fictional work which is guided by a neo-futurist sensibility and clearly a progression from our earlier work. Our first video work Wilderness of Elsewhere's, Colony 1 has been shown in Santiago and San Francisco and we recently produced a series of postcards for Shadowshop; Stephanie Syjucos parasitic shop at SFMOMA.