March 15 - May 3, 2008
Opening Saturday March 15, 7-9pm

Exit Art is pleased to announce the opening of E.P.A. Environmental Performance Actions, the first project of S.E.A, a large-scale program dealing with current environmental concerns and the way artists respond to them. E.P.A is a group exhibition surveying recent performance work from around the world that addresses current environmental crises. The exhibition will consist of videos, photographs, texts, related ephemera and a film program documenting recent performances. For this opening project we have invited curator, Amy Lipton, and founder/co-curator Patricia Watts of ecoartspace, a leading international environmental arts organization, to collaborate with Exit Art on the organization and presentation of this material. E.P.A. will include performance documentation from more than 30 international artists. These works, created in the public sphere, draw attention to and engage the public in a dialogue about issues such as climate change, watersheds, urbanization and, ultimately, human survival. E.P.A. will set the precedence for future exhibitions of S.E.A. dealing with environmental issues including The End of Oil, about the global oil crisis and alternative energy, and Consume, about food production, agricultural and sustainable living practices. An exhibition of historical social-environmental art works is also planned to place this work in context.

ARTISTS

Brandon Ballengee, Vaughn Bell/Sarah Kavage/Nicole Kistler, Mark Brest van Kempen, Carissa Carman/Joanna Lake, Center for Tactical Magic, Susanne Cockrell/Ted Purves, Xavier Cortada, Carrie Dashow/Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg/The Society for a Subliminal State, Erica Fielder, Ozzie Forbes, Futurefarmers, , Fritz Haeg, Amy Howden-Chapman, Basia Irland, Scot Kaplan, Carolyn Lambert, Robin Lasser, Kathryn Miller, Matthew Moore, Eve S. Mosher, EcoArtTech: Christine Nadir/Cary Peppermint, Andrea Polli and Joe Gimore with scientific collaborator Dr. Patrick Market, Rapid Response (Cobb ...

MORE »

This year, Eyebeam's Sustainability Research Group has been at work on an initiative called Beyond Light Bulbs, designed to inform individuals about contemporary "sustainable and green concepts" for helping the environment. Among the group's programs has been a series of exhibitions and the newest one, "Feedback", opened last week to an enormous crowd of earth-loving art geeks. Open through April 19, the show features nineteen installations by artists, designers, and research groups offering their answer to the question, "What does it mean to think 'green'?" Among the projects included are winners of Eyebeam's EcoVis Challenge in which participants responded to a call for new ways to brand and visualize environmental issues. Also included are Rebecca Bray and Britta Riley's DrinkPeeDrinkDrinkPee (2008) project, which gives viewers tools for thinking of their body as an ecosystem; Andrea Polli's Queensbridge Wind Power Project (2004), which explores "how clean, renewable wind power might be integrated into the landmark architecture of the Queensboro Bridge;" and Eve Mosher's HighWaterLine (2007-Ongoing), in which she drew a blue chalk line at 10 feet above sea level around areas of the city, in order to indicate the heights to which flood waters are expected to rise as a result of global warming. Many of the nineteen projects in "Feedback" use humor and irony to provide a point of entry into a subject about which viewers are often apathetic or misinformed. All cleverness aside, the show is meant to provoke action. If you're in the New York area, consider rolling-up your sleeves at one of the associated Saturday workshops. - Marisa Olson

Image: Eve Mosher, HighWaterLine, 2007-Ongoing

MORE »

dead-in-iraq
Joseph DeLappe
Live performance followed by a discussion with DeLappe and Mark Tribe.
Thursday, March 20
7PM
Location: Eyebeam, 540 W. 21st St., NYC
Cost: Free
http://www.eyebeam.org

On Thursday, March 20-the date of the US invasion of Iraq-from 7 - 9PM, Joseph DeLappe, recipient of Eyebeam's 2008 Commission for Resident Artists, will enact his ongoing protest and memorial work set within the Department of Defense's online military recruiting and marketing video game, America's Army. Using the login name "dead-in-Iraq", DeLappe enters the multiplayer game as a player and, forgoing fighting, uses the game's features to memorialize US military members killed in Iraq.

