GLOBALISM -- CRISIS AND OPPORTUNITY

The Art World is Flat: Globalism-Crisis and Oppportunity :: April 26-28, 2007 :: Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, Chicago.

Presenters: Amy Balkin, Francesco Bonami, David Buckland, Stephen Burks, Anna Deavere Smith, Bruce Ferguson, Ed Gillespie, Stanley Hainsworth, Susan Harris, Lynne Hershman Leeson, Natalie Jeremijenko, Simone Aaberg Kaern, Ruby Lerner, Rick Lowe, Lu Jie, Ken Lum, Bruce Mau, Lucy Orta, Anne Pasternak, Dan Peterman, James Rondeau, Peter Sellars, Jennifer Siegal, Stephanie Smith, Lynne Sowder and Victoria Burns, Francesca von Habsburg, Lawrence Weschler, Mathew Wilson, Jon Winet, and iro Yamagata.

Globalism is radically transforming our world, creating new political instabilities, economic interdependencies, ecological stresses and cultural hybrids. The negative results of globalism have been widely discussed: the loss of cultural and ecological diversity; the consolidation of economic and media power; the rise of violent reactionary and fundamentalist movements.

But there are concurrent trends that suggest hope for a more positive future. These include a growing awareness of the interconnectedness of human destiny regardless of religious, geographic or political differences; the uses of technology to heighten and accelerate social networks and actions; the realization of the urgency of addressing pressing, common, environmental, economic and political crises.

For the arts, the crisis of globalism is also an opportunity to interact meaningfully with visionaries in business, politics, science, and other arenas
The arts, always a harbinger of change, are likewise experiencing an unprecedented surge of new aesthetic forms, cross-disciplinary partnerships, distribution networks, market forces and inter-cultural exchanges. For the arts, the crisis of globalism is also an opportunity to interact meaningfully with visionaries in business, politics, science, and other arenas, and to play a powerful new role in the transformation of our shared reality and emerging future.

This conference will bring together an international group of innovative and socially engaged artists, writers, scientists ...

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On the Identity Crisis of Interactive Art

"I encountered -"hands-on"- an emerging phenomenon called "interactive art" on my first visit to the Ars Electronica festival (Linz, Austria) in 1989. One of the works on display was Deep Contact, a laserdisc installation by the American artist Lynn Hershman. Sitting in front of a display, the user was invited by (the image of) a seductive young lady to "reach through the screen" and touch her. By means of a touchscreen interface, the spectator-turned-into-interactor responded, entering various realms, including a kind of garden of earthly delights, where s/he chose forking paths and encountered erotically loaded incidents along the way. Another installation was The Legible City by Jeffrey Shaw. By means of a stationary bicycle, like the ones at gyms, the visitor entered a virtual city consisting of letters, words and sentences. Choosing one's routes through the spatialized database, one engaged in simultaneous acts of reading and writing with the combined efforts of one's eyes, hands, and feet. I still remember the intoxicating feeling of diving under a giant letter "A", or the sensation of virtually crashing through entire words. These experiences raised questions in my mind: what does cruising between and under letters, and even penetrating them, mean? What is the ontology of such experiences? Am I inside language, or even beyond it? Or inside someone else's mind? Confronted with such uncanny issues, I had a feeling that something "new", perhaps even the "ontological rupture" touted by virtual reality enthusiasts, was in the making." Continue reading On the Identity Crisis of Interactive Art by Erkki Huhtamo, Neme.

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The Bulgarian Identity in Europe

Upgrade! Sofia :: Place: Main Hall, Goethe Institute Sofia, 1 Budapest Street :: Date: TODAY at 19:00.

After two months of absence Upgrade Sofia returns with a new kind of event. This time we have Veronika Tzekova doing a presentation on the topic "Identity Jamming" and the guest artist from Germany Wolfgang Kemptner presenting the project "Wet Interviews 2". Both presentations are united by one topic - Bulgaria and Europe. These presentations will be used as a tool to form a discussion about the Bulgarian identity in Europe, one hot topic right now. Are we part of the Europe? Nothing has changed, but things aren't quite the same after Bulgaria entered the European Union in January 2007. How does that affect our personalities and changes our point of view, even on a artistic level? Are we Europeans really?

Originally posted by jo from networked_performance, ReBlogged by Rosanna Flouty on Feb 26, 2007 at 01:49 PM

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And/Or Gallery Show #8:
Chad Hopper + John Michael Boling and Javier Morales

This is our second showing of painting and collage by Austin-based Chad Hopper, and one of the first gallery shows of the quickly rising video and net artist team from New York, John Michael Boling and Javier Morales. This show’s going to be weird and great, come check it out!

