"As we walk the streets our bodies pierce magnetic fields." So begins artist Ricardo Miranda Zuniga's statement regarding his installation, "On Transmitting Ideology" at Philadelphia alternative art space, Vox Populi. This poetic preface underscores the ubiquity of radio waves, in our world, and the potential power of transmission. For while many of the powerful states and dictators Zuniga's work critiques use the airwaves as a means of broadcasting political dogma, the artist takes the space back in his own transmissions. For the show at Vox Populi, he will present an installation of wooden guns in which are embedded radios "broadcasting declarations on freedom and transformation in our society." The AK-47s and Uzis crafted by Zuniga take aim at the mass media and their role in disseminating ideology. This installation is accompanied by a screening of two new video works "that question the outcome of popular notions of freedom, liberty, and the power of capital." Both pieces touch on the political and personal struggles associated with immigration. Carreta Nagua, Siglo 21 (2007) is an animated narrative that also addresses aging and cultural and familial loss through the perspective of two aging TV superheroes, voiced by the artist's parents, and El Rito Apasionado (2007) "takes place in a hotel room where three Guevarrian Neo-Marxist Latino Terror Revolutionaries from Cuba, Nicaragua and Mexico gather to prepare an act against the history of U.S. intervention." Together, these projects exemplify Zuniga's forte for not only performing powerful interventions, but also interrogating the rhetoric of interventionist art and actions. "On Transmitting Ideology" will be open March 7-30. - Marisa Olson

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Online quarterly art journal Vague Terrain announced the release of its latest issue titled "Rise of the VJ" this week. Vague Terrain pairs academically-minded criticism and interviews with artist's projects and/or documentation. In the past, the non-profit publication has featured important and timely topics such as Minimalism, Generative Art, Locative Media, and Sample Culture. Their new issue takes stock of the contemporary field of VJing by showcasing a variety of artist's videos from the likes of Leeanee Berger, vjzoo, defasten, Kero and Neubau, among others, as long as well as substantial interviews with VJs Solu and Jaygo Bloom. Critics Ryan Stec, Michael Betancourt, and Tim Jaeger investigate the interactive angle of VJing while Lara Houston, Ziv Lazar, Xarene Eskander, and Ana Carvahlo situate VJing historically and socially. - Ceci Moss

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http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/galleries/listening_post.aspx

Listening Post is a 'dynamic portrait' of online communication, displaying uncensored fragments of text, sampled in real-time, from public internet chatrooms and bulletin boards. Artists Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin have divided their work into seven separate 'scenes' akin to movements in a symphony. Each scene has its own 'internal logic', sifting, filtering and ordering the text fragments in different ways.

By pulling text quotes from thousands of unwitting contributors' postings, Listening Post allows you to experience an extraordinary snapshot of the internet and gain a great sense of the humanity behind the data.

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The Museum of the Moving Image will soon become the latest art institution to incorporate video into its architecture, an initiative very much in line with the museum's mission to advance the public's understanding and appreciation of moving image technologies across multiple platforms. Located in the Queens borough of New York City, the museum is embarking on a $65 million expansion and renovation, which includes a new glass entrance with a grid of around 240 small video monitors. By entering, "you're literally walking through the image," said architect Thomas Leeser in a talk at a recent celebration of the upcoming expansion, which is scheduled for completion in late 2009. Adding to the permeable effect, the image is broken up by areas of glass between the monitors, which "breaks down the authority of the image and its controlling power," Leeser added.

His firm is known for its progressive use of new media, and the museum's facade is far from the only new video-friendly feature. Inside the lobby, there will be a 50-foot-long wall for projecting moving image, the architect said. An outdoor screening garden and a giant stairway doubling as a mini-amphitheater are just a couple of many other enticing new additions. "We wanted to move away from the idea that the museum's just about film," Leeser explained. "This is an opportunity to grow in new media." The museum will partially close after March 23 for the construction (though it will still offer screenings in various other locations); the new high-tech incarnation will open in late 2009. With so many institutions undergoing identity changes through their renovation projects, we await to see how the newly reformed Museum of the Moving Image will support moving image practice, as it intersects with architecture, digital technologies and the diverse ...

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Here's some information on a new project of mine. "Google Alert Loop" uses Google's free "Blogger" software and "Google Alerts" to create a webblog that auto-publishes itself based on mentions of specific alert topics sent to the email address specified. The idea is to create a self-perpetuating blog that will publish repeatedly until it begins to publish its own mentions into a continuous cycle. The project attempts to question the utility of these automated systems such as "Google Alerts" and how they are being used to aggregate and polarize opinions across the Internet.

More info on the project here.