MORE »

Montreal-based artist Cesar Saez has an interesting labor of love. He wants to launch a Geostationary Banana Over Texas. For three years, he's been researching the technology to do so and he's now ready to begin fabrication. All that stands between him and his dream is a fundraising goal of $1.5 million. Once launched, Texans will look up to see a banana that appears to be one-tenth the size of the moon. The 1000-foot, fruit-like assemblage will be composed of bamboo and balsa wood and will run on hot air, much like a blimp. Saez says he wants to think about space as a "canvas for expression" and to explore "territory as sovereign within the social context of today's global society." The territory of which he speaks is not simply Texas air space, it's the space for technological research into aeronautics currently "monopolized by wealthy governments and large corporations." In some ways, the artist likens himself to a cowboy, defiantly sending a rather phallic foreign object (bananas don't grow in Texas) into an orbital pattern above a state marked by a legacy of corporate pollution. Though Saez admits that the banana, itself, is simply and "oddity with a sense of humor," he's hoping that this intentionally "unthreatening intervention" can appear like a message in the sky to inspire community growth. In many ways, Saez's banana is just an arbitrary symbol for something much bigger than itself. His development process is one that has involved far-ranging and ground-breaking collaboration between artists, researchers, and locals. He hopes that the next step, after this major DIY feat is accomplished, will be regional community members stepping up to create their own DIY communication networks, allowing them to evade profit structures in "monitoring forest fires, the weather ...

MORE »

A brief round-up of events, small and large, for our readers, this Friday:

First, a little self-promotion, here's your reminder that the next installment of Rhizome's New Silent Series is taking place tonight at the New Museum. Regine Debatty will moderate a panel entitled Media Art in the Age of Transgenics, Cloning and Genomics with artists Caitlin Berrigan, Brandon Ballengee, Kathy High and Adam Zaretsky. (Video documentation of the event will be up on the Rhizome site shortly.)

Second, this weekend, Pixelache 2008 will unfold in Helsinki. Organized by artist and curator Juha Huuskonen, Pixelache is known for bringing together innovators across discipline through provocative presentations and discussions. The focus of this year's edition is Pixelache University with "education in the cross-roads of science, technology, art and culture" explored across the four days of the festival. Following are a few highlights. For those who will be nowhere near Helsinki this weekend, some of the events will be streamed.

Friday, March 14th (5:30-8 pm)
N.I.P. - New Interfaces in Performance is a touring presentation, network and workshop series, currently featuring artists from UK, Netherlands and Portugal. This artist lead initiative is exploring gesture and movement based interfaces within live performance and interactive, mixed media installation. Teresa Dillon (UK) will give a presentation about N.I.P. in Kiasma seminar, followed by N.I.P performances in Kiasma Theatre:
-Burning the Sound by Rudolfo Quintas & Andre Goncalves (PT)
-Resonant Objects by Andre Gon�alves (PT)
-Air Stick by Ivan Franco (PT)
-BOP by Teresa Dillon & Kathy Hinde (UK)

Saturday, March 15th (time tba)
Traveling without moving seminar is exploring various means to cut down the amount of international air travel, featuring John Thackara (UK), Andreas Zachariah / Carbon Hero project (UK), Matt Jones / Dopplr (remote participation) and Daniel ...

MORE »

The new media community has seen a fair share of open source-related art and exhibitions over the years, but as the open source movement continues to pick up steam, it's encouraging to see continued projects that bridge the gaps between the discourse of open source computing, the practice of art, and broader social practice. This is exactly what is strived-for in the exhibition, "Given Enough Eyeballs," curated by artist and organizer Annette Monnier, at Philadelphia's Esther M. Klein Art Gallery. Open March 14-April 26, the show takes its title from a passage in Eric S. Raymond's important open source essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar in which he argues that, "Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow." This principle embodies the ideal of collective editing and authorship that calls for loosened restrictions on copyright and other impediments to growth, and which is the model behind collaborative websites like Wikipedia. The Klein Art Gallery exhibition includes works that employ mash-up techniques, excavate public documents, and offer tools for viewers to put to their own devices. Included is Yoshi Sodeoka's Let It Bleed (Left) Let It Be (Right), The Stones And The Beatles Getting Tweaked At The Same Time (2007), in which similarities between the two pop songs are compared sonically and visually, by swapping videos and audio for the two tunes. Putting a humorously geeky spin on the DIY industry is Ramsey Arnaoot's Audio-Video Sampling Synthesizer (2008), a program written "to manipulate preexisting video clips (from assorted sources) and audio from the movie Hackers." Kendall Brun's The Haircut Entries (2004) are included as documentation of a project that, in a sense, revolved around documentation. The artist posted a survey to his website encouraging viewers to suggest a new haircut for him. He then created a ...

