About Pigxell:

Pigxell makes and trades furniture. The staff at Pigxell is dedicated to make your space a place. With a selection of furniture that incorporates our unique aesthetic, you can personalize your room with ease. The creation of space is central to us. Michael Townsend found a secret space at the end of a slim passageway in the Providence Place Mall. Townsend started to decorate the space to make it his home, but from the outside people only see the flat texture of the solid facades.

We hide behind the veneer facade of images and uniform aesthetics. We own and replenish the place in the gap between personal control and image flow. At Pigxell everyone embraces the idea of play. We dedicate to host your play, while you may also find us as players and actors beyond your gaze.

Backstage :

Pigxell is a combination of performance and a computer game, where the performer plays as an NPC in the game. This game is, as many other room-decorating games, all about personalization. However, here, gaining control of a virtual personal space means giving up certain controls of one’s image.

A character in the game, a pig, trades furniture with the player only if they trade images of their body; eyes, nose, ears, mouth, hands, feet. Accordingly the furniture pieces players purchased from the pig have labels of the pig’s eye, snout, mouth, ear, etc. The pig manages the shop in game while the performer manages the pig. The performer manually checks images sent from players, and then uses them as materials for making posters. The performer re-arranges their own apartment space, bringing the aesthetic and images from the game into their room, and shoots photos for making the posters.

Pigxell is a simulation of both symbolic posthumanism and digital surveillance. Within the trade of data and distribution of images, the surveilled and the watcher both give up / lay out something slightly personal while making rooms for the in-between to grow. Might the machine of share and distribution help us expand our living space? Might the somewhat anthropomorphic digital pig live the life of its own within the crevices of the spreading web, commercialization and personalization?

Artist Bio :

I started my art practices in sculpture, video and object making, in thinking of how I live in the in-between space of physical environment and screen, solid objects and light/image. With video installations in/about specific settings, such as restroom, office building, and ticket booth, I tried to explore the many layers of environment, from its physicality to digitality, and how one’s attention and consciousness transitions between these layers. The thoughts of our relation to screens and images led me to be more aware of digital spaces, internet and digital bodies such as online profiles, characters and avatars. Recently I am making works to explore our relationship to our digital avatars, and how the digital bodies exists in the intersectional and transitional space of physical and digital, subject and object.

— Zhengzhou Huang