By
Jacob Gaboury on
Friday, March 19th, 2010 at
3:00 pm
Today and tomorrow are the last two days of art collective The Cave'sweek-long residency at La Mama gallery space in the East Village. The group has been running an series titled "SCULPTURE STORAGE" in which a small stage hosts a series of performances, screenings, workshops and lectures. Not only do the lectures themselves deal with the issue of storage and the archive, the series itself functions as a performance of the act of storage:
"The platform will start out empty, but will accumulate debris from each event as it takes place. The physical wear on the structure and the rubble left from the nine days will act as a living timeline of the events that took place there. Posters surrounding the stage will both advertise and memorialize the events as they unfold during the exhibition."
By
Ceci Moss on
Friday, March 19th, 2010 at
2:00 pm
single channel video with custom surround sound system
“The Conductor (Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi),” is the first of a six part video installation. “The Conductor (Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi),” contains two chapters: "O Fortuna" and ""Fortune Plango Vulnera". The 3:55 min. digital video loop is made up of footage from various hip-hop videos. All the footage is digitally enhanced and re-edited to track the motion of the hands of the artists. The audio is a composite of sounds consistently heard in artist deemed Hip Hop music greats from a survey conducted with local New York radio stations Hot 97 and 105.1 These sounds are then weaved in and out of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana”. The seeming fluidity of the image belies the painstaking nature of the production process: over 5000 individual video frames have been enlarged and repositioned to create the moving image.
By
Rhizome on
Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at
3:00 pm
Join us for the Headless Conference this Friday March 19th at 7pm in the New Museum's Theater. Tickets are $6 members, $8 general, and they can be purchased here. Description of the event below, for additional reading please check out Ginny Kollak's "Putting the capital in decapitation" as well as Brian Droitcour's "Interview with Goldin+Senneby" from Rhizome News. Ginny Kollak and Brian Droitcour are the co-organizers of the Headless Conference.
“I was still living in Gibraltar, working through my notice at Sovereign Trust, an offshore management company. [...] One of thousands of companies that Sovereign manages is called Headless. It was incorporated (i.e. registered) on the Bahamas through our Gibraltar office. Headless is a strange name, and it got me thinking. Then we got a call from Goldin and Senneby, two Swedish artists. They said they were looking into Headless Ltd. This definitely was strange. Companies like Headless are not really ‘open to investigation,’ so I didn't really understand Goldin and Senneby's angle here.”
—In Search of Story: A journal in eight parts by K.D.
Goldin+Senneby are Swedish artists. They are also characters in Looking for Headless, a novel they commissioned, a detective story involving a murder (by decapitation, of course) that has been published serially since 2007. In it, Goldin+Senneby appear as shadowy figures, remotely controlling the action as it unfolds in exotic locales like the Bahamas and Gibraltar—glamorous but bureaucratic hubs of the offshore finance industry.
“While they implicate art institutions in the narrative they enact, G+S are ultimately interested in how the virtual world of global finances performs a sleight of hand to fictionalize the boundaries between public and private interests, in order to make them disappear.”
—Gregory Burke, director of the Power Plant, Toronto
The lectures, documentaries, and didactic displays that have accompanied the presentation of Headless at art institutions share little of the heady cloak-and-dagger suspense found in the fictional texts that the project spawns. The Headless Conference is no exception to this rule. Co-organized by Rhizome and the Office for Parafictional Research, the event will take the form of an academic symposium on issues pertinent to the discourse surrounding Goldin+Senneby's work. Up for discussion are topics as diverse as the economic theories of George Bataille and the nature of virtual spaces built by offshore finance networks. Participants are to include Angus Cameron, lecturer in human geography at the University of Leicester and Goldin+Senneby's chosen emissary; Brian Droitcour, Rhizome staff writer; Keller Easterling, associate professor at the Yale School of Architecture; Ginny Kollak, director of the Office for Parafictional Research and second-year graduate student at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; and Allan Stoekl, professor of French at Penn State University.
