NGHBRS

Excerpts the publication produced by The Hand in conjunction with NGHBRS: What’s Inside?

TS: The NGHBRS station is dysfunctional due to an outside force, and lack of care.
So you have this bonky world. Systems generally work fine. The company that runs it is The THE. T-h-e T-H-E.
Like if Tesla and Apple merged with Google as their backbone. I guess it probably follows Asimov’s laws.
TB: It’s beyond a monopoly. It’s a technopoly.
TS: I think that the AI became engaged in when the solar blast hit.
But somehow it grew into this thing that manages this region of space. Beyond neighbors.
TS: So some people are like: “Oh, I hate The THE system. Candy-goody. I wanna go to the “Ruckus Quadrant”. I just wanna like…”
TB: “Where I can get laid.”
TS: “Where I can get laid. Where I can get yelled at!”
MM: And the AI made the neighbors station?
TS: Yeah. It established the workflow.
TB: The open secret is that nobody knows how anything works.

This newspaper is published in conjunction with the exhibition NGHBRS: What’s Inside? at The Hand, in Brooklyn, NY, from September 9th through October 7th, 2017. The bulk of the text is an edited composite of several interviews between Taylor Shields, Trey Burns, and myself. Ursula Sommer, a long-time friend, writes about her experience collaborating with Shields, as well as the participatory nature of being a NGHBRS fan.

There is no easy explanation of NGHBRS. Geographically, it is a meteoric hospitality center that caters to intergalactic miners. Materially, it is a constellation of videos, animations, 3D renderings, physical models, props, scripts, and a radio play. Part anthropological study, part repository of tall tales, it is the result of many years of collaboration between two friends. NGHBRS is a Sci-Fi sitcom that bypasses the Utopian (dys- or otherwise) and presents a profoundly mundane future where science no longer functions in the service of progress, but rather in perpetuating a comfortable status quo. Temporally, NGHBRS never ends.

The Hand likes projects that never end. Art that is all-encompassing, spinning outward with open arms, embracing everything in its path. There is no final form, only a sprawling universe and whatever it cares to manifest. NGHBRS is best experienced from the inside out: amidst the dialogue that is its primordial soup.

So we present to you a colloquial map of the NGHBRS universe. Because much like Zen, or The Matrix, no one can really be told what NGHBRS is. You have to see it for yourself.

Maren Miller
The Hand
August 29, 2017