Rhizome editor-at-large Karen Archey is speaking at DLD (Digital-Life-Design) in Munich Jan 22-24. Moderated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, she will be part of the Saturday panel "Ways Beyond the Internet." Artists Oliver Laric, Cory Arcangel, and Rafaël Rozendaal are also presenting in addition to a number of innovators in art and technology like Yoko Ono, Sheryl Sandberg, David Karp, and Chris Poole.
Huong Ngo is part of Fantastic Futures, a 2011 Rhizome Commissions winner for their proposal, Fantastic Futures
Acting the Words is Enacting the World, 2011 more at Enacting the Words Photo: Dwayne Dixon
Your Rhizome commission is a continuation of the Fantastic Futures project (which already includes recordings of birds in Baghdad and someone making tea in Brooklyn). It seems to be another in a continuing series of projects exploring contemporary education practices and ways of learning like Secret School and "How To Do Things With Words." How do you see this project fitting into your larger educational practice? What sort of transformations do you hope to see in education that could result from a project like Fantastic Futures?
Yes, it’s continuing a collaboration with a group of students in the US (in particular at Parsons The New School for Design) and at the University of Baghdad, that began with And Longing is No Longer Sleeps (the project that we did for the exhibit “How to Do Things With Words”), and further develops some of the collaborative processes from Secret School (a curatorial and discursive project about pedagogy), Acting the Words is Enacting the World, a project with artist Hong-An Truong and a group of young folks completed this past summer, and generally the strategies and techniques that I use in my classes.
Our goals for Fantastic Futures are fairly modest: we aim towards facilitating a diversity of exchanges (experiential, social, political, etc), advocating for a free and open cultural commons, leaving a gesture that serves as a collective protest against past and future violence. Nevertheless, I always secretly hope that something from our collective process is transformative for all involved.
In an interview for the Walker Art Center, you talk about preferring to keeping these education oriented ...
After “getting fit” and whatever else people typically declare to be their new year’s resolutions, this year’s most popular goal is surprisingly nerdy: learning to code. Within the first week of 2012, over 250,000 people, including New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg, had signed up for weekly interactive programming lessons on a site called Code Year. The website promises to put its users “on the path to building great websites, games, and apps.” But as New Yorker web editor Blake Eskin writes, “The Code Year campaign also taps into deeper feelings of inadequacy... If you can code, the implicit promise is that you will not be wiped out by the enormous waves of digital change sweeping through our economy and society.”
If the entrepreneurs behind Code Year (and the masses of users they’ve signed up for lessons) are all hoping to ride the wave of digital change, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, a professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, is the academic trying to pause for a moment to take stock of the present situation and see where software is actually headed. All the frenzy about apps and “the cloud,” Chun argues, is just another turn in the “cycles of obsolescence and renewal” that define new media. The real change, which Chun lays out in her book Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, is that “programmability,” the logic of computers, has come to reach beyond screens into both the systems of government and economics and the metaphors we use to make sense of the world ...
Photo by John Powers
Earlier this month, Dutch artist/economist Hans Abbing, author of Why Are Artists Poor: The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, lectured at Artists Space, the first of a series of open forums organized by W.A.G.E. Artists John Powersand William Powhida attended the event. I asked over email for their thoughts on the talk -JM ...
Image by altffour
Editor’s Note: “"Tricia u MUST join Twitter to network with Poets" *tricia joins twitter, falls in with a million Comedy Fuckers, forgets what poem even is*” — @TriciaLockwood, September 2, 2011
Patricia Lockwood is an actual poet—published in the New Yorker, even!—who has inappropriately touched the imaginations of a thousand followers with her “sexts.” Born around the time of the Anthony Weiner scandal, the genre congeals gobs of glowing poetry from networked life’s greasy stew of blunt spam copy, collaged pop culture, and constant little spells of titillation. This is a selection of Lockwood’s hottest sexts.
A ghost teasingly takes off his sheet. Underneath he is so sexy that everyone screams out loud
Do you smell like a mousetrap? I am a cruel woman and I simply adore the smell of mousetraps
A Teenage Turtle takes extreme pleasure from sticking his head in and out of his shell very slowly while a rat watches
Midnight. My wife and children are asleep. Breathlessly I begin to search for my favorite kind of porn: "Women Standing in Big Jeans"
THE BIGGEST WOMEN IN THE TIGHTEST JEANS!!! U WONT BELIEVE YOUR EYES! THESE WOMEN SIMPLY CANT GET ENOUGH STANDING AROUND IN BIG JEANS!
These jeansluts stand up really straight with their tits out, holding the jeans as far away from their bodies as possible! SO RAW
This girl wants a denim vest, a denim scrunchie, and denim Keds -- are YOU the sicko who's going to give them to her
You are miniature, and I put you in the bell of a saxophone and play a long soulful B-flat
I am Everest and I JO while a 100-year-old grampa tries to climb me. At the moment he reaches my peak I produce a thunderous rockslide...