The Headless Conference
Friday, March 19, 2010
7:00 pm
New Museum Theater
235 Bowery, New York
$6 Members/ $8 General Public BUY TICKETS
The Headless Conference is co-organized by Brian Droitcour and Ginny Kollak as part of Rhizome’s New Silent Series at the New Museum, and is supported in part by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at
2:00 pm
ASPECT, a DVD publication dedicated to new media art, is currently seeking work for their next two issues, one on "lo-tech" (v. 16) and the other on "hi-tech" (v. 17). More on this from the original call below:
Artists have historically co-opted emerging technology, adapting and expanding complex developments to suit their own goals. Conversely, there is nostalgia for obsolete technology. We seek work that exploits antiquated or sophisticated technology, either as an aesthetic or technical choice. We will review installation, video, performance, sound, and any other work best documented in time-based format.
The deadline for the "lo-tech" issue is May 1, 2010 and the deadline for the "hi-tech" issue is August 1, 2010. For more information about the application process, visit the call for proposals here.
By
John Michael Boling on
Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
t+7 is a Twitter adaptation of the classic n+7 text procedure concocted by the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) group. Each substantive noun in a text is systematically substituted for the noun found 7 places after it in a dictionary, creating peculiar mutations of the original prose.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at
10:00 am
These sculptures are made from 2 over the counter 'Dancing Stands' (the tacky kinetic product display stands you can often see in down market stores) which have been modified to spin at slightly different speeds. When my modified stands are placed next to each other they go in and out of phase slowly.
By
Ceci Moss on
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at
1:00 pm
LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) wearing Coat of Embrace, a wearable A/V synthesizer
I had the opportunity to drop by LoVid's (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) studio at Smack Mellon in DUMBO this week, where they were awarded space for the 2009 cycle of their Artist Studio Program. In their work, LoVid hack and manipulate video in a myriad of ways -- sewing it into quilts, melding it with resin and foam core to make 3D sculptures, integrating live video feeds into the body of other sculptures, altering it in live performance, or weaving the electric wires that transmit video signals into large textiles. Their practice brings the elemental technologies behind video to the fore, while also emphasizing the interactive systems that trigger them. The below photo essay provides a small preview to some of their recent and older works. To see everything they've been up to, be sure to stop by Smack Mellon's Open Studios on Saturday March 20th from 12-6pm, when LoVid will open up their workspace to the public.
Valleys and Temporary Light on the left, LoVid block print on right
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at
1:00 pm
Former Rhizome Fellow Tracky Birthday (aka Dennis Knopf) of netlabel Upitup has teamed up with sister net denizens Ego Twister, Peppermill, Proot, WM Recordings, and Cock Rock Disco to produce the compilation Greatest It, downloadable for FREE here. Each label selected a few choice tracks from their catalog to contribute to the comp, so you get a feel for the artists they support and work with. Netlabels have been carrying the torch for the copyleft cause for awhile, and Greatest It is a concise sampling of what a few of those labels have been up to recently. Check it here.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Rhizome's Director of Technology, Nick Hasty, is in Austin this week, attending SXSW Interactive. He's tweeting during the festival, you can catch it here.
Stay tuned, as Nick will contribute a longer report about the panels, special events and other technology-related goodness from his time down there soon.
By
Brian Droitcour on
Monday, March 15th, 2010 at
12:30 pm
The ambient noise of common machines and the unexpected sounds that come from familiar objects have been a part of music for some time, but over the last fifteen years French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has been joining the two, using instruments and objects to construct complex, apparently self-sufficient systems that play music without any beginnings, endings, or performers. Videodrones (2001) isolates and amplifies the hum that all video signals make when hooked into audio systems. From Here to Ear (1999) now showing at the Barbican in London, is an aviary that resonates when its finches alight on electric guitars. In Harmonichaos, which was on view at Paula Cooper Gallery until this weekend, Boursier-Mougenot affixes the grooves of harmonicas to the mouths of vacuum cleaners, and the staggered grid of thirteen pairs produces an undulating, reedy drone.
