Eyebeam
March 13 - April 19, 2008
Opening: Thursday, March 13, 6-8PM.
Closing Reception: April 19, 3PM.
Free 540 W. 21st St.

What does it mean to think "green"?

Eyebeam's expansive new exhibition, FEEDBACK, surveys artists, designers, architects and engineers on the topic of sustainability, and presents their responses- 19 projects varying from public art projects and industrial design to DIY energy solutions and software tools-to inspire discussion and action on this pervasive (and increasingly commodified) subject.

As the culmination of Eyebeam's Beyond Light Bulbs programming series, the show highlights the concerns, interests and work of Eyebeam's Sustainability Research Group, with work by individuals, collectives, students, local community groups and the Eco-Vis Challenge winners. Free, artist-run workshops are integral to the exhibition's design and are scheduled Saturdays throughout the show's duration.
The exhibition's title, FEEDBACK, refers to the self-correcting mechanisms by which systems-in this case, ecological- respond to the influence they exert on their environments...

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On Thursday March 6th at 11am SLT the Ars Virtua Artist in Residency program presents Feed Lack Loop with Micheál O'Connell.

Feed Lack Loop arose out of experiments with the idea of Feedback. Using a live performer and an Avatar in the Online World Second Life, Micheál O'Connell inquires whether the concept of interactivity, so lauded in contemporary culture, is about Empowerment or possibly leads to its opposite: Control. Also the liveliness, or lack of it, in virtual space is brought into question. The event will be situated in two spaces simultaneously, Ars Virtua Gallery in Second Life and as a live projection and performance at Lighthouse. Other relevant pieces by the same artist may be incorporated or displayed...

1) Event on this Thursday 6th March:
http://www.lighthouse.org.uk/whatson/digiville.htm
2) Come either in Real Life or as Second Life avatar. Virtual Location:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Seventh%20Eye/108/60/50

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We have posted about the Vienna scene and the Austrian Abstracts here on previous occasions, but the video work that was central to that movement has generally not been available for viewing online. Therefore, it's with great pleasure we see that Tina Frank has posted some early videos to Vimeo. Let's hope other artists follow her initiative, it would be nice to have an online archive of these early experiments somewhere.

Shown above is the video AKA by Skot, produced for Gasbook 4. Skot was the name used by Tina Frank and Mathias Gmachl for a number of collaborations from 1996 to 2000. Gmachl is also one of the founders of farmersmanual, a collective that was central to the Vienna scene. "Aka" means "red" in Japanese, and the video was made with Image/ine software from Steim, one of the very first softwares to support realtime processing of video on a regular computer.

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The world is full of junk. Why should Second Life be any exception? In fact, something about the technological impetus to always create new, more advanced gizmos and realities makes this online virtual space a perfect site for the consideration of trash. The New York-based German art collective eteam are doing that now, in their project Second Life Dumpster. The duo's work often revolves around land-use issues and other socio-spatial interventions, and in this case they purchased 4096 square meters of space in SL to start a plein-air dumpster. The artists visit freebee sites throughout the virtual world and bring the detritus back to their space, and also encourage other users to drop their garbage at the site. Snippets of chat sessions with other avatars posted to the Second Life Dumpster blog reveal the humorous social challenges of keeping such an operation running. The project received a 2008 Rhizome Commission and their original proposal was to carve out a new type of behavior on Second Life. The site's owners, Linden Labs, say that exploring the world (including crafting one's persona and visage), creating objects, and selling those objects are the primaries forms of activity there, but eteam wanted to ask what happens after self-actualization and the ultimate disposal or withering of the ephemera exchanged in this process. After all, virtual junk is still junk, and its weighty presence online is but a mere token of the refuse our high tech lifestyles generate in "first life." If you're in the real world city of Brooklyn, this weekend, you can visit Smack Mellon to see the artists' physical rebuilding of decaying Second Life objects. Otherwise, check them out online or even consider joining the cadre of dumpster divers now hanging out at Fearzom. - Marisa Olson

Image: eteam, Second ...

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Gareth Long's interdisciplinary practice explores the nature of various forms of contemporary communication by subjecting the narratives conveyed through material objects, such as video and books, to unexpected and often highly erroneous transliterations. As with the work of the artist's conceptual forebearers, like Pierre Hughye and Pierre Bismuth, the interpolation of one medium with those of another does more than simply expose their respective limits: it draws each into unfamiliar light, under which many of our habituated ways of navigating the world are suddenly put into relief. With Don Quixote (2006), Long ran the George Guidall-narrated audiobook version of Cervantes' novel through speech recognition software, in attempt to faithfully reproduce the original text. Yet even while the artist exactingly trained the software to respond to the accent and intonation of Guidall's voice, errors arose - especially considering that Guidall often assumes different voices for the characters of the story. Long bound the resulting text in the novel's actual softcover, as if in faithful reproduction to the original: a most appropriate homage to Quixote's confusion of fiction and fact. It's hard to dazzle us (2006) is the artist's latest exploration of lenticular printing, a process in which up to thirty video frames can be embedded in a single, printed image. A viewer can see a given print's full succession of images only by moving around it - terms of engagement strangely appropriate for Long's depiction of the 1986 explosion of Challenger Flight 51 L. By taking an event that many remember on highly personal terms and enabling a viewer's mobile participation - and, on a more unsettling level, ability to play forward or play back the sequence, through their movement - Long pinpoints the intersection of subjective and collective memory, and the continual need to ...