February 24th - March 31st
opening reception Saturday, February 24th 6pm-9pm

more info at www.andorgallery.com

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Also going on this weekend in Dallas…

Friday night at the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, a (semi) narrative video show curated by John Pomara, Dean Terry & Joan Davidow. It includes a video from Michael Bell-Smith and some other stuff that looks cool too. More info here.

And there’s a new show at Plush opening Saturday night, and a show opening at the Fort Worth Modern on Sunday that includes Loretta Lux

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8 short talks on bio-art, biotech, and bio-politics

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Eno Henze: Der Wirklichkeitsschaum / Cortices (excerpt)

Der Wirklichkeitsschaum (The Reality Foam) is an ambitious project by Berlin-based Eno Henze. The 10 x 3,5 meter image is a massive wall, created at low cost by mounting 288 A3 inkjet prints as a continous surface. The image itself depicts a complex structure of fine trails, created by tracing particles as they move across the surface. Attracted and repelled by attractors, they leave an intriguing network of nucleii and boundaries.

This interest in fine-grained structures is repeated in Cortices. Here, a folded surface created using Perlin noise is sampled and plotted. The resulting gossamer-like structure looks as though it has been frozen in motion.

Both works were created using VVVV, a tool that is more typically used for realtime applications. Henze’s pieces show that it is more than capable of producing works for print.

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If you are in London on March 1st, I’d recommend coming to the Future of Sound tour at Goldsmiths University 7pm. Tickets are free, and the 250 available have nearly gone already. To book a place, email Zehra Arabadji, details on this page. Set in the Great Hall (shown above & this tiny photo), its set to be a very fun evening.

Presenting & performing artists include Brian Duffy, Ross Phillips, The Sancho Plan, United Visual Artists, Chris O’Shea with Owen Lloyd, squidsoup.

Regine from wmmna has posted 5 questions to Martyn Ware about the tour. Here are my photos from Sheffield and Liverpool.

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Cat’Art, international centre for research and creation
Visual arts, writing, performing arts, music…

Cat’Art is a place where the diversity of the art expressions is encouraged and where the exchanges between cultures from all over the world can be developed, so that the art expression remains a universal language.

There are still opportunities of residency in spring 2007 at Cat’Art.
Application open to professional artists only, for temporary stays from 2 weeks to 1 year.
Average residency fee: 600 € (lodging, studio and energy costs included). Detailed estimation of costs on request.

Every resident has his/her own independent bedroom with common cooking facilities.

Space for the creation:
9 independent studios from 30 to 200 m²;
3 individual rooms for writers;
a 140 m² room with excellent natural light and good show conditions to visualize the works;
a specialized library with permanent Internet connection.

The environment is exceptional (unspoilt nature, mountains, lake, in the south of France). The region has a rich historical background (Cathar castles, old city of Carcassonne and above all the cave of Niaux with its original paintings). Close by cultural centres, like Toulouse, Montpellier, Barcelona.

More details and application to residency on our website www.catart.org

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Alejandro Tamayo is an artist-engineer and a teacher working in the intersections of design, art and new technologies in a country that is often seen as the land of wild cartels, coffee, futbol, the terribly boring Fernando Botero (i'm quoting you here, Alejandro!): Colombia. I discovered his work by chance. He had emailed me to say that he wished i'd cover more of the Latin American art scene. That's something i'd love to do but i wouldn't know where to look for information about what's going on up there (although i read Spanish). Then i realized that the best way to start was to ask a few questions to Alejandro about the lab he's currently directing in Bogota.

The v*i*d*a lab, part of the Aesthetics Department at the Javeriana University, is focusing on the development of new design products and ideas. Guided by a reflexion on life itself, the course proposes to engage with organic (biological) and "post-organic" (electronic, digital) visions, trying to identify new relationships and interrogations that could be translated into the realization of concrete projects.

Read more...

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Outdoor Social Videosharing in the Built Environment

Upgrade! Vancouver: In partnership with Upgrade! International, Upgrade! Vancouver is launching a series of outdoor screenings of local and international art videos. Appropriating the functional model of online videosharing sites such as Youtube, we are creating a series of exploratory events that translate social videosharing into the analogue environment of the urban street.

Video programmes are curated by individual Upgrade nodes and screened outdoors in the built environment of cities including Vancouver, Paris, Montreal, Belgrade, Seattle, Scotland, Skopje, Chicago, Boston, Amsterdam and Istanbul. Videos will travel between cities, being screened locally and internationally. The social software aspect of these events is explored through a deliberately low-tech model in which flyers containing contact information for participating artists will be circulated at the screenings, with the intention of encouraging people in these cities to develop individual connections. The series will launch in Vancouver in March, 2007. For more information, to submit work, or to get involved: Kate Armstrong : kate at katearmstrong dot com. Boston artists can contact jo at turbulence dot org directly.

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