The set-up of Harmonichaos could only be the product of a playful mind, even though its appearance deflects suggestions of human involvement. Both the vacuums and harmonicas have an assembly-line sameness, and while they perform according to design, their functions have been diverted away from the needs for clean homes and entertaining song that they were intended to meet. As a viewer and listener, you're made to feel like a confused outsider: a system of switches modulates the intensity of the air flow, as well as the sound emanating from the vacuum cleaners, but it's nearly impossible to identify the source of these fluctuations. False clues are sent by a randomized blinking of bulbs on the vacuums' bodies. As usual, Boursier-Mougenot brings a sense of humor to his work, from the irony of the hokey harmonica becoming eerie when forced to drone (like the accordion in the music of Pauline Oliveros) to the punning title. He finds both harmony and chaos in the harmonica's name, and the unlikely pairing of the vacuums and harmonicas mirrors the forcible verbal junction of two incongruous elements. While the vacuum is missing from the title, this, too could be seen to figure in the artist's wordplay, given the vacuum's double meaning as both a void and a device that operates by creating a partial one. Bouriser-Mougenot's combination of domestic and folksy objects is an eccentric, room-sized model of the universe--one that exaggerates the invisible friction of matter and its absence by making it more plaintively and strangely audible.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, March 15th, 2010 at
11:00 am
Home of the Brave is a 1986 American concert film featuring the music of Laurie Anderson, who also directed the movie. The film's full on-screen title is Home of the Brave: A Film by Laurie Anderson. The performances were filmed in Brooklyn during the summer of 1985.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, March 15th, 2010 at
10:00 am
The Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) is offering an award to artists (fine art, media, architecture, design, music, theatre, visual communication etc.) and scientists who work between the arts and sciences. Prize-winners will receive 7,500 euros which can be used in the realization of projects, or projects that are already underway. For more information or to apply, visit the original call here.
Goldin+Senneby is the identity-resistant “framework for collaboration” established by Stockholm-based artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby in 2004. An interest in capitalist logic and networked culture guides their investigative practice, which explores juridical, financial, and spatial infrastructures through performance and role-playing, invented (and often virtual) realities, writing and publishing, and public interventions.
Headless (2007–) is the artists’ ongoing analysis of the shadowy realm of offshore finance. The subject represents a nearly perfect encapsulation of Goldin+Senneby’s many preoccupations, but perhaps its most relevant feature is its provocative and strategic use of masking, secrecy, and withdrawal. The system is evasive by definition: its procedures allow a company’s assets to be protected from taxation or other bureaucratic regulation, and the identities of its owners and their true business practices can be concealed. In spatial terms, examining an offshore company can be thought of as encountering a space that shifts readily from an impenetrable barrier to an empty void—like a hologram, it appears and disappears according to the perspective from which it is viewed. From a moral standpoint, offshore’s slippery visage is just as apt to inspire bored yawns as righteous indignation: one man’s exploitation is another’s tedious paperwork. Still, like most unknown territories, offshore triggers mainly sinister readings. A more anthropomorphic understanding might conceive the offshore company as something monstrous—a decentralized, elusive body that moves without any visible means of control—a headless organization.
Headless Ltd is a real company registered in the Bahamas, one of a number of sun-soaked former British colonies in which the offshore financial industry flourishes. The company is the focal point for Goldin+Senneby’s multivalent inquiry, whose numerous manifestations—texts, performances, interventions, and illustrations—take place in the open and behind closed doors.
By
Rhizome on
Friday, March 12th, 2010 at
10:00 am
The Office for Parafictional Research has been established to study the implications of a body of work by artist duo Goldin+Senneby known as Headless. For the past three years, the Stockholm-based collaborators have been investigating an offshore company called Headless Ltd as part of a larger inquiry into strategies of absence, invisibility, and withdrawal. Their project, also called Headless, has emerged in a number of formats thus far, including lectures and readings, a series of newspaper interventions, an author’s personal journal, a suite of etchings, a number of critical essays, a scattering of stage-like tableaux, a documentary film, and—most importantly—a serial novel-in-progress. But Goldin+Senneby’s own position in this remains elusive, as they outsource all representations of their work to independent practitioners and dispatch spokespeople on their behalf for public events.
