Rhizome | Blog Archives

Community Campaign 2012 Limited Edition Artworks

Rhizome | Thu Nov 10th, 2011 11:09 a.m.

A New Age Demanded (Kline #2), Jon Rafman

Rhizome's Community Campaign is currently underway! Today, we're offering eight excellent reasons to make a contribution this year - the fantastic artworks generously donated by artists Anamanaguchi, Extreme Animals, DIS, Paul Chan, Ofri Cnaani, Kärt Ojavee & Eszter Ozvald, Joe Hamilton, and Jon Rafman.

Make a donation today at the following levels and you may choose to receive the following works:

Anamanaguchi and Extreme Animals, images courtesy of the artists

For donations of $25, we offer limited edition ringtones from the bands Anamanaguchi and Extreme Animals. Load these ringtones on your phone to ring with noise and chiptune style!

Contemporary Internet Lifestyles (2011), DIS

Contributions of $50 will receive this large photographic print titled Contemporary Internet Lifestyles by DIS. Featuring performer Paris Gotti, this photograph is a perfect piece to expand your growing collection.

Sade for Sade's Sake (2010), Paul Chan

A donation of $100 receive Sade for Sade's Sake (2010), a data CD containing 21 type fonts and a collection of digital artwork by Paul Chan. Each data CD is signed and editioned; it's fantastic gift for any collector, artist, or designer.

Slideshow #15 (no title, 1988) (2011), Ofri Cnaani

Donations of $500 include a lush digital print entitled Slideshow #15 (no title, 1988) by time-based media artist Ofri Cnaani. This print was donated by the artist specifically for Rhizome's Community Campaign.

SymbiosisC (2011), Kärt Ojavee and Eszter Ozsvald

A $750 donation will receive SymbiosisC, a heat responsive soft sculpture by Kärt Ojavee and Eszter Ozsvald. SymbiosisC is a unique decorative object that changes color with your body's warmth. Its cushion-like size will fit perfectly in any home or apartment.

Hyper Geography Print Set (2011), Joe Hamilton

For a $1,000 contribution, you can receive a ...

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Artist Profile: Artie Vierkant

Ian Glover | Thu Nov 10th, 2011 3:57 p.m.

Artie Vierkant, Image Objects 2011

You are continuing to explore your Image Objects series for your Rhizome commission, which seems to deal with new elements of the age-old difficulties with representation and the power of images. In your statement, you say you introduce distortion in an attempt to intentionally "not accurately represent the physical sculpture" which seems to imply that a photograph, straight out of the camera, will 'accurately represent' the physical sculpture. Do you think that this is true, or possible? What do you think that your distortions introduce to the images?

The thinking behind Image Objects has always been that by introducing distortions (and layers of other imagery) into the images I can make the viewing experience on the Internet or through other mediated sources fundamentally different from viewing the objects in an installation setting. It also allows me to make a lot more pieces than I could otherwise. These all start as digital files, so ultimately it's rather arbitrary at what point I decide that a file I'm working on is ready to be physically produced—any one of these could easily have undergone more changes, had more or less layers, &c. So by having a piece produced physically and then splitting it into all of these different variations I have the opportunity to sort of go back into it and reshape it into all of the other shapes it could have been.

All of this does stem a bit from, yes, feeling that for the most part installation photographs very accurately represent what a physical sculpture looks like. When I see documentation of works before I visit the exhibition, usually the act of visiting does little more than produce a sense of deja vu. Even if not, install photos are usually an idealized version ...

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Weekend Clicking

Joanne McNeil | Fri Nov 11th, 2011 10:10 a.m.

"I dropped my book and now I can’t read my book" (alex_lee2001) via The New Aesthetic

Agata Pyzik writes about Ostalgia in Frieze, brilliant from start to finish: "Just as Žižek has already published 30-odd books, in which he calls for a reevaluation of the idea of Communism, one might well ask: is this an infinite project, serving only the perpetual Ostalgie business? How many times is the same ‘Idea of Communism’ (the title of a book by Tariq Ali) being sold to us?"
This week's must read: The Social Graph is Neither by Pinboard's Maciej Ceglowski
Douglas Rushkoff at Occupy Wall Street
Social Media in the Age of Enlightenment (Open Culture.) "Europeans living in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had to deal with their own version of information overload. Emerging postal systems, the proliferation of short letters..and the birth of newspapers and pamphlets all pumped unprecedented amounts of information — valuable information, gossip, chatter and the rest — through newly-emerging social networks, which eventually played a critical role in the French Revolution" ...

