Real-Time Legend
Let's admit it. Many of us have done it. You simply lift the lid on the photocopier, press your face (or other body part) against the glass, and hit "print." Sonia Sheridan has made an art out of this form of self-portraiture. The phenomenon of artists using the oft-overlooked tools around them is one with a long tradition. Think of Lillian Schwartz and the computers that surrounded her at Bell Labs, or Sadie Benning and the toy camera her father, James Benning, gave her. The list is long. And there's something about the convergence of play and experimentation that has made work like this a locus for forwarding new media. In Sheridan's case, it's partly a result of a deep attunement to the relationship between industrial methods and creative drives that has persisted for over sixty years. She was the beneficiary of a 3M residency program which allowed her to make work with equipment like their Thermo-Fax and Color-in-Color machines. In the legendary Jack Burnham-curated exhibition, "Software" (Jewish Museum, 1969), Sheridan allowed viewers to play with these machines, as well. The resultant work enabled her to comment on the compression of time in the conception-to-realization process, positioning her as an early theorist of "real time" art-making and communication. Meanwhile, her art projects helped establish the aesthetics of electronic graphics, while simultaneously pushing the formal boundaries (light, line, color) of seemingly simple systems and drawing these experiments into more and more complex generative systems. Like many artists of her generation opening up new tools, the body became a common site of investigation, and the images she continues to make reflect the metamorphosis of the body in relationship to machines. The Daniel Langois Foundation maintains an extensive archive on ...
Female Extension (1997) - Cornelia Sollfrank
Female Extension is perhaps one of the more renown pranks within the history of net.art. For the project, artist Cornelia Sollfrank submitted more than 200 applications by fictitious female artists to the net.art competition EXTENSION sponsored by Galerie der Gegenwart (Gallery of Contemporary Art) of the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg Art Museum). She created not only a name, email address, phone number, and address for each applicant, but an example of original net.art work as well. Despite the disproportionate number of submissions by female artists, only male artists were selected as finalists. After the decision was announced, Sollfrank went public with the spoof.
Check the website for Female Extension which contains documentation from the project, including an interview with Sollfrank as well as a list of links to the art works she created for the applications.
Rhizome Celebrates Ada Lovelace Day
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day honoring women's contributions to technology. Named for Ada Lovelace, who invented one of the first computer programs for the Analytical Engine in the mid-19th century, the event asks bloggers to post entries featuring admirable women in technology in an effort to raise awareness of female forerunners in an often male-dominated sector. We'll be posting about some of the women that we look up to, both within the field of technology as well those working at the intersection between art and technology.
General Web Content
General Web Content is an ongoing series that spotlights developments on the internet which bear on aesthetic and/or cultural concerns. In this edition, we turn to eBay blogs. The authors here assemble eBay listings in their posts according to an overarching idea, theme or sensibility. If you have an eBay blog you would like to share, please post links in the comments section.
About Sentimental Value:
I’ve always had a love for vintage objects and a curiosity about their former lives. Sentimental Value collects some of the more noteworthy stories about clothing and accessories I’ve discovered while digging through Ebay.
About Reference Library:
Most of these posts originate as my disappointments on eBay. You can sort by the REF labels or search for something specific.
About Hanne's Fashion Blog:
Welcome to Hanne's Fashion Blog! Hanne's Fashion Blog is an Ebay Blog, filtering the greatest stuff from Ebay for you. The best fashion website during a recession!
HEXA_FLEXAGON_F_EVER (2008) - Anna Lundh
display of hexaflexagons, Anthology/Manual, reading area
The hexaflexagon is a strip of paper, that has been folded into a hexagon. This two dimensional shape can then be turned inside out, flexed, so that a number of faces that were previously hidden will appear. In theory, it can have an infinite number of faces, although in reality, the thickness of the paper sets the limit. It was discovered 1939 by a British fellowship student at Princeton, who started to fold the strips he had just trimmed off his American "letter-size" sheets to fit his A4 binder. It had a revival in the late 50s, when it first became popular among magic buffs in New York, and after an article in Scientific American, it became something of a craze.
To investigate which connections that can be made between the ideas and the people associated with the hexaflexagon, I use the digital network Myspace as my tool. A some-what old fashioned and analog phenomenon is applied to something very contemporary and digital. Right now, HEXA_FLEXAGON_F_EVER is trying to become friends with Alan Turing, Lewis Carroll and Katherine Hayles. It’s an exponentially growing mapping, where more dimensions will uncover, for an unforeseeable future.
Media Studies
This is the first installment of a monthly column by Rhizome's Contributing Editor Marisa Olson. "Media Studies" will explore timely issues within the broader field of technology. Each post will pay specific attention to the relationship between these subjects and artistic practice. For this column, Marisa provides a reading list on the topic of "Experimental Geography". In recent years, access to geographical tools and data collection has expanded rapidly, allowing many artists to rethink their relationship to the earth and geographical study. This column provides a summation of publications relevant to these developments.
Please join us tomorrow for a panel, organized by Marisa, on "Experimental Geography". Beginning at 3pm in the New Museum's theater, Creative Time curator Nato Thompson, who curated an exhibition of the same title for Independent Curators International, will lead a discussion with artists Lize Mogel and Damon Rich. - Ceci Moss
The following is an initial list of readings that might be of interest to anyone researching experimental geography. It includes key theoretical texts on the nature of space, texts on locative media, and works on radical cartography. Many of them cross over into game theory, cyberfeminism, relations between real and virtual spaces, surveillance, tactical media, psychogeography, situationism, sound art, networked cultures, site-specific installation art, and other related sub-themes. It's tempting to sort these into temporal or topical categories, but to do so might be to inappropriately compartmentalize an ongoing discourse that moves in new directions every day.
This is only a starting point. Please feel free to add texts in the comments. Links to related syllabi would also be a great resource!
Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (eds), Else/Where: Mapping -- New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, Univ Minnesota Design Institute, 2006
Saul Albert, "Locative Literacy," Mute, July 12, 2004
Marc Augé, Non-Places ...
Closing Tomorrow, Catch It Today
A restoration of Paul Sharits' 1975 installation Shutter Interface, now on view at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York, will close this weekend, so get over to Chelsea while you can. Rarely screened during Sharits' lifetime, this project was recovered in a collaborative effort by Anthology Film Archives and Greene Naftali. A noted example of "expanded cinema," four 16mm films loop onto four separate screens, accompanied by four soundtracks played simultaneously. The resulting color and sound feed in and out, to a deliriously pulsating effect. A collection of Sharits' drawings and diagrams are on display in the second room, providing an overview of Sharits' research and interests.
Call for Submissions:
IEEE VISAP'15 / Data Improvisations / Call for Papers and Artworks
Posted by Angus Forbes
Edwin VanGorder