One such event is The Headless Conference, which shares little of the heady cloak-and-dagger suspense found in the fictional texts that the project spawns. The conference will take the form of an academic symposium on issues pertinent to the discourse surrounding Goldin+Senneby's work. Up for discussion are topics as diverse as the economic theories of George Bataille and the nature of virtual spaces built by offshore finance networks. Participants are to include Angus Cameron, lecturer in human geography at the University of Leicester and Goldin+Senneby's chosen emissary; Brian Droitcour, Rhizome staff writer; Keller Easterling, associate professor at the Yale School of Architecture; Ginny Kollak, director of the Office for Parafictional Research and second-year graduate student at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; and Allan Stoekl, professor of French at Penn State University.
The Headless Conference
Friday, March 19, 2010
7:00 pm
New Museum Theater
235 Bowery, New York
$6 Members/ $8 General Public BUY TICKETS
The Headless Conference is co-organized by Brian Droitcour and Ginny Kollak as part of Rhizome’s New Silent Series at the New Museum, and is supported in part by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
By
John Michael Boling on
Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at
5:30 pm
So... Team Rhizome™ got together yesterday to determine the winner of our FAVICONTEST and I must admit that it was intense... a little too intense. After many long hours of screaming, clawing, and hair-pulling we were no closer to reaching an agreement on which of the user-submitted favicons to ordain as victor as we were when we started. Out of this ideal-driven hate-fest, the decision was made to share the spoils and select several favicons to use for Rhizome.org. So... in the coming weeks we are going to generate a 'favicon randomizer' that will load one of the following four favicons everytime the page is loaded. So without further ado, I present the winner(s) of FAVICONTEST:
by Adam Okrasinski
by Ben Coonley
by Daniel Leyva
by night-falls.net
In closing, I would like to sincerely thank everyone who submitted a design. We were truly overwhelmed by how many good options there were to choose from and totally honored that you took the time to participate.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at
1:00 pm
The Women's Audio Archive began as a series of recordings, taped by Lewandowska after leaving her home country in 1984, grown out of an interest in language as a site of cultural displacement. These recordings document public events, seminars, talks, conferences, and private conversations as valuable records of a particular time in discourse, beginning around 1983 until 1990. Lewandowska denotes this period of time as one dominated by academics and artists close to October magazine and by feminist gatherings, including the participating of Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly, Barbara Kruger, Yvonne Rainer, Jo Spences, Nancy Spero, Jane Weinstock, etc. In a variety of settings and institutions, as well as in private, the recordings also document talks by artists and academics such as Benjamin Buchloh, Victor Burgin, John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Tom Lawson, Les Levine, Peter Wollen, etc.
The act of sound recording began as a way to address the possibilities, as an artist and in everyday life, within a new, unfamiliar environment - through observation in gathering knowledge and participation in developing relationships. Having been educated and raised in a totalitarian state and under a Communist regime, the artist maintains a sensitivity to the power of representation, to the original and manipulation of images, thereby influencing her perception of how history is constructed, who keeps the documents, and who has access to public broadcast. Moreover, the emphasis on sound, away from the image, is a conscious decision by the artist to undermine the primacy of visuality.
In establishing the Women's Audio Archive, Lewandowska seeks to create a collection and a site that would act as a meeting point where the recording conversations would participate in developing a history of women in the media-visual tradition that by its ephemeral nature can easily be forgotten. The Archive, with its attention to sound acts as an incision in the hegemony of visual culture and commodity values. It gathers sound and speech, traces debates, contributing a selective commentary.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Above: Laid Off from the series "Testament"
Testament is a series of collective self-portraits made up of fragments from online video diaries, or “vlogs”. The project consisted of a series of chapters, each of which focuses on a collectively told vignette, story, proclamation, or meditation on topics such as identity, the economy, illness, politics, the war, or work. Testament explores the formal and conceptual consequences of online video viewing and sharing, while analyzing contemporary expressions of self, and the stories we are currently telling online about our lives and our circumstances. Clips are edited and sequenced like streams and patterns of self-revelation and narrative that flow and dissipate over space and time. As in a Greek chorus, a choir, or a musical symphony, individuals echo, respond to, contradict, add refrains, iterations, and variations, join in, and complete solo narrations. The series reflects on the peculiar blend of intimacy and anonymity, of simultaneous connectivity and isolation that characterizes online social relations.
