Mirror: Chicks on Speed’s Utopia

Founded in 1997 as a multidisciplinary art group working in performance art, electronic dance music, collage graphics, textile design and fashion, Chicks on Speed first made a name for themselves during the Electroclash takeover of the early 2000s — a genre they would become synonymous with over the years which followed.

On June 27th, Chicks on Speed came back with Artstravaganza, an album, film and app project which was created by band members Melissa Logan and Alex Murray-Leslie in collaboration with leading contemporary artists, including Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Yoko Ono, Austrian artist Peter Weibel, Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, DJ and producer Christopher Just, and many more.

On Thursday, 3rd July, the duo launches their first release of the multimedia album ‘Utopia” at the Ace Hotel in London.

Utopia is a thought provoking synthesis of Chicks on Speed’s signature electronic pop style woven with their distinctive, thought provoking lyrics –the song is a digital age response 500 years on to Thomas Moore’s book Utopia and questions ‘Where do we find Utopia today?’

Utopia culminates with Yoko Ono answering: ‘unite and focus on what we want and we will get it, one of the things is peace, because we don’t want a violent world’.

This is what Chicks on Speed’s Alex Murray-Leslie and Melissa Logan say about their new single: “Is utopia, the place of equality and space for each individual to live out fantasies in the digital world? The song is full of diverse ideas of utopia, from the tsunami of free thought and equality of the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, to the knowledge that our desire for utopia is being manipulated every day with the false possibility to buy our own private utopia. It’s about asking yourself What do you want most? We’d say to live peacefully together in an outrageous, creative place…….Drop in-Drop Out, one thing is certain, an innovative microevent can one day change the world! From paradoxical inventions, new machine art of Futurism, Buck Minsterfuller’s geodesic dome to Ant Farm’s radical software, and temporary Fluxus Utopias, to contemporary Accelerationism and new strategies on how to work with our capitalist system for Utopian outcomes, to the Techno-Utopias and Mixed realities of today”

Listen to the full track on Vimeo.

Don’t forget to check out live art performances and upcoming exhibitions:

October 2014 – Live-Art performance staring Francesca von Hapsburg, Witte de With, Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
12 October 2014 – Live-Art performance, MoMA PS1, New York, USA
12 December 2014 – ZKM, Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany
February 2015 – GOMA, Gallery of Modern Art, Australia& Milani Gallery, Brisbane
30 May 2015 – Re-opening Govett Brewster, New Plymouth, New Zealand