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Architectural Uncanny Valley

Joanne McNeil | Mon Nov 14th, 2011 11:01 a.m.

screengrab from Kane and Lynch 2 via Steam Postcards

Steam Postcards is a tumblr documenting the melancholy landscapes of video games. The role of architecture is important in gameplay. A level designer is considering the way that a surface responds to weather conditions, the depiction of shadows and textures, and other factors that contribute to a realistic looking structure. Sometimes a game will pose its own uncanny valley hypothesis, when something about the gravity in the virtual world does not match up with human experience. But as still images these buildings look like "postcards" from the future. The uncanniness is the dream world depicted, not any failure in representation.

screengrab fromLost Plant 2, Red Orchestra 2, Mirror's Edge, and Brink via Steam Postcards

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"Performance Anxiety" at Stadium Gallery

Orit Gat | Mon Nov 14th, 2011 12:55 p.m.

Steve Bishop, Φ III, 2011.

Stadium is a new event and exhibition space in Chelsea. The inaugural exhibition, "Performance Anxiety," featuring four artists, Steve Bishop, Ben Schumacher, Chris Chiappa, and Timur Si-Qin, opened on November 10 and runs until December 20, 2011.

"Performance Anxiety" was curated by artist Nicolas Djandji, who tragically passed away in a bicycle accident in September. A number of his friends took the research he conducted in the last few weeks of his life and grouped in order to finalize the administrative tasks necessary to complete the show and fabricate new works by artist Steve Bishop, Ben Schumacher, and Timur Si-Qin.

The artists featured in "Performance Anxiety" all deal in their works with the consumer culture of bodily self-improvement. Using quotidian products—deodorant, mouthwash, Vitamin Water—their works show how a trip to the pharmacy can tell us something about the way we live today and our value systems. From the press release:

Here, the notion that the pursuit of athletic, hygienic, and professional perfection should be sought through the constant purchase of new products is cast into doubt. Through a series of works arresting these normally utilitarian, performance-enhancing products in sculpture, Performance Anxiety waxes upon the paradoxical, collectively shared desire of the present-day individual to become superhuman–physically fit, sexually attractive, and immaculately groomed—by way of altering the body’s chemistry and obscuring its most basic functions. Contextualizing these items as aesthetic elements rather than functional goods, each artist carves a meditative space reflecting upon the absurd modus operandi of these products.

A press release so intelligently written—that speaks specifically to the artists' works and practice while tying them in with the exhibition's theme and art historical traditions—is rare. And it seems that as a space Stadium is embarking on an ...

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Hyper Geography (2011) - Joe Hamilton

Rhizome | Mon Nov 14th, 2011 5:10 p.m.

Hyper Geography (2011) from Joe Hamilton on Vimeo.

Hyper Geography is currently on view at 319 Scholes until November 20th.

Hamilton donated Hyper Geography Print Set for Rhizome's Community Campaign. Check out Hamilton and the other great artists who donated limited edition artworks available only during the Campaign, which ends January 14th.

For more on Hamilton's work see:

Reframing Tumblr: Hyper Geography

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Community Campaign: Focus on Rhizome Editorial

Joanne McNeil | Tue Nov 15th, 2011 10:41 a.m.

Your contribution to Rhizome means continued high level discussion of art and technology provided daily on the Rhizome blog and news site. We hope you'll make a contribution today to help us meet our $25,000 goal.

As editor of Rhizome, I am fortunate to work with a gifted team of writers asking and answering tough questions about the role of technology in art and society. Rhizome writers are looking for the history and context. Our editorial team offers daily original reporting and critical writing on art and digital culture. Writers report on events like the Venice Biennale and ISEA in Instanbul. We provide in depth interviews with artists, curators, and technologists like Paul Chan, Paola Antonelli, James Bridle, Martine Syms, and Nicholas Felton. Once a week we feature an essay or interview from the blog on our mailing list Rhizome News.

Rhizome News recent highlights:

Melissa Gira Grant wrote about the aesthetics of camgirls in the 90s in her essay She Was a Camera. "As an early online community, camgirls learned to both live on and produce the web together. We were our own audience. If there were people who were not camgirls watching – actual voyeurs – we could pretend not to notice them. While they watched, we taught each other CSS, compared different models of webcams, and complained about web hosts. It would be sexist to call it an endless slumber party at which presumably male viewers sat on the periphery. It was more a boot camp in How To Make the Web where you could show up sometimes in your pajamas."

Artist Jon Rafman contributed an original essay on the arcade Chinatown Fair when we debuted his short film Codes of Honor. "I spent the better part of 2009 in that dingy, dim-lit arcade at the end ...

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Klaus Gallery Builds a "New Wall" for Online Art

Karen Archey | Tue Nov 15th, 2011 3:30 p.m.