By
Kevin McGarry on
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Pae White, Smoke Knows, 2009. (Photograph by Fredrik Nilsen)
2010, Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari’s Whitney Biennial, is essentially a Whitney Biennial calibrated for the times: small at 55 artists and altogether humble. This humility, and the fact that one needn’t contend with an overwrought curatorial concept, allows viewers a more cogent experience than past, sprawling, thesis-driven Biennials could offer. Several works, rooms and motifs make good impressions. Not many are impressive enough to make an indelible impact—but a few are. Judging by the past couple decades, the task of this biennial of American art seems insurmountable, and there is no urgency to fault this edition for hitting the target and missing the bulls-eye. While the levelness here is exciting as an indicator of a playing field for post-boom artistic production, the devil’s advocate wonders, perhaps unfairly, if there isn’t something ultimately more exciting about a splashy Biennial that fails stupendously.
In the absence of an overarching conceit, why not start with a premise that did precede itself a bit: the third floor as a dedicated space for film and video. Considering the continued expansion of film and video practices throughout the art world, the idea seemed gimmicky at best—easily the curators could fill a floor, but why ghettoize? Then, come February 25, visitors stepping off the elevator and onto floor three were greeted by a tapestry by Pae White, freezing a frame of interlaced wisps of smoke in a vast expanse of fabric. Mercifully this is not a plain LCD screen (as it turns out, the floor showcases a variety of mediums), but as a piece that meditates on materiality, medium and time, it serves as an excellent banner to welcome visitors to the area of the exhibition that is most concentrated on media. The projects therein attending to these matters soar.
Among them is Erika Vogt’s Secret Traveler Navigator, a small dark room featuring a 16mm projector and two abstract, figurative drawings reminiscent of the images that manifest in the film. Onscreen, silhouetted players gesture with ambiguous instruments both blunt (wands and other prostheses) and delicate (a drawing compass). They are recorded, projected and re-recorded, back and forth between video and film. Other simple deviations—for instance, a mirror held before the camera during a joint recording/playback session, thus reflecting projected light onto the shadow cast by the mirror—collapse layers of ritualized mark-making and physical processing into the finished film, which imparts a heavy, hollow feeling of magic.
By
John Michael Boling on
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at
3:01 pm
So, The Rhizome Team is getting together for our weekly staff meeting around 3ish tomorrow. (Our staff meetings are catered by the fine folks at Le Cirque and sometimes start fifteen minutes late to allow the wine to breathe and the caviar to chill)* One of the things on the agenda tomorrow is to decide which of the fabulous favicons that you have created to pick as the winner of the FAVICONTEST. This means you have around 24 hours left to contribute your own design for our new favicon. Even if you don't have the urge to submit your own creation you should definitely take a look at what folks have been able to come up with so far. Thanks again to everyone that has submitted, and keep em coming!
*PSYCHE, we are lucky to have 3 banana flavored laffy taffys to split
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at
1:30 pm
Gene McHugh, Rhizome's former Editorial Fellow and a periodic contributor to the site, received the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts’ Writers Grant earlier this year and has used these funds to begin the "Post Internet" blog. His project aims to build a space to reflect on "...art responding to an existential condition that may also be described as 'Post Internet'–when the Internet is less a novelty and more a banality. Perhaps this is closer to what Guthrie Lonergan described as 'Internet Aware'–a term that I’m sure I will be thinking through here sooner or later." The blog is essentially a bare-bones workspace for his loose, often train-of-thought musings on contemporary internet-based art, and covers everything from Google's Parisian Love ad to Seth Price.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, March 8th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Germany’s first computer graphics were jointly produced in 1960 by the artist Kurd Alsleben and the physicist Cord Passow. They worked on an analog computer which was linked to an automatic drafting unit and transformed parameters of a differential equation into deviations and disturbances.