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Electrofringe 2008 is now calling for proposals for this year's festival from artists, media makers, curators, researchers, playful experimenters, enthusiasts, writers and producers.

Electrofringe is a five day festival of electronic arts and culture occurring as part of This Is Not Art in Newcastle Australia. Electrofringe is dedicated to furthering the creative use of technology and electronic art forms with focus upon skills exchange and development. In 2008 Electrofringe is also including a residency program in Newcastle during the lead up the the festival to allow for the creation of site specific work.

Electrofringe is seeking proposals in the following program areas:

Artist and Project Presentations, Panels, Workshops, Site Specific Residencies, Special Events, Electro-Online (web based art) and Electro-Screen (single channel video based works).

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This past February, renowned experimental composer and harpist Zeena Parkins curated an eclectic series of events at New York's avant-garde music venue The Stone. During the last week, Parkins invited a number of guiding lights from San Francisco's experimental media scene to perform. One highlight was the synthesizer trio Phase Chancellor, an improvisational group who have made memorable, yet infrequent appearances at various art and music spaces since 2005. Comprised of video artist Nate Boyce, musician J. Lesser, and Matmos's M.C. Schmidt, the outfit channels the early investigations in electronic art and video carried out by John Cage, David Tudor, and Nam June Paik. Phase Chancellor distance themselves from their predecessors through their integration of digital technology. The backbone of the performance is Boyce's mesmeric imagery, prepared mostly through the processing software Jitter, but altered and added upon live using a hacked video mixer fed oscillations by his Korg Mono/Poly synth. (In the accompanying video, imploding circles in the center of the image are generated by the arpeggiator function on this device.) The Mono/Poly is also part of the sound mix, to which Lesser and Schmidt contribute a rich counterpoint of electronic textures, avoiding the concept of drone altogether in favor of a perplexing and ever-shifting sonic environment. - Nick Hallett

Video: Phase Chancellor at the Stone, February 22, 2008

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"Impermanent Markings" at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery
Opening Reception Thursday, March 6 from 5-8pm.
through April 17

This exhibition seeks to define drawing and the vestiges of the artist's hand in very broad terms: where a drawing can be graceful outlines of charred earth or luminous traced gestures; where sinuous computational paths can be drawings; and where scratched lines can express the creative process itself. Mark making will be explored in various ephemeral and impermanent media such as sand, fire, earth, water, code, motion capture, performance, and video.

Guest Curator: Linda Lauro-Lazin, professor, Digital Arts, Pratt Institute

Artists: Jean-Pierre Hebert, Ana Mendieta, Oscar Munoz, The OpenEnded Group-Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, and Paul Kaiser, C.E.B. Reas, Carolee Schneemann, and Camille Utterback

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Jennifer Dalton's work very often takes up the art world as its subject matter. Art about art--and the world that revolves around it--can often be cheeky at best, but Dalton manages to pull it off with grace, wit, and originality. She also tends to merge newer and more traditional media in doing so, ranging from internet art to paintings to temporary sculptures. On March 8, Brooklyn-based alternative art space Smack Mellon will open a solo show of her work, entitled "Jennifer Dalton is a Scientist--Not!". This moniker comes from an entry written by a gallery visitor on one of the surveys Dalton facilitated over the last year, in preparation for the show. As the gallery notes, the project puts a unique spin on the concept of site-specific art by revolving the work around the space's audience. The show will include a Powerpoint-style DVD infographically presenting the results of a survey entitled What is the Art World Thinking? (2007-Ongoing), in which "this particular slice of New York's art-going public has been invited to take a short anonymous survey consisting of a few simple questions on topics ranging from art to feminism to philanthropy to politics." The results of a previous poll, entitled How do Artists Live (2006) will also be presented in a slide show, along with a new "'insta-survey" asking viewers to respond to a pressing question by taking a candy." These questionnaires raise interesting unspoken questions about the attention spans and consumptive habits of contemporary artists and patrons, as well as the lack of demographic information we have about these individuals, despite the fact that we now live in what many have called a "database society." If you can't make it to Brooklyn but want to participate in the Q&A festivities, check out Artsurvey ...

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The Experimental Television Center is pleased to announce Finishing Funds 2008.

Finishing Funds provides media and new media artists with grants up to $2,500 to help with the completion of diverse and innovative moving-image and sonic art projects, and works for the Web and new technologies. Eligible forms include film and video as single or multiple channel presentation, computer-based moving-imagery and sound works, installations and performances, interactive works and works for new technologies, DVD, multimedia and the Web. We also support new media, and interactive performance. Work must be surprising, creative and approach the various media as art forms; all genres are eligible, including experimental, narrative and documentary art works. Individual artists can apply directly to the program and do not need a sponsoring organization. Applicants must be residents of New York State; undergraduate students are not eligible. The application requires a project description, resume and support materials, including a sample of the proposed project. Selection is made by a peer review panel. About $25,000 is awarded each year. Announcement is made in early June.

The program is supported in part by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a public agency, and by mediaThe foundation.

Postmark Deadline: March 15, 2008

Guidelines and applications are available on the web at: http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/ in the ETC News Section and the Grants area or by mail or email.

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