The Pirate Bay just announced a new file type available on the site: "physibles," digital files for 3D printing. It expects in 20 years you'll be downloading sneakers. In the meantime there are lawn darts and plastic toys:
We're always trying to foresee the future a bit here at TPB. One of the things that we really know is that we as a society will always share. Digital communication has made that a lot easier and will continue to do so. And after the internets evolutionized data to go from analog to digital, it's time for the next step.
Today most data is born digitally. It's not about the transition from analog to digital anymore. We don't talk about how to rip anything without losing quality since we make perfect 1 to 1 digital copies of things. Music, movies, books, all come from the digital sphere. But we're physical people and we need objects to touch sometimes as well!
We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.
The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour. We'll be able to print food for hungry people. We'll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We'll be able ...
Recently added to the Artbase: I'm Here and There by Jonas Lund
Through a custom browser extension, Lund has opened his personal web browsing to a level of full transparency and public scrutiny. At imhereandthere.com the URL of the website the artist is currently browsing is published in real time. When the artist visits a new site the work automatically refreshes – providing a mirror to the artist's life and browser
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At this event, renowned Dutch collective JODI will premiere a new mobile application, outfitted for iPhone and Android, that is invested in “Motion/ Figure/ Posture Actions.” The application records users’ quotidian movements and turns them into choreography—one that captures our awkward, mundane, frustrated, addicted interactions with our ubiquitous devices. This focus on dynamics of control, as well as the psychology and behavior produced by technology, is at the core of JODI’s work. For this presentation, the collective will present and discuss the work, and hired performers will enact its choreography.
Friday, February 10th, 2012 7 p.m at the New Museum
$6 Members, $8 General Public (tickets)
Jim Sanborn's cryptographic sculptures, pieces on atomic energy, and large-scale projections might already seem familiar. Installed in front of the CIA headquarters, the ciphers in his sculpture Kryptos have puzzled many a code-cracker (three out of four of the coded sections have been solved), and he has been the subject of several museum shows. The artist answered a few questions we had on his work via email:
There's often something hidden in plain sight in your work. In public installations like Kryptos (at the CIA plaza) and A Comma, A in Houston, among others (I'm thinking also of the Covert Obsolescence andArcheotranscription pieces), it's letters/word/code. How does written communication affect your work? Is there a background story that drives these pieces?
Prior to the Kryptos commission my work documented hidden or invisible natural forces, Earth’s magnetic field etc. For the Kryptos piece and for the 20 years since, the hidden forces/content in text and language have taken over.
For most of my life both of my parents worked at the Library of Congress, My father as the Director of Exhibitions and my mother as a photo researcher, this privileged access to the historic record was tremendously enabling. The texts I chose for my public projects were heavily researched at the L.C. and in these works in particular the International, Classical, and Native American texts were used to encourage collaboration among cultures to fully decipher. Like Kryptos, the other public works are designed to exude their information slowly.
The “background story” is either above, or resides in the following: The Archeological record offers us a frustratingly fragmented view of the past. Though fragmentary, this archeoview is pregnant with secrets yet to be discovered and is thrilling in its potential. Secrecy is power even if it is just a little something kept from view, buried, so to speak, in the matrix of everyday life...
Jim Punk is prolific and anonymous.
His website is encased largely in a cryptic vernacular predominately of his own design: A laptop is rendered in ‘Oldskool’ ASCII style illustration graphics with the ‘keyboard’ displaying letters and symbols (such as “&” or “n”) arranged in no particular order—as if Punk had button smashed his keyboard and left the results to exist as is. There are no direct title links, or any kind of straightforward archive list of projects, instead it’s these arranged letters and symbols that when painstakingly, individually clicked on, lead the viewer down into a further maze of Punk’s own glitchy, early net art based work.
It’s this jumbled arrangement of symbols and navigation confusion that has come to define Punk’s work over the years. Responding to blog comments, tweets and even emails with this seemingly incomprehensible employment of language, Punk avoids a certain communicative regularity; rejecting the comprehensibility and clarity that often lends itself to distinct individual recognition. Instead, Punk’s non-linear, schizophrenic performance draws attention to the form language and communication take, all the while disrupting standardized information flow and producing an irregularity in the way we expect to approach and access content.
Punk's latest user generated project, exq=.s.te =n.c&de/s, is a glitched out Twitter feed that anyone can post to. Utilizing a customized keyboard, comprised solely of unicode symbols, users can easily create and tweet glitchy status updates. With currently more than 600 tweets, Punk’s project works within the hyper consumptive pace of Twitter and utilizes it as an alternative platform for ...
marc garrett