By
Ryder Ripps on
Friday, March 5th, 2010 at
1:30 pm
Editor's Note: Ryder Ripps, of Internet Archaeology, along with Tim Baker (Delicious) and Scott Van Damme (MIT Exhibit), recently launched a beta version of dump.fm, a chat room where participants communicate solely through images. The site combines the creative back and forth of surf clubs, tumblr’s loose and rapid-fire network of image transmission, and the real time spontaneity of an old school chat room. Right now dump.fm is strictly invite-only, but Ryder was generous enough to offer a special invite code to Rhizome readers - “RHIZOME” - so they can play around with the site. Ryder drafted a statement about his concept and aspirations for dump.fm, below.
I remember going into AOL chat rooms, and experiencing instantaneous glee. The hyper-everything world; where experiences come and go at the pace of your typing. Instantaneous collaboration and connection. These are the feelings I wanted to recreate in conceptualizing dump.fm. Dump.fm is a place where you can share images from anywhere on the web, your hard drive or right from your webcam, in real time with other people. Today content moves so fast, making a blog post from a week ago irrelevant. Dump.fm is a place where content is hyper-transient and used to facilitate connections and induce creativity. I think in the future people will produce and consume content much faster and because of this we must reconsider the value of content. For the surf club Spirit Surfers, content is a way to document and make public the most powerful content in the hypnotic surf, “Most of the really enlightening surfs I've had did not end with a post to a surf club -- surfing is so private, it rarely ends in a public act.”, as club creator Kevin Bewersdorf states. Where surfing was a private act from computer to computer, friend to friend, and node to node; dump.fm makes it a public, real time and collaborative act. The surf becomes discovery and the discovery becomes collective.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at
12:30 pm
Takeshi Murata's Melter 2 at Gosen Skole from "Keep On Moving, Don't Stop"
I tracked down curator Hanne Mugaas, one of the organizers behind New York's Art Since the Summer of '69, for a 1 question interview, à la Rafaël Rozendaal's One Question Interview blog. Mugaas is the first to curate a new public video art initiative in Stavanger, Norway called Public Screens. In the spirit of Boston's Lumen Eclipse or Creative Time's At 44 1/2, Public Screens presents video art around the city on large public screens. Mugaas's exhibition for this new project "Keep On Moving, Don’t Stop" brings together animations by a young generation of artists who grew up under the specter of the internet, television and video games. Artists include Michael Bell-Smith, Vidya Gastaldon, Ezra Johnson, Yui Kugimiya, Takeshi Murata, Adam Shecter, and Espen Friberg. (More shots of the exhibit after the jump.) Given the topic of the show, I thought it would be fitting to ask Hanne about her childhood exposure to animation.
What was your favorite animated television show as a child and why?
My favorite animation as a kid was Flåklypa Grand Prix (Pinchcliffe
Grand Prix) from 1975. It was made by the legendary Norwegian animator
Ivo Caprino. It's about the inventor Reodor Felgen who's living with
his animal friends Ludvig, a nervous, pessimistic and melancholic
hedgehog, and Solan, a cheerful and optimistic magpie. One day, the
trio discover that one of Reodor's former assistants, Rudolf
Blodstrupmoen, has stolen his design for a race car engine and has
become a world champion Formula One driver. Solan secures funding from
an Arab oil sheik who happens to be vacationing in Flåklypa, and to
enter the race, the trio builds a gigantic racing car: Il Tempo
Gigante—a fabulous construction with two extremely big engines.
My dad used to show me this and another film by Caprino, Karius and
Baktus (Caries and Bacterium), about two little trolls living in and
destroying your teeth, on a film projector and projection screen in
our living room.
Here is a clip of Flåklypa Grand Prix (Pinchcliffe Grand Prix):
By
John Michael Boling on
Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at
10:00 am
It all started when, on a trip to Germany, I was resting at the hotel bar. My glare was fixed on a slot machine endlessly running its attract mode. Snapping out of the (meanwhile) mesmerised state I was in, I wondered if I could isolate this obscure animation as a work. Back home, I obtained a machine and stripped it of its information (the glass plates, the reels, stickers, sounds, etc).