MORE »

The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) is home to a very interesting set of new media artists--both faculty and students--and exhibitions like "sight.sound [interaction] 2.0" are securing the space as a breeding ground for new ideas. An annual exhibition curated by Jason Sloan and open through March 14, the show brings together local and international artists whose work--much as the title implies--explores audio/visual interactivity. "sight.sound" doesn't aspire to a much tighter curatorial theme than that, but this allows viewers to create associations of their own, ranging from labor commentary to the aesthetics of experimentation. For instance, Nashville-based collaborators [Fladry+Jones] and DJ Black Noise meditate on collage theory, as it has shifted from the era of expressionist film to the present, by offering a 30-minute remix of Fritz Lang's film, Metropolis. The original film comments on the relationship between workers and the ruling class in an increasingly mechanized society, and the artists' remix offers a contemporary take on this evolving narrative. Baltimore-based artist Colin Ford conducts an experiment in color psychology, asking visitors to identify the hues that represent business brands, such as "Starbucks Green" and "Verizon Red," and each subsequent visitor's selection is averaged with their predecessor's, which Ford believes turns corporate power on its head by allowing consumers to " alter the meaning that the brand holds." Local artists Dan Huyberts and Will Rosenthal bring play into the fold with their fun projects. Huyberts's Circuit Bent Video Sculpture Aural Vision 1 allows viewers to "watch" nature recordings on a television, using a photocell that triggers the screaming of a circuit-bent smoke detector. Rosenthal's Cideslide is an interactive video game inviting users to choose their own adventure in navigating what Rosenthal describes as a surreal "Lynchian" world by using ...

MORE »

Earlier this week, we pointed to Brian Holmes' article on the troubling set of circumstances around artist Wafaa Bilal's latest work, Virtual Jihadi. As the situation has evolved, as has the public outcry from artist communities, we offer a round-up of resources on the subject.

Wafaa Bilal's "Virtual Jihadi" exhibit at RPI -- freeculture wiki

Coverage from Regine DeBatty of We Make Money Not Art

Coverage and discussion on Inside Higher Ed and GamePolitics.com

Opinion from Art Fag City

Call for letter-writing support by Ryan Griffis on Rhizome

MORE »

The overlaps and incongruities between visual and aural engagement are the focus of "Finding Pictures in Search of Sounds," sound artist Stephen Vitiello's second solo exhibition with Museum 52, in London. For Boxed Gray (2008), Vitiello has applied a thick coat of silver paint to the walls of the gallery's front room and immersed it with a rapidly paced soundtrack of field recordings and electronics. Subtle Blue Gray (2008), in the back room, forms a conversational counterpoint: three blue lightbulbs flicker and pulse, enveloping the space in nocturnal hues, as four speakers embedded in the gallery walls generate faint, scratching sounds. Collectively, the two works find Vitiello continuing to develop visual analogues to his sound pieces, an inquiry that previously included him mining the sculptural properties of speakers and making graphite, ink and pigment drawings from LFO speaker vibrations. For "Night Chatter", his 2006 show with Museum 52, Vitiello even interwove Virginian ivy with speakers playing a recording of a conversation between Tony Blair and George Bush, processed to a point where the politicians' voices sounded like electronic bells (Hedera B,B,B (2006)). Considering Virginia's military significance for the United States government, Vitiello's piece had the strange effect of turning an element of the state's natural bounty into an agent for the cause: a position from which to surveille. In contrast, Boxed Gray and Blue Gray number among Vitiello's more abstract experiments, forgoing explicit critique for diffuser modes of engagement. Yet by focusing on the expressive and meditative registers of aesthetic experience, Vitiello's sophisticated understanding of the conditions of reception comes to the fore. - Tyler Coburn

Image: Stephen Vitiello, Blue Gray, 2008

Link »

MORE »

SoundLAB - sonic art project environments
http://soundlab.newmediafest.org

is happy to make 2 announcements:

1. Call for soundart for SoundLAB VI
Deadline: 30 November 2008

2. SoundLAB IV on FILE Rio 2008
----------------------------------------------<br

MORE »