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Despite the fact that certain nations continue to insist on the building of walls to both quarantine and keep out certain economic and ideological actants, the politics of network culture find governments moving away from the old-school forms of control that involve physical, geographical, architectural wrangling and towards more high tech means of discipline. A conference at New York University, to be held next weekend, will examine this shift. Entitled Radars and Fences, the two-day event will bring together a handful of leading thinkers and activists to discuss the differences between "radars and fences, satellites and walls, networks and bunkers," the forces that have brought about these shifts, and what implications they hold for surveillance, public life, and creative practice. On March 6 and 7, speakers James DerDerian, Stephen Duncombe, David Lyon, and Trevor Paglen will sit on panels entitled "The Military between Transparency and Secrecy" and "Identification Protocols, Net Wars and the Struggle over the Securitization of the Internet." If these sound like a mouthful, it's only because there's a lot to say about the subject of the current state of surveillance and other machinery of control, and organizer Marco Deseriis (an academic, writer, and former Luther Blisset co-conspirator) ensures readers that "by looking at the grey areas where control and discipline, transparency and secrecy, democracy and the state of exception overlap and collide, Radars and Fences [will] provide a cross-disciplinary and experimental platform whereby researchers, artists, journalists, and activists can negotiate new and critical positions." - Marisa Olson

Image: Angel Nevarez and Alex Rivera, LowDrone, 2006

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[kate armstrong & michael tippett / grafik dynamo / 2004-2005]

Kate Armstrong is a Vancouver-based artist and theorist with a panache for new media powered permutational storytelling. Her work questions the nature of narrative in light of computation, social media and contemporary urban space. She has exhibited widely and is currently en route to Turkey for the March 8th launch of PATH, a bookwork generated by "an anonymous individual living in the city of Montreal between 2005-2007" at the Akbank Art Centre in Istanbul. Above and beyond her creative practice, she is the author of Crisis and Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture, sits on the board at The Western Front artist-run centre and is a lecturer at Simon Fraser University's School of Interactive Arts + Technology.

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An obvious starting point in any line of questioning about your work would be the primacy of text. The vast majority of your projects could be described as machines for making fiction and you've explored storytelling through found documents, the blogosphere and social media, and even as a geo-locative phenomena. This list of work more closely resembles a bibliography than any conventional understanding of the word portfolio. Could you talk about your relationship with storytelling and why it is a driving force in your work?

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Attend any number of experimental music performances in New York City and chances are you'll come across a curious sight: a skinny young man conducting conversations on a cordless rotary telephone, which accompanies him almost everywhere and is, practically speaking, his mobile phone. This fellow is none other than Tristan Perich, a talented young artist, composer and inventor whose interest in the foundational units of acoustic sound and digital electronics is manifest in his reclamation of obsolescent objects and technology - the rotary phone among them. For 1-Bit Music (2004), the project for which he is best known, Perich retrofitted a CD jewel case with an 8-KB microchip, battery, track control and headphone jack, thereby enabling listeners to plug in and hear 40 minutes of low-fi electronic music. Beyond the strange and marvelous nature of this apparatus, 1-Bit Music's compositions exhibited a surprising degree of sophistication, considering that they effectively comprise MIDI blips and bleeps that Perich wrote in binary code. For tonight's performance at the Whitney Museum, as part of its "Composers' Showcase," Perich will perform three recent compositions (two of them debuts) that find his 1-bit circuit boards accompanying piano, trumpets and violin. Building on Perich's background in math and computer science, Active Field (2007) endeavors to generate the sonic equivalent of a planar landscape, particularly at its conclusion, when ten violins and ten channels of 1-bit music sustain a single-chord, to the point where analogue and electronic sound cease to be differentiable. Far from more conventional applications of electronics as supplements to orchestral music, Perich's project finds the mediums engaged in a formative, structural dialogue. - Tyler Coburn

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The sixth annual installment of AV Festival, the UK's largest international festival of electronic arts, explores the theme of broadcast in the work of a handful of sound artists, filmmakers and musicians. As color television this year celebrates its 80th anniversary, and China rings in fifty years of television services, broadcasting has clearly passed its period of technological novelty, while nonetheless remaining a fundamental conduit for many of the electronic arts. Departing from this assumption, the festival's program divides time between seminal moments in the history of broadcasting and contemporary practices that endeavor to push its communicative properties. Teesside actor Mark Benton, for example, will helm a re-enactment of Orson Welles' infamous 1938 War of the Worlds recording. The original, broadcast in the run-up to World War II, elicited mass-confusion and paranoia in its listeners, with many mistaking H.G. Wells' fictional account of an alien invasion for an actual Nazi invasion. The populous' susceptibility to the content of radio broadcasting may have changed in the seventy years since, but its sensitivity to globalized terror certainly has not. Among the contemporary projects will be Whispering in the Leaves, a sixteen-speaker installation by acclaimed sound technician and Cabaret Voltaire founding member Chris Watson. Appropriately housed in Sunderland's Winter Gardens, Watson's piece comprises recordings of a Costa Rican rainforest: a "dawn and dusk choruses of a myriad [sic] voices," he describes, "mostly unseen, but heard far and wide through the dense dark greens of the tree canopy." Watson's work mimics the jungle's elision of visibility, offering instead a soundscape so rich with affective resonances as to practically induce synesthesia. Like many of festival's other projects, Whispering in the Leaves elegantly and assuredly channels the transformative- at times, all-consuming - power of audio broadcast. - Tyler Coburn


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