The work basically is a tribute to the unknown programmer. The obscure unknown artist responsible for all the animations, start up modes, test modes, etc. of all the electronic hard- and software out there in the world. It is a found footage work, footage hidden in the interface of an ordinary nameless gambling machine.
By
Brian Droitcour on
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at
1:00 pm
Image: Kalup Linzy, Conversations wit de Churen III: Da Young and Da Mess, 2005
(Courtesy the artist and Taxter and Spengemann Gallery, New York, NY)
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey upset the purpose of portraiture--rather than preserving the memory of its subject in his best light, the painting of the title grew gradually uglier to record Grey's sins, even as he kept the beauty that facilitated his sinning--but left intact art's status as an attribute of rich, leisured living. The arch moral tale is invoked twice in "Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde," an exhibition currently on view at MIT's List Visual Arts Center. Michelle Handelman's hour-long, four-channel video Dorian, 2009, loosely retells Wilde's novel with club kids standing in for opium eaters. In her ghoulishly lit self-portrait Dorian Grey, Manon appears messily caked in makeup, wearing a baggy gray suit, like the corporate conscience of a hedonist spirit. Both of these works introduce to drag a story about beauty, representation, and pleasure, and the anxieties that attend them. This suggests there's more to "Virtuoso Illusion" than an exercise in gender studies; as exhibition curator Michael Rush writes, "[i]n each major historical advancement of experimental art, cross dressing has been present as a strategy that has expanded the possibilities of the perception-bending intentions of artists (as opposed to merely gender-bending)."
Image: Matthew Barney, The Cremaster Suite, Ed., 10, 4 of 5, 2005. (Copyright Matthew Barney. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York.)
Rush takes a long view in his application of the term "new media." The show is all film, video, and photography, and encompasses about fifty years (Andy Warhol is here in Polaroids and video, getting made up for drag, his eyes constantly darting to a handheld mirror to check the progress of his mascara) and even jumps back to 1925 with the inclusion of Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema, made in collaboration with Man Ray and credited to Duchamp's female alter ego, Rrose Selavy. The implicit opposition to absent "old media" is productive, since in many cases the artists highlight artifice by referring to the conventions of classical painting and sculpture. A self-portrait by Yasumasa Morimura inserts his airbrushed body in a Photoshop reconstruction of Manet's Olympia, and in a shot from The Cremaster Suite, Matthew Barney, dressed as a satyr beneath a thick membrane of whitish goo, adopts the frontal posture of academic portraiture. Katarzyna Kozyra's Summertale (2008), a twenty-minute video of grotesque violence and obscure ritual, often looks like televised versions of plays and operas--which is fitting, since it's partially set in a dressing room and has Offenbach on the soundtrack--but shot from the vantage point of the posse of dwarves who swarm the drag-queen protagonist. All Together Now (2008), by Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, provides a refreshing foil to all the cloying refinement, as Kahn wanders numbly through a suburban wasteland in sexless castoff clothes.
By
John Michael Boling on
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at
10:00 am
Dear Y'all,
For awhile now I have been quite annoyed with Rhizome's favicon---> Our current favicon feels a little clunky and if you ask me it is high time for a change. I have tried and failed several times to create one that is more elegant and after some careful consideration and consultation with the Rhizome team I think it is time to turn to our community for a favicon refresh. So for the next week, I invite all of you to try your hand at creating a favicon for Rhizome. If you would like to submit a design simply create a 16x16 pixel png/gif/jpg file, upload it to your server/tumblr/blog and embed it as a comment on this thread.* You have until March, 10th 2010 to enter at which point the Rhizome staff will get together and choose a winner. The winning icon will replace our current one and we will add a credit somewhere on the site that links to an URL of your choosing. (Full Disclosure: The credit link will probably be small and at the bottom of a page somewhere, but come on.... bragging rights? google rank improvement?) Can't wait to see what sorts of big ideas you can come up with with such a small canvas.
Happy Hunting,
John Michael Boling
* If you don't have access to a server to host your submission please feel free to e-mail it to me at jm.boling[at]rhizome.org with the subject "FAVICONTEST" and I will upload and post it to this thread for you.
