The projects of German artist, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, flirt with the construction of scientific knowledge, grasping and slipping between the object and subject. Drawing from a background in visual and new media art practice, Meyer-Brandis creates installations, performances, and film that drift from scientific theory into fiction and wonder. Her work draws parallels with fictional and quasi-fiction worlds, those of space cadets and armchair rocket launchers.

Exploring recurring subjects such as gravity, weightlessness and space travel, her work has led to collaborations with scientists and researchers providing access to operations and activities usually restricted to scientific experimentation only. In 2007, while working on a project called Cloud-Core-Scanner she travelled on a zero gravity flight in collaboration with the DLR (German Aerospace Centre) to examine the formation of clouds in a weightless environment. As well as a rigorous scientific approach, her work is often tinged with a playful humour, such as her series of public meteor watching events, where participants are instructed to bring a safety helmet.

Her latest work, Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility is currently showing as part of a group exhibition curated by Arts Catalysts at FACT in Liverpool, UK before touring to AV Festival 12 in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Her contribution to the show was originally conceived as a quest to investigate gravitational anomalies, mythological pockets of low gravity but it eventually became the fruition of a project she started several years ago.  While preparing for her weightlessness flight experiment she discovered, Frances Godwin’s The Man in the Moone. Completed in 1638, the book is one of the first works of science fiction and the first to describe the notion of weightlessness as the protagonist flies to the Moon in a chariot towed by ‘moon geese’. Fascinated and inspired by the book, Agnes set ...

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Jon Kessler, The Blue Period at Salon 94, 2012

Where are you?  Jon Kessler's The Blue Period involves surveillance cameras, cardboard figures, collaged portraits, and video monitors to answer that establishing question in different ways.  In his exhibit, viewers are located via camera capture, then turn to find themselves on video screens.  They become spectators and a part of the spectacle (Kessler has an acknowledged affinity for Debord), pinpointing their actual and metaphorical whereabouts by viewing themselves in a loop of mediated images.  

Jon Kessler, The Blue Period at Salon 94, 2012

If one of the cameras in Kessler's piece had localization functionality, it could infer position based on a current view of the scene like a QR code can.  In scanning a QR code for embedded information, an individual effectively informs on himself, firing a flare in space.  A sort of inverse to The Blue Period's accumulation of intermediary images with unlocatable sources, QR codes create an augmented reality where a mediated physical environment gains content through revealing position.

Eric Mika, überbeamer mapping, 2011

The überbeamer, a hand-held, spatially-aware projection system reminiscent of Ghostbuster weaponry by artist Eric Mika, expands on augmented reality by using a projector to draw content directly onto surfaces.  The device knows where you are relative to where you've been, storing a three-dimensional model of its environment.  Comprehending the geometry of a scene, and your location in it, the überbeamer has the same functionality as a QR code to overlay digital information and track location.  And it does so without covering the world with robot barf.

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Rafaël Rozendaal created a special video tour of the Rhizome "booth" at the VIP Art Fair.

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Doug Aitken (Victoria Miro) at Art Basel Miami (via)

The day I moved to Brooklyn was the day my iPhone screen first shattered. I struggled to get my keys out of my purse while a group of students were waiting at the door for a friend to buzz them in. Unlocking the door in a confused jetlagged state, I held it open for each of them while juggling several bags with the other hand. After the last student entered the building, I stopped the door with my foot while attempting to redistribute the weight of my belongings. My iPhone slid out of my back pocket and on to the concrete. 

The resulting spiderweb of a crack had no impact on the iPhone's haptic sensitivity. It looked ruined but worked just as well. Eventually, I got used to reading without much eye strain. There were even some benefits. Everyone knew which phone was mine at dinner parties with iPhones strewn on various counters and end tables. I never worried about dropping it again as the screen wasn’t going to get any worse. And I didn’t worry much about it getting stolen, either.

My broken iPhone also resulted in random conversations with strangers. In queues for restaurant bathrooms, on public transportation and park benches, I was asked again and again what happened, and why didn’t I just take care of it? ...

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Rhizome is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by outstanding artist Rafaël Rozendaal, who is known for his trailblazing explorations of the web browser, and for his forward-thinking contributions to the curation and sale of digital art.

Rhizome will present eight recent works by Rozendaal at the VIP Art Fair, all unique websites, each one an animation representative of the artist’s exploration of the browser as a limitless pictorial space. Here, in the ‘white walls’ of the online VIP Art Fair, each work is represented as a screenshot: a single frame that also includes the browser window that demonstrates how these works exist natively online. Colorful, minimal and redolent with feeling, the exhibited works range from figurative, such as Hot Doom. com’s depiction of a volcanic explosion, to abstract, as seen in From The Dark Past. com’s rendering of a scorched emotional terrain. Rozendaal’s formal aesthetic—his tendency to render commodities, like popcorn, or familiar scenes, like sunsets--recalls Pop art’s interest in the mass market and kitsch. Yet, in these works, each image has been pared down, stripped of idiosyncrasies related to place or time, and transported into a visual language of computer graphics and figuration--a language the artist suggests is more ‘universal’ today.

Rozendaal is noted not only for his own digital work, but for his inventive, free-form curatorial project BYOBthat  has been staged around the world, and his contract that outlines how a browser-based work can be sold. This contract applies to all works for purchase at VIP Art Fair, and is available online here. As an organization dedicated to advocacy of digital art, and education around its history, preservation, and exhibition, Rhizome is proud to share Rozendaal’s contract within the VIP Art Fair as an example of an artist’s bold move towards defining best practices around the sale of digital art. Proceeds from the sale of Rozendaal’s donated works will be split between the artist and Rhizome. 

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