Michelle Ceja's Wet Code opened earlier this month in Klaus von Nichtssagend's Lower East Side venue, an installation marking the launch of the gallery's new online exhibition space. Initially shown as a browser-based collage of gifs, Quicktime video, MP3s, and HTML, Wet Code also existed as a one-night installation of projections bearing a similar aesthetic. Klausgallery.net will see rotating two-week online exhibitions curated by artist Duncan Malashock, with periodic in-real-life installations by artists in Klaus Gallery proper. "We wanted to accommodate artists whose practices wouldn't ordinarily fit into a physical exhibition space," says Sam Wilson, co-owner of Klaus von Nichtssagend, "Now it's kind of like we have another wall in our space specifically made for this kind of work." Adds fellow co-owner Rob Hult, "It was also a way to satiate a growing curiosity about artists working with the medium. I saw Duncan speak on the history of internet-related art practices at Nurture Art and felt compelled to ask him to work with us on an online project."

Many conversations later brought Klausgallery.net, which developed from a more modest singular art project to a full-blown online exhibition space.

As it stands, the artist line-up may seem like a who's-who in a current internet social sphere to some, building on the web-specific dynamic of building one's practice in tandem with and through a community of peers. Though many included in Malashock's participant list are connected socially via the internet, specifically via Facebook or through the surf club Computers Club, it also ranges widely in geographic location and practice, from established Dutch artists Constant Dullaart and Harm van den Dorpel to more emerging Stateside artists Bea Fremderman, Sara Ludy, and Billy Rennekamp. Presciently, Malashock has chosen many artists whose work successfully navigates ...

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Short Documentary on Internet Infrastructure

Joanne McNeil | Wed Nov 16th, 2011 11:30 a.m.

Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors is a short documentary explaining internet infrastructure, focusing on the art deco building 60 Hudson Street in Tribeca, which is now one of the most concentrated carrier hotels in the world. The internet has an "ironically very limited geography in terms of big strategic concentrations," explains Stephen Graham, professor of cities and society, Newcastle University, in the short film. "The big affluent high tech information rich regions" is where the infrastructure is densely located. And 60 Hudson Street was especially ideal as a hub, given that the building was already designed to accomidate cables as it was first fitted for pneumatics tubes, then telegraph cables and telephone lines.

In an interview with The Atlantic's Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, director Ben Mendelsohn explains, "The issue of how this infrastructure is hidden fascinates me. Andrew Blum has a book coming out in May about physical Internet infrastructure, which I'm very excited for. He was giving a lecture and handing out postcards of "data monuments" in New York City, and I asked him: if these are monuments, what do they reveal about the culture that built them? Their message is really one of ambivalence. Service providers need to let potential clients know where they are, but they generally decline to make their presence widely known beyond that marketing purpose. Andrew did say that he envisions "brewery tour" style visits or class field trips to Internet buildings in the future, and I think that would be great, but the industry is not there yet."

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Goodiepal’s Plot To Educate AI

Nat Roe | Wed Nov 16th, 2011 2:01 p.m.

If you find Goodiepal’s artwork to be inexplicable, it may be because you’re not a robot or a blade of grass.

Goodiepal (alternately spelled Gaeoudjiparl or Gaodjiperl) has in fact directed his unique and absurd concerts/lectures/performance art/stand up comedy/show-and-tell toward AI. As he waxes in his Mort Aux Vaches lecture, “We need to start to talk to the machines as human beings, bringing and expecting machines to understand what we are saying....in a Utopian future, [my] work is not only made to be appreciated by human minds. No, it’s also meant to be worshiped by all kinds of alternative intelligence.”

A Goodiepal performance might begin with a solemn whistled rendition of a patriotic ode. Often he will place an array of strange handmade objects on a table and begin to move them around methodically on a chess board, occasionally uttering a guttural croak. He might begin to lecture about his nonlinear conception of time, indicating that small bundles of twine on the table symbolize points of time. He might impersonate rock bands and do karaoke. Goodiepal’s lectures would be a complete upheaval of everything you believed if there weren’t wry Dadaist halo around it all.

Goodiepal’s London studio, The Blue House, designed by FAT

Primarily using voice in recent musical performances is an odd step for Goodiepal, since he was introduced to most fans as a synth musician and builder. One of Goodiepal’s more infamous synths is an motorized brass bird that has several levers to control a synthesized birdsong. This synth is just one charismatically packaged part of a massive portfolio of built-from-scratch and modified electronics. Goodiepal in fact makes much of his income by repairing and modifying synthesizers and various electronics at his studio in London ...

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