By
Christo Doherty on
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at
1:30 pm
Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, The Gallerist, 2009
This past month, Johannesburg’s AOP Gallery, a space devoted to works on paper, hosted the exhibition “Passing Between” which showcased the collaborative output between digital artist Nathaniel Stern and printmaker Jessica Meuninck-Ganger. At the outset, Stern and Meuninck-Ganger approached the collaboration as a chance to learn each other's techniques. But they quickly chose to focus on their own strengths in a process they call, "passing between", hence the title of the exhibition. For Stern, the move toward printmaking comes from a long interest in the technique. In recent work, he has engaged with an expanded form of digital print making, using a hacked portable scanner to produce densely patterned sequences of natural images, in a project called Compressionism. For “Passing Between,” Stern concentrated on using digital photo frames as a medium for displaying loops of video obtained through live filming, and sampled machinima taken from Second Life. Meuninck-Ganger responded to the framed video loops with an encyclopedic range of printmaking techniques from wood block to mono print, silkscreen, etching, and photogravure. In some cases, she printed or etched directly on the screens of the digital photo frames; in other cases, the prints were layered over the screens creating a delicate conjunction between the fibers of the paper medium and the illumination of the underlying video. In The Gallerist, a prominent New York art dealer is portrayed anxiously perched on a chair in middle of a lithograph while below the surface of the paper machinima sharks circle him endlessly.
Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, Twin Cities, 2009
The effect is both magical and subtle. Jessica's images often capture a static moment from the subject matter of the video in etching or ink. The pleasure offered by the composite images comes from the interplay between the stasis of the printed image and the temporal flow of the video, producing witty and sometimes fascinating results. In the diptych Twin Cities the 2009 tornado is represented with an animated twister from Second Life. Jessica’s lithograph shows a flying pig coming to rest momentarily in alignment with its outline before whirling back to the beginning of the looped tornado. In general, the artist’s subject matter is deliberately low-key and it presents samples from their lives as artists and young parents in Milwaukee and Johannesburg exploring moments of fun, awkwardness and good humor. However, the rich range of techniques and visual allusions layered over the works also references an entire history of contemporary art and print making, ranging from Hokusai to Velazquez.
Christo Doherty is head of the department of Digital Arts at Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg. He is a photographer, video artist, and VJ. His most recent solo exhibition – SMALL WORLDS – was a visual study of miniature railway technology, nostalgia and the South African landscape.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, March 1st, 2010 at
1:30 pm
This gallery-installation/internet-art hybrid automatically created sculptures using spam and e-mail to trigger the sculpting process. It consisted of a steel frame surrounding a large block of biodegradable (starch-based) Styrofoam. Attached to the frame is the Eroder: a mobile sprayer that squirted colored water on to the foam.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, March 1st, 2010 at
12:00 pm
self.detach is a dynamic object, which adopts a critical position towards the celebration of the ego on the internet by dissolving self-portraying pictures into coloured particles.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, March 1st, 2010 at
10:00 am
Combining Robert Morris' Box With the Sound of Its Own Making with Baudrillard's writing on the art auction this sculpture exists in eternal transactional flux. It is a physical sculpture that is perptually attempting to auction itself on eBay.
Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.
If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.
by Adam Okrasinski
by Ben Coonley
by Daniel Leyva
by night-falls.net
Our current favicon feels a little clunky and if you ask me it is high time for a change. I have tried and failed several times to create one that is more elegant and after some careful consideration and consultation with the Rhizome team I think it is time to turn to our community for a favicon refresh. So for the next week, I invite all of you to try your hand at creating a favicon for Rhizome. If you would like to submit a design simply create a 16x16 pixel png/gif/jpg file, upload it to your server/tumblr/blog and embed it as a comment on this thread.* You have until March, 10th 2010 to enter at which point the Rhizome staff will get together and choose a winner. The winning icon will replace our current one and we will add a credit somewhere on the site that links to an URL of your choosing. (Full Disclosure: The credit link will probably be small and at the bottom of a page somewhere, but come on.... bragging rights? google rank improvement?) Can't wait to see what sorts of big ideas you can come up with with such a small canvas. 
